Armus Patheticus
Garrulous Windbag
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2015
- Messages
- 400
Agreed that intrinsic and instrumental value are not mutually exclusive. I stated as such above with regards to the value of work.
Your views are not unique. They are shared by some very intelligent philosophers (Korsgaard and Dewy, for example), but frankly that line of thinking has always seemed intentionally ignorant to me. And I don't mean ignorant as in uneducated, I mean it as in ignoring what is readily apparent and overwhelmingly accepted, but unprovable.
Joy is good. Self-efficacy is good. Pleasure is good. But regardless of how hard people try, they can't "prove" that they are. Items and activities that are intrinsically valuable have a direct connection to good. A sunset or sunrise, for example. While there is indeed an instrumental value as well (warming or cooling the earth), most people would readily agree that the beauty of a sunrise is valuable for its own merit. If you're in the Dewey camp, then I recognize there is no way to convince you of this. But again, my opinion is that that is just willful ignorance.
Competitive leisure is intrinsically valuable in the same way that a picture of a deceased relative is. To someone who enjoys it for its own sake, it is good. But to someone who doesn't, it's not. You can look at a picture of a deceased grandmother and receive joy; if I look at your grandmother's picture I won't. That doesn't make the picture any less intrinsically valuable, just because I don't appreciate it. But it does mean that I personally won't keep a picture of your grandma in my house. And just because you don't enjoy competitive leisure, doesn't mean that others don't enjoy it. But it does mean that you probably shouldn't waste your time pursuing it.
I don't read philosophy, and I'm not trying to get too abstract. I reckon I figured that if there are tangible negative aspects of competition, that maybe there were tangible positives that I was unable to perceive.
I accept that not everything can be proved or demonstrated. What is obvious to you may not be naturally evident to me. But is the fact that many people enjoy competition irrefutable evidence that it is good? Other examples indicate other possibilities. To use an extreme illustration, many people enjoy adultery, at least for a time, yet it has the potential to devastate the lives of others, and cannot, no matter one's personal moral convictions, be called good simply because it is fun.
So maybe recreational competition is inexplicably good, and I will have to carry on without that good or the understanding of it in my life. Or maybe it is partly good and mostly bad, and I'm spared something by not being involved. I don't know. I believe that hyper-competitiveness in sports and games is partly an extention of our societal structure which is not designed to serve healthy individual or communal needs. But I don't know.
What I know is this:
I can happily play a million innings of baseball without giving a single thought to the score.
I once met an old ballplayer called Bill Lee at a beach in Maine to try and sell him an antique limestone table. We talked a little and started throwing rocks at the the distant boulders in the water. And we talked and threw and threw and threw and never once competed and had a good old time.
I like to climb trees more than I like to win at disc golf.