Intrinsic value is the worth of an object that cannot be gauged – easily or at all – by rational or other evaluative techniques.
”To The Rationalist, Nothing Is Of Value Merely Because It Exists (And Certainly Not Because It Has Existed For Many Generations), Familiarity Has No Worth, And Nothing Is To Be Left Standing For Want Of Scrutiny”.
- Michael Oakeshott
Oscar Wilde quipped that “a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing”. The quip was frequently turned against the market fundamentalists associated with the Thatcher years. Some Conservatives lost their equilibrium during that period. They became obsessively materialistic and appeared to idolise the price mechanism’s ability to judge the value of things.
The price mechanism is one of the measuring devices used by a rationalistic mindset. Deconstructionism is another. The decontructionists use the neophiliac insights of one generation to debunk values and institutions that many previous generations have revered.
Conservatives worry that rationalism is an inadequate way of evaluating things. But, even more significantly, they worry that trying to evaluate things is sometimes a futile enterprise. This conservativehome.com definition examines these two worries in turn:
The inadequacy of rationalism for evaluating worth
True conservatives will worry at an over-reliance on any form of rationalism for evaluating an object’s value. They worry that rationalism can become a gluttonous ideology. Conservatives believe that the wisdom contained in traditions, religious teaching and ‘experience’ should also be used to evaluate something’s worth.
In the 1960s many social revolutionaries discounted the value of marriage. It stood in the way of their reasonable right to sexual experimentation. Marriage was only a piece of paper, they insisted, and their rationalisations paved the way for today’s alternative lifestyles and patterns of cohabitation. Unfortunately society has discovered that marriage was more useful than the sixties rationalists had calculated. Social science has proved what its traditionalist and religious defenders instinctively knew – marriage provides much more stability for children than any alternative. Marriage had ‘latent’ or ‘hidden’ value that wasn’t obvious to the egotistical rationalists.
Market fundamentalists during the Thatcher years were quick to close down collieries when other fuels – or imported supplies – put British coal at a financial disadvantage. But were the closure decisions made on overly narrow grounds? Had the market fundamentalists calculated the externality costs for taxpayers of turning coalmining communities into economic ghost towns? Had they considered the implications of their plans for Britain’s future energy security? The popular outcry at Michael Heseltine’s 1992 coalmine closure programme wasn’t, perhaps, an entirely sentimental phenomenon. It represented an unarticulated understanding in the British psyche that a hasty and wrong act was being committed.
The futility of trying to evaluate some things’ worth
The value of some things is impossible to ascertain. Whether someone looks at an object through a traditional, religious or rational lens, some things have an inestimable intrinsic value. The economic value of a new housing development can be calculated but what is the value of the vista that the development has destroyed? An elephant’s ivory has a market value but what do we lose when endangered species are driven to extinction? An insurer can price the market cost of many stolen goods but it cannot price the inherited trinkets that possessed more emotional significance than monetary worth. Neither can the insurer restore a burgled person’s peace of mind. That peace of mind is again immeasurable.
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