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.
Read more about this topic: Instrumental Value
Famous quotes containing the words direct and, direct and/or indirect:
“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.”
—Max Weber (1864–1920)
“Pleasure is the rock which most young people split upon; they launch out with crowded sails in quest of it, but without a compass to direct their course, or reason sufficient to steer the vessel; for want of which, pain and shame, instead of pleasure, are the returns of their voyage.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Long as I have lived, and many blasphemers as I have heard and seen, I have never yet heard or witnessed any direct and conscious blasphemy or irreverence; but of indirect and habitual, enough. Where is the man who is guilty of direct and personal insolence to Him that made him?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)