Callicott, a leading writer in the environmental philosophy field, offers two proofs for the existence of intrinsic value and how it exists in nature and how they lead inevitably to sound environmentalism. The “philosophical” concept of “intrinsic value” is hard to explain to colleagues and constituents. As one put it, “When you start talking about morality and ethics, you lose me.”(Pister 1987: 228). Finally, Pister found a way to put the concept of intrinsic value across clearly. To the question What good is it?, he replied, What good are you? That answer forces the questioner to confront the fact that he or she regards his or her own total value to exceed his or her instrumental value. Many people hope to be instrumentally valuable — to be useful to family, friends, and society. But if people prove to be good for nothing, people believe, nevertheless, that they are still entitled to life, to liberty, to the pursuit of happiness. (If only instrumentally valuable people enjoyed a claim to live, the world might not be afflicted with human overpopulation and overconsumption; certainly people would have no need for expensive hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, and the like.) Human dignity and the respect it commands — human ethical entitlement — is grounded ultimately in one’s claim to possess intrinsic value. Call this the phenomenological proof for the existence of intrinsic value. The question How do we know that intrinsic value exists? is similar to the question How do we know that consciousness exists? People experience both consciousness and intrinsic value introspectively and irrefutably. Pister’s question What good are you? simply serves to bring one’s own intrinsic value to one’s attention.
