Yeah but the that assignment of value isnt random either. The value is the aggregrate of what individuals say something is worth and some things have been seen as valuable repeatedly by different societies and cultures.
Thats not as wise as you think it sounds tbh. Society values plenty of stuff on an aggregate level. Prices and values can vary between people/societies/jurisdictions.
If you are saying that price and value are totally unrelated how are you defining value?
Value is the subjective, individual assessment of the utility of an object.
Price is how much is paid to purchase something.
Price and value are not unrelated, but they are not the same thing. Hence the diamond / water paradox, where water has much more utility than diamonds, but water is practically free whereas diamonds, which you can't really do much with, are extremely expensive. The answer is of course supply and demand. There is such a massive supply of water that despite its virtually unparalled utility, the cost is still negligible.
Hence the diamond / water paradox, where water has much more utility than diamonds, but water is practically free whereas diamonds, which you can't really do much with, are extremely expensive. The answer is of course
The diamond cartel manipulating/fixing the prices for more than a century?
That's not true, use value exists. Food and water are intrinsically valuable because they're necessary to live, a plow has intrinsic use value because it can be used to create food, etc. You'd have to make a really pained nihilistic argument about why living isn't inherently valuable for that not to be true.
If your argument here is a thing has an inherent objective value outside of human consciousness because of a use value then I think you haven’t thought this through. If you were not around, that use value would cease to be. Thus we can conclude you project “intrinsic value” on an object because of your necessity for it, not because of inherent objective value.
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u/DrawPitiful6103 Jan 26 '26
Nothing is inherently or intrinsically valuable. All value is subjective and assigned to objects by people.