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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Whatever is non-instrumentally good must be good in virtue of its intrinsic properties.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.G.E. Moore's 'principle of organic unities' shows that a whole can have intrinsic value irreducible to the intrinsic value of its parts.
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    • 2.A thing can therefore be non-instrumentally good in virtue of relational properties constituted by its place within a valuable whole.
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    • 3.This means non-instrumental goodness need not derive solely from intrinsic, context-independent properties of the thing itself.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Rae Langton and others argue that intrinsic properties must be those a thing retains in isolation, yet many candidates for non-instrumental good (friendship, knowledge) are irreducibly relational.
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      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.If non-instrumental goods like loving relationships are good precisely because of their relational structure, the inference from 'non-instrumental' to 'intrinsic-property-based' conflates two distinct distinctions: ends vs. means, and intrinsic vs. relational properties.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.If something is good only because it is related to something else, then it must be the relation to the other thing that is non-instrumentally good.
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    • 2.If the relation is what is non-instrumentally good, then the thing itself is good only because it is needed to obtain this relation (i.e., only instrumentally good).
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    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.