154 ARGUMENTS: MONOTHEISTIC CONCEPTIONSsomething may have both intrinsic and extrinsic worth; then it won’t have
purely extrinsic value. Let us say an item X has purely intrinsic value if and
only if X has value and all of the value that X has lies entirely in X and not at
all in anything that X contributes to anything else. (Aristotle’s Unmoved
Mover might be such a thing, or an enlightened Jain person in her isolated
enlightened state.) God, minus creation, will have very high purely intrinsic
value; once God creates, God keeps high intrinsic value but presumably also
has extrinsic value – if God creates John, then God contributes a lot to John,
having brought John into being and sustaining John and so on.^43
Value by association is a variety of extrinsic value. Suppose the President
gives you a cactus. In charge of your cactus while you vacation, your friend
Susan overwaters, and thereby kills, it. Even if Susan replaces it by a
qualitatively identical cactus, the new cactus isn’t the one the President gave
you. It hasn’t the same value to you, since it hasn’t the same associations, and
you find the associations significant.
One question is whether things below a certain level of complexity or
capacity have any value or worth, or any beyond purely extrinsic value. Would
there be any worth or value, say, in a world in which the most complex thing
was a pile of sand and nothing had any capacities beyond those possessed by
such a pile and its members? Value in this context is conceived in terms of
natural value – the sort of thing that is expressed in the tradition that the
existence itself of something X (that is, there being an X) has value. This
question concerns whether not living members of species but non-living
members of natural kinds have natural value.^44 It is not obvious that they do.
Suppose that God executed a plan on which a universe of isolated electrons
exists for, say, a trillion years and then goes poof. It is hard to see that this
would be wrong of God to do. Nonetheless, since the objection being
considered has more potential force if the pile-of-sand, or the isolated
electrons, world has some natural value, assume for the sake of the argument
that it does, and take the pile-of-sand world as a representative world of non-
living things.
That this assumption is correct can be argued in at least two ways. Perhaps
sand grains, electrons, and quantities of matter have purely extrinsic value, so
the pile-of-sand world will have a purely extrinsic value sort of natural value.
This argument fails, since there is nothing in the pile-of-sand world,
considered as containing only extrinsic worth, to generate that worth. There is
nothing of intrinsic value for the alleged extrinsic value to serve. The other is
that such items have some intrinsic worth just by virtue of their existing at all.
Then the idea is that even a pile-of-sand world has intrinsic value of some sort
K. It still does not follow that it would be morally wrong that God obliterate
something that has intrinsic worth of sort K. Even if it is true that something’s
existence has natural worth, it does not follow that causing or allowing it to
cease to exist is wrong. Even if it would be wrong unless one had a morally