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Comment by jikachu2 | Hacker News Reader

Nothing has inherent utility.

Utility/value is relative - maybe a tulip is worth something to you, but it's not worth anything to me.

I disagree, I mean, food has inherent utility. Food is valuable for everyone and even though you might not like certain foods, you _need_ food in general. Some things are more usefull for us as a society than others.

I do agree with OP that certain things might not be usefull even tough they currently hold commercial value, I just think Bitcoin is usefull. And I also believe that BTC is usefull in an infectious way.

What if someone is allergic to your food. What if there's a virus that makes everyone allergic to a specific food. The value isn't inherent.

The argument is not that everybody sees the same value in everything, but where that value comes from. I think the value of the food comes from the food (to the extent that somebody eats it). I don't think it comes from a thought.

The value for that speciffic food is nil (for you), but food in general is still valuable and has intrinsic value. There are people alergic to peanuts but peanuts still add value and nurture for lots of people.

Regardless, I fell like you're begging the issue. Not all value is relative, some thing are more practically valuable than others and sone, if you look at them objectively, are almost worthless.

> The value for that specific food is nil (for you), but food in general is still valuable and has intrinsic value.

I'm not understanding this argument. How can value be dependent on the context and intrinsic at the same time?

If peanut allergy spread to the entire population, would peanuts still have intrinsic value?

If the sun exploded and everyone died, would anything still have intrinsic value?

This is a facile line of argument. There are reasonable assumptions we can make about how stable a particular context is.

So value is intrinsic if it meets some vague criteria of stability? How stable does the value of something need to be for it to be intrinsic?

Can you enumerate these "reasonable assumptions"? The idea sounds pretty dubious to me.

And yes, I would say that if the sun exploded, killing all Earth life, nothing would have value, at least not from a human's perspective. This doesn't seem to help the case for intrinsic value.

Sounds like a game of semantics to me. Value is a human concept, so eliminating all of humanity doesn't prove anything with regard to the nature of value, intrinsic or otherwise. That's like saying "poison is not inherently dangerous because without life on earth it ceases to pose a threat". Ok, that's technically true, but you're not saying anything meaningful since nothing has meaning outside of the human context. The point of labeling a quality as intrinsic is to point out that the quality being described arises from the fundamental nature of the thing regardless of how it is perceived. Food has inherent nutritional value because nutrition is a function of an object's physical composition. Nutrition has inherent value because nutrition is necessary for survival. The ability to survive has inherent value because it is a fundamental need of all living things.

I agree that food is pretty darn close to having a constant, stable value to all humans.

However, the edge cases aren't imaginary, and they give us a chance to refine our ideas.

Say there is a huge harvest and a town now has much more food than it can eat. A food merchant passes through the town and wants to sell some of his goods, however obviously no one is interested. Has the merchant's food lost its intrinsic value? Why doesn't anyone want it?

We can also consider the vastly different food preferences found all over the world. And so on...

Being a bit pedantic, food isn't really a specific thing, it's an amorphous category. It's literally defined as "anything people eat that provides nutrition", so it almost feels tautological to say that food has intrinsic value.

Finally, almost any other concrete, specific example I can think is much less universal than "food".

See W. F. Lloyd for a compelling argument that all value is relative.

http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/lloyd/val...

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