Direct and Indirect
An instrumental value may be directly valuable or more or less indirectly so. For instance, in the perspective of a hedonist with pleasure as end-in-itself, then music may be regarded as something directly instrumentally valuable by directly generating pleasure. A guitar, on the other hand, may be regarded as something indirectly instrumentally valuable, since it generates end-in-itself by generating music which, in turn, generates the end-in-itself - pleasure in this case.
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Famous quotes containing the words direct and, direct and/or indirect:
“...I have never known a “movement” in the theater that did not work direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the very people associated with various “uplifting” activities in the theater are people who are astoundingly lacking in idealism.”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932)
“Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.... What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)