Pursuing a thing for its own sake

Suppose you pursue truth for its own sake. As we learn from Aristotle, it does not follow that you don’t pursue truth for the sake of something else. For the most valuable things are both intrinsically and instrumentally valuable, and so they are typically pursued both for their own sake and for the sake of something else.

What if you pursue something, but not for the sake of something else. Does it follow that you pursue the thing for its own sake? Maybe, but it’s not as clear as it might seem. Imagine that you eat fiber for the sake of preventing colon cancer. Then you hear a study that says that fiber doesn’t prevent colon cancer. But you continue to eat fiber, out of a kind of volitional inertia, without any reason to do so. Then you are pursuing the consumption of fiber not for the sake of anything else. But merely losing the instrumental reason for eating fiber doesn’t give you a non-instrumentally reason. Rather, you are now eating fiber irrationally, for no reason.

Perhaps it is impossible to do something for no reason. But even if it is impossible to do something for no reason, it is incorrect to define pursuing something for its own sake as pursuing it not for the sake of something else. For that you pursue something for its own sake states something positive about your pursuit, while that you don’t pursue it for the sake of anything else states something negative about your pursuit. There is a kind of valuing of the thing for its own sake that is needed to pursue the thing for its own sake.

It is tempting to say that you pursue a thing for its own sake provided that you pursue it because of the intrinsic value you take it to have. But that, too, is incorrect. For suppose that a rich benefactor tells you that they will give you a ton of money if you gain something of intrinsic value today. You know that truth is valuable for its own sake, so you find out something. In doing so, you find out the truth because the truth is intrinsically valuable. But your pursuit of that truth is entirely instrumental, despite your reason being the intrinsic value.

Hence, to pursue a thing for its own sake is not the same as to pursue it because it has intrinsic value. Nor is it to pursue it not for the sake of something else.

I suspect that pursuing a thing for its own sake is a primitive concept.

Two kinds of families of goods

I have the good of friendship with Trent. Suppose Trent was my only friend. Then I would be getting two good things out of my friendship:

1. having Trent as a friend
2. having a friend.

These are separate non-instrumental goods. When I came to be friends with Trent, I already had good (2) as I had other friends, so I "only" gained good (1) (which is a great good). But if I had had no friends previously, coming to be friends with Trent would have provided me with both good things.

So the family of friendship-with-X goods has the property that not only are particular members of the family non-instrumentally valuable, but it's also of non-instrumental value to possess some member or other of that family, which gives one d over and beyond that particular member. Not all families of goods are like this. Consider the family F consisting of the two goods (a) friendship with Trent and (b) reading Anna Karenina. There is no good of possessing some member of F that goes over and beyond the two particular goods in F. It's good to be friends with Trent and it's good to read Anna Karenina, but there is no third disjunctive good here. Or at least there is no third non-instrumental disjunctive good (we can imagine cases where the disjunction is, as such, instrumentally valuable, say when a prize is given to anyone who is friends with Trent or is reading Anna Karenina).

Here's another example. Consider the subfamily of the friendship-with-X goods given by friendships with blue-eyed people. While every member of this subfamily is valuable (I'm supposing for simplicity that all cases of friendship are valuable), there does not seem to be a further value to being friends with a blue-eyed person. Someone all of whose friends are brown- or green-eyed is missing out on the good of friendship with the particular people whose eyes are blue, but isn't losing out on some further good. On the other hand, someone who has no female (or no male or no American or no Iranian) friends seems to be losing out on something valuable over and beyond the value of the particular female friends that he or she does not have, though it is unclear whether the lost value here is instrumental (say by providing a different outlook on the world) or not.

Pursuing as an end and pursuing as a means

One might think that to pursue (desire, hope for) something is to pursue it either as a means or as a final end. But that is false. Here is a nice case. Let us say that you don't know whether symmetry is worth having for its own sake. An omniscient being (or just an axiological expert) tells you that you will be better off for ensuring the existence of large symmetrical patterns on your walls. You ask whether this will be good in and of itself for you, or whether it is merely instrumentally good. The being declines to answer. You now have good reason to pursue the large symmetrical patterns on your walls (and desire and hope for them). But notice that you are not pursuing the patters as either a means or as an end. You are not pursuing the patterns as a means, because you do not believe that they are a means to anything valuable. You are not pursuing them as a final end, because you do not believe that they are intrinsically valuable. Instead, you believe the disjunction of the two value claims, and that is enough to justify your pursuit (and desire and hope).

In fact, this sort of thing is quite common. We have good reason to think that something is valuable, say because friends we respect pursue it, but we sometimes don't know whether it is valuable merely as a means or as an end. But this ignorance doesn't stop us from pursuing it. Thus, one may well pursue good reputation without having settled whether it is intrinsically or instrumentally worth having.

It is common to divide up pursuit (desire, hope) into the instrumental and non-instrumental. If so, then this case counts as non-instrumental, simply because it is not, in fact, instrumental. However, the term "non-instrumental" is often used as if it were more than just the denial of "instrumental". A "non-instrumental desire" is thought of as a desire for the thing itself, for instance. The above shows that this is mistaken, because it makes one think that there is a dichotomy where in fact there is a trichotomy: the instrumental, the intrinsic, and that which is neither instrumental nor intrinsic.

I've for a while been bothered by the phrase "non-instrumental value", which makes it sound like it's a derivative notion with the basic notion being that of instrumental value. And now I see that I have good reason to avoid the phrase. For non-instrumental value corresponds to non-instrumental pursuit. And the category of non-instrumental pursuit is not a natural way to slice things up: it is a disjunction of final pursuit and neither-final-nor-instrumental pursuit.

Interestingly, though, while the phrase "non-instrumental desire" is extensionally problematic given the kinds of cases I've been talking about, "non-instrumental goods" does manage to be extensionally right: it slices axiological nature along its joints, because the third category that arises for pursuit, desire and hope arises from subjective considerations, and hence does not apply to the good itself. But, nonetheless, it is better to avoid the phrase. "Intrinsic" or "basic" is better.