Steve Watson

Does Mars have Value?

“Assuming that terraforming Mars would work, would doing so violate a moral obligation to leave Mars and other worlds alone?” The question is asked by Bailey (“Does Mars Have Rights” Reason, Feb. 2012) The question of moral rights for rocks can be addressed by reference to any appropriate ethical theory, but one version of this – which I recall hearing at a seminar once, and I’ve read repeatedly, is that (unspoiled) Mars has an intrinsic value that should weigh in our moral calculations when considering terraforming. It’s the sort of claim that is often made for the preservation of more mundane wilderness areas which are supposed to have some intrinsic value that trumps the value that their development would have. The proponents of such views rarely explain what kind of thing value is, how these objects get their value, whether these values are in fact morally weighty, or how weighty they are. It’s an open question in value theory whether all values are commensurable, whether they are all independent, and so on. Until these questions are answered we can’t even tell whether accepting the claim of intrinsic value for Mars would have the claimed consequences for action wrt Mars; I think, however, that the common sense view of values indicates that it would not.

Consider the most basic statements regarding values (easiest to understand, most likely to be accepted by competent language users, etc. ) It’s easy enough to grasp what is meant when we say that we value something, or that something has value for us. If I say that I value a beautiful object – say, Botticelli’s Venus – then I mean that I prefer that object to other comparable objects, say the painting of dogs playing poker or the green lady behind a tree. ‘Preference’ can be defined operationally in whatever way seems reasonable. In general, to say that something, X, has a value for some agent, A, is to say that there is a quality or property of X that features in A’s preference assignments in a certain way. If X has an appropriate property or quality, say Q, then X will be given a positive value by A; meaning that, other things being equal, A will prefer X with Q to something without Q. To say this is not to say that the quality or property possessed by X is a value, it is rather to say that there is a particular way A has of assigning preferences that references those properties and qualities rather than others. In the example given, our valuation might be affected by the colour balance of the painting, but ‘colour balance’ doesn’t have to be a value, it only has to be valued or to contribute to a valuation in certain circumstances. (Nevertheless, the common way of speaking often will make these properties and qualities ‘values.’)

In other circumstances we can also say that something, X, has a value, tout court. But this lacks the relativisation to any valuer and thus is divorced from the process of preference assignment that is fundamental to the explanation of something having value for an agent.  We can restore the relativisation if we take such a statement to mean that for any A that we take to be a relevant agent, X has a value for A. So I can say that the beautiful object – say, Botticelli’s Venus – has (positive) aesthetic value: but by this I mean that this painting is valuable for everyone whom I regard as being a relevant valuer of the painting. (It might be that I would exclude philistines or imbeciles or other categories of presumptively ‘defective’ valuer; or I might take the attitude that my class of relevant agents is restricted to a small list of those who know. Those are details that needn’t detain us.)

Understanding ‘X has value’ in that way has at least two other advantages: first, it is plausibly the natural way that we would come to express the idea that something has a value for any relevant A; and second, any alternative would seem to involve connecting two different meanings under the single verb ‘value.’ At the very least, the onus would be on those rejecting the proposed interpretation to show the advantages of their alternative.  

Assuming that this is the right way to think of valuing things, or of things having value, it is equally reasonable to suppose that there are different kinds of value. Nothing in the nature of preference requires that there is only one source of preference rankings, however much the prudentialists and moralists and rational actors might wish it to be otherwise. We value things for their beauty, or for their sentimental value, or for their utility, or for their contribution to the advance of projects that we love, or for any of a vast number of other reasons – and there is nothing, prima facie, to indicate that they are all versions of the same value. Now some of these ‘valued’ qualities are pretty straightforward, and the way that they feature is no great mystery – for example, things which contribute to my own well-being are going to have value insofar as I have a preference for pursuing my own self-interest. Other things, like beauty, are a little more puzzling. But the source of the value – the reason why and the manner in which it features in those preference assignments – doesn’t affect the fact of the thing having value.

Thus, on our story, there are as many values – aesthetic values, moral values, social values, alethic value, etc.  – as there are different ways of assigning preferences to things in the world, and that these different ways reference different sets of properties and qualities. In fact, more than just arguing that this should be the default position, I would argue that if we take preference assignment to be anything but a purely rational function, then we make it a part of our sentimental nature, and thus a part of nature subject to contingent evolutionary, cultural, historical, and biological forces, and therefore almost certainly pluralistic in nature.

In any case, the naïve story of value, the story which is the interpretation of least resistance, indicates that unless a thing, like Mars, has a moral value – yet to be established – it cannot be claimed that there are moral claims inherent in the thing itself; and it cannot be said that just because one valuer finds value in a thing that all must find the same value; and it can’t be claimed that just because it is accepted that a thing has value, that that necessarily has moral consequences. (In all of this I’m ignoring the question of respect for the things that others value for whatever reason.)