Existence value and intrinsic value

Ecological Economics 24 (1998) 163 – 168

Existence value and intrinsic value Robin Attfield School of English Studies, Communication and Philosophy, Uni6ersity of Wales Cardiff, P.O. Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XB, UK

Abstract In this paper, the concept of existence value is related to the notion of intrinsic value current in environmental ethics, the methods employed to measure existence-value are discussed, and thus the question is investigated as to whether these methods are a satisfactory means of taking non-use value into account in practical decision-making. In particular I argue, against Jonathan Aldred, that not all bearers of intrinsic value satisfy his definition of existence value: plausible counter-examples include undiscovered and future bearers of such value (Section 2). I also raise difficulties for the two proposed measures of existence-value; willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept (Section 3). Finally, I conclude, in Section 4 that to base decision-making on the valuations of valuers in a free market fails to give value its due. A method is instead needed which, unlike those associated with existence value, more directly takes into account and weighs up the good or the interests of future human beings and of nonhuman entities. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. Keywords: Intrinsic value; Existence value; Willingness-to-pay; Environment

1. Introduction Environmental economists sometimes provide for those values which are not use-values for the valuers concerned through the introduction into economic analysis of ‘existence values’. Indeed, existence value is usually defined as value not arising from use. Jonathan Aldred has recently redefined the existence-value of an environmental good, so as to avoid certain problems which he specifies as the ‘‘value assigned by the agent in addition to any expected changes in the welfare of the agent dependent on the good’s continued existence’’

(Aldred, 1994). Aldred’s recognition that some preferences are not egoistic is salutary, and his clarification of the hazy notion of existence value is welcome, but there is reason to doubt whether, as he suggests, existence value as newly defined is ‘sensitive to criticisms from environmental ethics’. My aim is, accordingly, to relate the concept of existence value to the notion of intrinsic value current in environmental ethics, to reflect on the methods employed to measure existencevalue, and thus to investigate whether these methods are a satisfactory means of taking non-use value into account in decision-making.

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2. Intrinsic value and existence value Aldred states that if believers in intrinsic value hold their beliefs honestly, they will be willing to give up scarce resources to maintain them. This controversial claim (Hammond, 1994), which seems to assume that all valuers have resources which could be given up, will be the subject of some later comment. It also supplies the context of his further claim that even if valuers are sometimes unwilling to give up resources in practice, this does not imply a logical incompatibility between economic and intrinsic value (Aldred, 1994). In a related note, he adds that ‘‘it is argued here that existence value may include intrinsic value’’ (Aldred, 1994), but that ‘‘it is not claimed that they are equal’’ (that is, equivalent). For ‘‘the set of entities possessing positive intrinsic value simply overlaps with the set possessing positive existence value’’. By way of evidence he cites Andrew Brennan’s example of rain forests, of which the existence value may be instrumentally valuable, in that it is of direct use not to human beings, but to nonhumans (Brennan, 1992; Aldred, 1994). Brennan’s example may, I suggest, be accepted as showing that at least some existence value is instrumental value, and thus need not be regarded as intrinsic value (although in particular cases intrinsic value might happen to be also present). Although some kinds of value are plausibly neither instrumental nor intrinsic, these two classes of value are usually so defined as to be contrasting kinds. Thus, intrinsic value is usually defined as value which depends solely on the intrinsic nature of the thing in question, a definition deriving from G.E. Moore, whose definition would not collapse, even if his account of the location of intrinsic value is rejected; whereas instrumental value clearly depends on the relation of the thing in question to the good (or supposed good) of something else. While Moore was an objectivist, the concept of intrinsic value is sometimes given a subjectivist interpretation, and this possibility will be returned to later; instrumental value, however, is seldom interpreted in this way, perhaps partly because markets rely on instrumental values of an interpersonal kind. Fortunately, the issue of

whether the extensions of intrinsic value and of existence value intersect can be raised without resolving the debate between objectivism and subjectivism. We should accordingly ask whether intrinsic value is ever a subset of existence value. For there is a strong apparent reason for a negative answer to this question, and this would seem to imply that intrinsic value and existence value do not overlap at all and that intrinsic value, apparently, cannot be accommodated for decision-making purposes or for any other purposes within the category of existence-value. The reason I have in mind is that, at least where living creatures are concerned, it is at least a defensible view that what has intrinsic value is not mere existence or mere life, or therefore continued existence or continued life, but quality of life. For if it is granted, as this view assumes, that life can have a neutral or negative value, then its mere continuation has no positive value at all, except where it has instrumental or some other kind of non-intrinsic value; and in these circumstances its mere existence cannot have any intrinsic value either. Those who accept this need not deny that much within the lives of creatures can be of intrinsic value and that the existence of life of positive quality is intrinsically valuable. But this value turns not on mere existence but on life’s quality, since this value lapses when the quality does, except insofar as a potential remains for the resumption of this quality of life. To this argument, it may be replied that people actually sometimes value the continued existence of species and of ecosystems and that some environmental philosophers believe that these are instances of intrinsic value. While I do not have space to discuss this view adequately here, I should point out that the value of ecosystems could well be like that of Brennan’s rainforests, value instrumental to the good of many individual nonhuman creatures. Likewise, the value of the continued existence of species might consist in the intrinsic value, not only of present, but also of future flourishing lives of individual members of the species. And even if I am wrong here, some comparable ground surely needs to be given for regarding the existence of a species or an ecosys-

