"Intrinsic value has traditionally been thought to lie at the heart of ethics. Philosophers use a number of terms to refer to such value. The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.”

“Let me start then, by distinguishing two concepts of intrinsic value. On the one hand, we have the notion of the value that an object has independently of all other objects— the value that an object has in itself. Philosophers sometimes try to get at this kind of value by suggesting that it is the value that an object would have even if it were the only thing existing in the universe. Although this suggestion is not without its difficulties, it points us towards the basic idea that value of this sort must depend solely upon the intrinsic — that is, roughly, nonrelational — properties of the object…This first notion of intrinsic value should be distinguished from a second concept, that of the value that an object has “as an end.” I suppose that the familiar picture at work here goes something like this. Many objects are valued merely as a means to other objects — they are valuable solely in virtue of the fact that they will produce (or help produce) those other objects. Those things valued in this way have “instrumental” value. But what about the objects that the instrumentally valuable objects are means to? In some cases, of course, objects may possess instrumental value by virtue of being means to objects that are themselves of no more than instrumental value (as means to still other objects). But eventually — or so the thought goes — we must reach objects that are valuable as “ends” or “for their own sake.” The objects that come at the end of these chains — those that are desired (or deserved to be desired) for their own sake— have intrinsic value in the second sense of the term."

Intrinsic value

Meaning

Noun