>Some questions for clarification.
>
>Is there a difference between "quality", "value" and "worth"?  If so, what
>are they and are they relevant to the discussion of intrinsic value? Are
>there any other terms that need to be defined?
>
>For what it is worth (ha, little pun I didn't even intend - this is a
>quality debate of some potential value) I think that they are often
>confused.  Many refer to intrinsic "value" while perhaps meaning intrinsic
>"qualities".  Others refer to "value" as "worth" perhaps.
>
>Only stumbling around in the dark  here.  My views are not formed.  Comments
>please.
>
>Chris Perley
>

Hi Chris, hi everyone,

I thought of something slightly different when reading your questions,
Chris.  Let me see if I can relate them somehow.

What I'm thinking of relates to the philosophical problem of tertiary
qualities (there are primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities).  A
primary quality of an object can be described in a true or scientific (i.e.
strictly empirical) account of that object.  This may not be the best
example, but shape can be considered a primary quality, whereas color is
usually considered a secondary quality.  A secondary quality is thus not
necessarily directly analyzable in any fundamental empirical sense, but is
nonetheless still *observable* to beings with particular sensory abilities.
The secondary qualities of an object can be explained by the object's
primary qualities, but *not* vice versa.

In contrast, a tertiary quality is one that is observable *only* to beings
possessing certain intellectual and/or emotional abilities or capacities.
In other words, tertiary properties are not necessarily even directly
perceivable.  Since tertiary properties are not exclusively dependent on
the senses, they are basically indistinguishable from the "response" of the
person who is observing them. From a scientific or empirical viewpoint, a
tertiary property is considered less a part of the "real" makeup of an
object than even the secondary qualities which the object appears to have.
. . maybe an example here will help illustrate the point.

For example, let's consider a face in a picture.  The picture as such (i.e.
as a representation of a face) is not visible or comprehensible to, say, a
dog, but only to a (human) being with a particular imaginative capability
(which is a rational capacity) to perceive it as a picture.  The physical
aspects of the picture--the paper on which it is printed, the ink in the
printing, etc.--that explain empirically the fact that I can see a face in
it are to be described in primary-quality terms.  But note that the face
itself (or my recognition of it as a face) is *not* a primary quality.
Think of the well known "gestalt switch" pictures (e.g. the duck/rabbit or
the old woman/young woman) and I think you may better sense what I mean.
In other words, there is no physical law that guarantees that the face will
automatically appear even to a person with certain sensory abilities (e.g.
eyesight and receptivity to light rays).  It will appear only to a person
with imagination, that is, to any being with the rational/imaginative
capacity required for an interpretive (or should I say, an aesthetic) point
of view.  By that I mean to say that tertiary qualities are often aesthetic
in the sense that they require a trained and or refined sensibility to
perceive them.  (The Greek root of aesthetic is . . .?  I'm blanking on it
at the moment, but it means "to perceive.")

Because the perception of tertiary qualities depends in large part on
trained rational capability, it is always possible that the quality
perceived (in this case, e.g., the face) can be either mistaken or subject
to further refining and/or enhancement, especially upon further study and
reflection.  In the humanities (or in any form of humanistic appreciation,
for that matter--in science, too, I suppose), for example, this is
especially apparent when it comes to examining the more subjective or
"emotional" tertiary qualities, e.g. the mood of a piece of music, or the
tone of a novel.

Now, when it comes to "realism" about primary and secondary qualities, most
people feel pretty comfortable with the idea that primary qualities are
"in" an object itself and that secondary qualities are also in some sense,
"possessed by" the objects.  But how should we think about tertiary
qualities?  Here is the philosophical "problem" of tertiary quality.
Tertiary qualities are ultimately a matter of interpretation--i.e. they
*depend* on the (subjective) response of the observer, in some very
fundamental and important sense.  But they are no less "real" than either
primary or secondary qualities. . . .  Consider landscape aesthetics: we
refer to a landscape as "awesome" (or as in the 18th century, when
landscapes were "sublime").  These are qualities that are felt in some
sense to be "in" the landscape itself--not just arbitrarily imposed upon
the landscape by our taste.  To speak of a tertiary property in this way is
to suggest that our response is justified in part by the real (aesthetic)
properties of the object (landscape) being perceived.

All this is fairly abstract . . .   but the rubber meets the road, so to
speak, when we start speaking about things like Leopold's "integrity,
stability, and beauty" of the biotic community.  In a very important sense,
each of these three "qualities" or "properties" of the biotic community is
a *tertiary* quality--NOT a primary or secondary quality.  "Stability" is a
good example: stability refers to patterns of events over time.  It takes a
specific type of rational, imaginative ability to perceive "patterns" of
events over time.  Stability is like the face in the picture: yes, it's
really there, in some sense.  The face in the picture is a "pattern," of
sorts, made up of thousands of dots on the page (or pixels on the screen).
But like the ink and the paper in the case of the picture--which are the
primary properties making up that picture--something *other than stability*
makes up or constitutes the primary and secondary qualities of the biotic
community.

Well . . . hmmm.  I don't know how clear I'm being.  Certainly the case of
"beauty" is easier to illustrate the idea of a tertiary quality in terms of
Leopold's land ethic.  "Beauty" seems clearly to rest upon the human
response to the landscape.  But I think you can also see the point with
"integrity," which seems pretty clearly a human/rational/imaginative
quality that we *undoubtedly* can perceive and appreciate in biotic
systems.  But "integrity" per se does not make up any part of that system,
i.e. is not a constitutive property of the system, in any real sense.
Integrity (at its most objective) is thus also something like that face in
the picture: observable to any being with the requisite intellectual and
emotional capacities but not reducible to any structural properties of the
object (biota) itself.

These kinds of considerations or reflections help suggest to me at least,
not only *that* value might be objectively located (and discussed) in
nature, but also how value might be located in nature.  But this value, of
course, is ultimately aesthetic value (or aesthetic "quality") to my way of
thinking--not "intrinsic value" of the metaphysical/ontological sort wished
for by so many environmental philosophers.  If the educated, appreciative
capacities of a trained ecologist are publicly shareable, in the sense that
any lay observer, so to speak, can share in these capacities as well, then
the ecologist's knowledge and reflections on his or her own response to
nature are, at least in principle, available to the non-ecologist.  In
other words, like any endeavor that involves an appreciative consciousness,
the ecologist is describing not just some personal and/or purely subjective
association with nature, but a publicly perceivable and intersubjectively
verifiable quality of the environment.  Tertiary qualities, unlike
secondary qualities, might not be immediately perceivable to someone who
lacks the requisite appreciative, aesthetic understanding.  Just as
education and training is what enables people to perceive musical
qualities, for example, or the finer points of literary structure (or
whatever), so the "taste" for tertiary qualities of nature needs to be
cultivated and developed, i.e. trained and refined.

In a very important sense, then, all education is really a kind of
aesthetic education, that is in the sense of cultivating the appropriate
response to whatever object or entity is being studied.  Whereas we can
think of secondary qualities as objective partly because every normal human
being unavoidably perceives them, the same is not always true of tertiary
qualities, particularly of those that have to do with value in nature,
meaning in works of art, etc.  As I think I've mentioned on this list
previously, only some people perceive the tragedy of King Lear, or the
beauty and ambiguity of hunting or the bullfight.  <grin>  oops, there,
I've gone and messed up a perfectly good email!

Well, that's probably enough for now.  :-)  At any rate, that's what popped
into my mind in reading Chris's email.   Sorry for any fuzziness or
unclarity above, but this is one of those late evening emails that just
kind of acquires a life of its own. . . .
Jim T.