I would like to focus on ambiguity found in the concept of intrinsic value and propose, what I trust, will be a useful modification of this concept. The concept of intrinsic value is important for two reasons. First, it is central to any ethical theory because it makes it possible to define the Good, whatever that may be. Second, the contrasting concept of instrumental value is parasitic to it, and therefore cannot be answered without a satisfactory understanding of intrinsic value.

As with so many discussions in philosophy, the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value is one which we find first introduced in work of Plato, and then contrasted in the work of Aristotle. Plato presents the issue in Book Two of the Republic. Glaucon asks Socrates, "For tell me--do you think that there is a kind of good which we should be glad to have for its own sake alone, not because we desire what comes from it?" Socrates answers that justice "belongs to the noblest class, which is to be loved both for its own sake, and for what comes from it..." (1).

Aristotle opens his Nicomachean Ethics with the following: "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has been rightly declared to be that at which all things aim." He then adds, "If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good" (2).

At first glance, these two passages reflect the same distinction. Yet despite superficial similarities, there is a central muddiness that has plagued subsequent ethical theory. Don Marietta, Jr., has described this as the difference between being valued as an end in itself and having value independent of human ascription (3). I would like to describe this distinction in terms of descriptive and prescriptive intrinsic value.

When Aristotle speaks of the aim of our actions, he is asserting that what we do has a purpose, and that sometimes this purpose will be many steps removed from our short-term goals. The ultimate motivations for our acts may be investigated, reported, and perhaps generalized. Descriptive intrinsic values are statements of fact, and may be correct or incorrect as any statements of fact.

Plato's distinction is crucially different. Discussion of "a kind of good which we should be glad to have for its own sake alone" and "is to be loved [...] for its own sake," does not point us to our actual motivations. Rather, we are directed to consider what we should cherish. This serves as a primordial moral imperative of the form, "desire x."

We find that intrinsic value, imprecisely understood, straddles the fact/value chasm. This muddiness is not merely a source of technical imprecision, it is also lends itself to illicit shortcuts in ethical reasoning. Jeremy Bentham, to offer one example, slides neatly from the descriptive observation that people do avoid pain and pursue pleasure to the moral imperative that we should act to promote pleasure and alleviate pain. Certainly something crucial must be added here; we must bridge the gulf between the is and the ought. G.E. Moore specifically takes Bentham to task on this point (4).

What we have here is the core puzzle of ethical theory. How can we move from the realm of the descriptive (the is) to the realm of the prescriptive (the ought)? Some writers take Hume and Moore to have established that this is conclusively impossible, with the consequence that ethical theory becomes flatly meaningless. I will instead approach this as a crucial challenge for the moral theorist and not prejudge its outcome.

In order to craft a viable grounding for ethics, we will need more than an account of descriptive intrinsic goods. There is nothing trivial about an analysis of descriptive intrinsic goods -- that which people for their own sakes -- but I would suggest that this is a task best left to the psychologist or perhaps to the sociologist. It does not serve as a sufficient grounding for ethical theory. Ethics is about the ought. We need to find some way to make sense of the prescriptive ought which must lie at the heart of ethics. It is necessary to make sense of the assertion that people should value something which they may or may not actively value. Rather than attempt to catalogue and critique the expansive history of attempts to do this, I will suggest a solution which has not received, to the best of my knowledge, serious consideration.

The solution to the puzzle of prescriptive intrinsic value -- again, that which we should cherish for its own sake -- is teleological, naturalistic, and pragmatic in character. Put in its simplest form, it is the thesis that the only viable bridge from is to ought is must. This will, of course, require considerable clarification and elaboration.

