Philosophers have attributed intrinsic value to human life
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Scholarly and reference literature notes that traditional approaches attribute intrinsic value to human beings, identifying individual humans as quintessential entities considered to possess intrinsic value.
1. The Conguillío Statement on the alleged values and responsibilities of ecologists claims that ecosystems are intrinsically valuable. This is a common claim by ecologists and the authors of the Conguillío Statement probably view it as uncontroversial. 2. Ecologists want to invoke the concept of intrinsic value because it seems to cover more of nature than instrumental value. However, ecologists of- ten use the term without recognizing that it can have significantly different meanings. In particular ecologists often invoke the conception of objective intrinsic value because it has more moral force than other conceptions. 3. The quintessential entities thought to have intrinsic value are individual human beings. There are two approaches to showing that ecosystems also have intrinsic value: monism and pluralism. Monism attempts to show that we can come to recognize the objective intrinsic value in ecosystems by showing that they have this value for reasons similar to those thought to engender it in individual humans. This position does not seem plausible. Pluralism attempts to account for the supposed intrinsic value of ecosystems for some other reason, and this account exists independently of our traditional human-centric ethics. The problem with the pluralist approach is that there is no principled way to reconcile the inevitable conflicts that will arise between human interests and the claimed intrinsic value of ecosystems. It seems that unless we are prepared to throw out our human ethics, pluralism will not work. 4. While there are active philosophical research programs aimed at resolving these conflicts, ecologists should probably treat the Conguillío Statement's claim of intrinsic value for ecosystems as an essentially contested concept- one that is inherently debatable and for which there is no single agreed-upon understanding or interpretation.
not only vain but pernicious . It is vain because , whether nature has intrinsic value or just a wide range of instru- mental values , it remains valuable and worth conserving both for present human ... philosophers have argued that the ...
The Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, Second Edition, Four Volume Set addresses both the physiological and the psychological aspects of human behavior. Carefully crafted, well written, and thoroughly indexed, the encyclopedia helps users - whether they are students just beginning formal study of the broad field or specialists in a branch of psychology - understand the field and how and why humans behave as we do. The work is an all-encompassing reference providing a comprehensive and definitive review of the field. A broad and inclusive table of contents ensures detailed investigation of historical and theoretical material as well as in-depth analysis of current issues. Several disciplines may be involved in applied ethics: one branch of applied ethics, for example, bioethics, is commonly ex
The concept of intrinsic value is one of the most disputed concepts of ethics, and in particular, environmental ethics. The traditional approaches towards nature are anthropocentric, attributing intrinsic value merely to human beings. Nowadays, environmental philosophers mostly try to distance themselves from anthropocentric attitudes, and they introduce ethical reasons, which do not consider nature merely instrumentally valuable. In general, environmental ethicists are prone to appeal to the concept of 'intrinsic value' to justify the necessity of enlarging the scope of moral concern. For this reason, in this dissertation, I aimed to clarify the role of the concept of 'intrinsic value' in environmental ethics and I present a metaethical analysis of this concept within anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric approaches. I discuss whether intrinsic value exists independently of a valuer, and specifically a human valuer, examining what ethicists mean by 'intrinsic value' and what they mean when they call something 'intrinsically valuable'. In light of these discussions, contrary to defenders of objective value, like Moore, I defend the view that there would not be a value independently of a valuer and attribution of a value is a subjective act. I express that the subjective act of attributing value is related to the agent, but it need not be always for-agent's-own sake. In other words, what I mean with 'intrinsic value' is not the value that is 'in-itself' owned by an object be
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