Naturalistic ethics have previously suffered brutal attacks from authors like Hume and Moore who have criticized them for leaping artlessly from the is of human existence or the natural kingdom to the ought of ethics. Newer sociobiological and evolutionary modifications of naturalistic ethics have suffered, quite deservedly, the same fate. I am convinced that the reason that they have failed is because they have approached the problem from the wrong direction. A typical approach to naturalistic ethics tries to derive moral behavior from the some positive aspect of human reality. Human animals have many characteristics and many potentials; some of them are routinely approved of, while others routinely receive condemnation. How can we know where to draw this line? The fact that I can either aid a suffering animal or compound its misery does not tell me which act is appropriate. The fact that I would enjoy helping or hurting the animal is likewise unenlightening. Facts do not automatically entail what I ought to do.

In order to make the move from fact to ethics, it is necessary to reverse the standard perspective on the problem. Instead of focusing on what we are, we must consider what we are not. Instead of our abilities, we must focus on our limitations. Superficially, the human animal is an absurd and ill-equipped creature. Our hides offer little protection from the elements, our teeth and claws are laughable, and our strength-to-mass ratio is the lowest by far of any primate. We must add to this two decisive factors.

First, the human animal begins life in a state of complete vulnerability and dependence. It is perplexing that ethical theories have been so blind to the universal imperative of child-rearing (5). Each of us present today is a testimony to literally thousands of hours of care, nurturing, and education which we have received at the hands of adults of our kind. It is not my intention to downplay the individual wrongs and inadequacies that we may have suffered in our upbringing, but the fact remains that we have not reared ourselves, and this is a fact that I may declare with absolute certainty about any human being.

The second limiting factor here is that we lack anything like the complex instincts that make social life possible for other social animals. In contrast with a frequent theme in naturalistic ethics, I do not think that ethics is written on our DNA. The claim that we instinctively know right from wrong is subject to a number of potent criticisms. It is at odds with the fact that ethics is subject to dispute; we do not automatically agree on what is right and wrong. Further, it flies in the face of the fact that we must be educated into appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Finally, it glosses over all demonstrable human drives which receive moral condemnation instead of praise. Is my desire to see my enemy crushed under my heel an example of a moral or immoral passion? At very best, a drive to be moral would only be one drive out of many which we possess.

We need to be social animals, yet nature has not seen fit to hard-wire us for socialization. As Ruth Anna Putnam has observed, morality is a human invention crafted to compensate for a natural deficiency, much as a knife it a tool devised to overcome our physical limitations (6). Knives exist in all societies because there are inevitable human deficiencies as well as inevitable human needs. Morality is likewise a common feature of all viable societies. We may not use the same sort of knives as our ancestors, but we can recognize their knives as knives. I may disagree with Plato or Confucius on matters of morality, but I can understand that we are discussing the same subject.

What follows from all of this? It is necessarily the case that each of us exists only because of the social mechanisms which made possible our rearing. These mechanisms must be created and adopted by each generation of human animals. While many animal species are social, the human animal must be social. Human sociability is preconditional to any sort of human existence, and moral rules are necessary for human sociability beyond its most trivial forms.

This, I think, offers a meaningful explanation to how something may have a value whether or not we actively cherish it. A thing may be valuable because it is preconditional to existence, even if we do not actively recognize it. My liver has value to me even if I do not know what it is or what it does. It then follows that not all preconditional values are subject to moral consideration. For example, the ongoing existence of the human race is presently contingent on the earth being a certain distance from the sun. This planetary orbit is of value to us, but it would be absurd to speak of a humanly tolerable orbit as being morally good and one too far or too near the sun as being morally bad. Ethics is about the choices that we make which make human existence either possible or impossible.

Is this adequate stock to make a soup from? Hume identified a link between social utility and morality, but emphatically rejected that this was an adequate grounding for moral theory (7). I see important growth in recent decades in our ability to describe the necessary conditions for any sort of social existence. Sociobiology and biomathematics have begun to discern that there are patterns to the operation of viable social arrangements. These insights reinforce the harsh historical lesson that not all social orders can endure through time.

As one example, Robert Axelrod has shown in The Evolution of Cooperation that all but the most rudimentary of social arrangements require that we effectively create a shadow of the future (8) The effort and sacrifices that I make will probably not be immediately rewarded, and the wrongs that I inflict on others will not be immediately counterproductive. If the shadow of the future is not scrupulously enforced, then individuals will be compelled to do the only rational thing, which is to operate in the now. A society of transients will not be an ethical society; consider how people act away from home at conventions, and the point is nicely illustrated. An observation of this sort needs to be understood cautiously, but shows the direction that moral theory must move in.

At this point, one may well suggest that the initial quest for intrinsic value has fallen short of the mark. Do preconditional values, in fact, meet the goal of value for its own sake? If their value derives from their utility in making human existence possible, are they not merely some species of instrumental value, albeit of an especially broad sort? There is a strong element of truth here, but a partial success is better than no success at all. What I am proposing here is a foundation for ethics which is universal, but not absolutely unconditional. I cannot offer any value of any sort to a hypothetical nihilist. Such a person (if he or she actually existed) would have no "handles" that would make moral discourse possible. But if a person has any descriptive instrumental values, any goals or desires whatsoever, then an appeal to preconditional value will have rational merit because it informs us of what we need to realize our own goals.

This spawns a second criticism. Even stipulating that my history may have included and required the society which created me, why should I consider myself obligated to sustain that social order? This sounds very much like the claim that I am bound by a social contract even though I have never voluntarily "signed on the dotted line." Why should I?

There are three different answers which will respond to the different ways that this question may be posed. If one is asking why a society and its status quo should be accepted unquestioningly, I would respond that it most certainly should not. The fascist doctrine of the organic state ignores the very real possibility that a state may be sick or dying. Preconditional value is pragmatic, and unthinking adherence to an extant social order is morally equivalent to driving with a blindfold on.

Another take on this question is to see it as coming from a libertarian declaration of moral atomism. My response here is that moral atomism rests on counterfactual premises. It denies not only the past that has made our existence possible, it also denies the present reality which we inhabit. The latest "loner" in the news is suspected Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski. The media has informed us that he lived by himself in complete isolation in a one-room cabin in rural Montana. Except that he went into town regularly for supplies. Except that he wrote home regularly for money. Except that he had a Mexican pen-pal. Except that he checked books out of the local library. Except that he used mass-produced tools. Kaczynski's isolation was only partial, despite an obsessive attempt to live by his own effort. As has been frequently observed, none of us is an island, nor even a peninsula.

A final take on the question of why we should bind ourselves by the constraints of morality is more complicated. Suppose that a reasonable person insists that he or she only needs to live in a way that takes care of his or her immediate needs without regard to the costs or benefits that may befall future generations. Why should the sustainability of human society be of any interest to me? So long as I am comfortable, why worry what the future may hold after I am gone? Allow me to answer this challenge a bit tartly. Why should we, collectively, allow someone to soil the human nest? What right can possibly be asserted to make life unbearable for future generations?

If there is anything to commend this approach to ethics, it will challenge the moral theorist to flesh out the implications of a moral code based on necessity. This moral code will have a number of characteristics. First, it will take into account the inherent weaknesses of the human animal. The first moral imperative will be that we must care for children. This fact will have important consequences for a moral society.

The second characteristic of this approach is that much of human life will fall outside of the realm of ethics. Most of what we do does not have any substantial impact on the conditions necessary for human existence.

The third characteristic of this approach to ethics will be that moral imperatives will be subject to verification and falsification. A moral rule which does not work, one which acts against the sustainability of human existence, will stand reproved. It is not irrelevant that a social ideal, however pure and rarefied, does not work.

Finally, we will see that ethics does change in content over time. Sustainability, as we learn in nature, is not a static accomplishment. A sustainable system must be self-perpetuating. It must have the ability to compete with other systems. It must be able to adapt to new realities. Our continued existence requires choices today that simply were not an issue to our ancestors. The next millennium will test our resourcefulness; an ethical society will be able to meet those challenges.