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tem as betokening the presence of intrinsic value. People who value the continued existence of ecosystems would be unlikely to value them if most or all of the species interacting in those ecosystems became degenerate, ceased to lead lives in which the generic capacities of their kind were able to develop, and ceased to embody prospects of any revival of flourishing lives or prospects of lives of positive quality in the future. So, if existence-value consists in the value of the continued existence of various things, then there are strong apparent grounds to doubt whether it overlaps the realm of intrinsic value at all. There is, however, a way for Aldred or his supporters to defend the overlap thesis, without which, of course, existence value is unlikely to perform the role allotted to it in decision-making contexts. Their obvious resort is to deny that existencevalue need be attached to mere existence only. For it is present, by definition, ‘‘wherever valuers assign value which is additional to any expected changes in the welfare of the agent dependent on the continued existence of the environmental or other good in question’’. (I assume that Aldred here means ‘changes dependent’ and not ‘value dependent’, or he would have said ‘‘and dependent on the continued existence, etc.’’ So I assume that he has in mind any assigned value of any kind, whether dependent on continued existence or not, as long as it is extra to expected welfarebenefits to the valuer in question. But I may be wrong.) Now, as long as some of this value is intrinsic value, the overlap thesis will stand, and if this would apply only in cases where what is of value is not mere existence, then to locate intrinsic value we should simply look to some other proposed criterion of intrinsic value, like beauty or diversity, or perhaps the flourishing of creatures. As far as the definition of existence-value is concerned, this would seem to be an allowable move. So the apparent grounds for rejecting the overlap thesis turn out to be inconclusive. But the meaning of ‘intrinsic value’ requires closer scrutiny. Aldred assumes that even intrinsic value depends on a valuer assigning it; the valuer, remember, has to be willing to give up scarce resources to maintain what (s)he values thus. This

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is all consistent with Aldred’s only move in the direction of a definition of intrinsic value, namely: ‘‘Loosely speaking this (sc. ‘intrinsic value’) refers to a willingness-to-pay purely to know that an environmental feature is preserved and undisturbed… and presumes that there exist characteristics of the entity per se which may be valued’’ (Aldred, 1994). One possible problem here is that a subjectivist interpretation of intrinsic value may be assumed by Aldred, even though many people adhere to an objectivist interpretation. Further, to define intrinsic value as willingness-to-pay begs the question of whether willingness-to-pay is even a plausible measure of intrinsic value as normally understood. Certainly willingness-to-pay forms no part of standard definitions of intrinsic value, such as the definition supplied earlier: value which depends solely on the intrinsic nature of the thing in question. So let us adhere to that definition, which is also compatible with the presumption mentioned by Aldred, and return to considering the overlap thesis in the light of it. It remains possible that, for Aldred, ‘valuing X’ simply means ‘being disposed to protect and maintain X’; but this interpretation omits ‘believing that there are reasons to value X’ and is thus too implausible to warrant further discussion here. For the meaning of ‘valuing X’ needs to be related to that of ‘X is valuable’, and it is here assumed (something for which I have elsewhere argued (Attfield, 1995) that ‘X is valuable’ means ‘there is reason to value X’. This assumption, which Aldred could safely endorse, is consistent both with objectivist and with subjectivist interpretations of the concept of intrinsic value; from any perspective, anyone valuing X intrinsically holds the belief that its own nature supplies reasons to value it. So, despite possible differences between Aldred and myself over subjectivism and objectivism, questions about the possible overlap of intrinsic value and existence value can still be addressed without resolving meta-ethical debates, and without equivocation, if suitably clarified. Are there then entities of intrinsic value which also fall within the class of things with existence value, that is, things the value of which is ‘assigned by an agent’ and ‘unrelated to that agent’s

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welfare’? The answer turns on what this question precisely means. If the question means ‘‘Are there any cases of value dependent solely on the intrinsic nature of the thing in question, value which is also non-welfare value dependent on being assigned as such by an agent?’’ the answer is obviously ‘No’, for what depends solely on the intrinsic nature of an entity does not also depend on being assigned by an agent. If, however, it means ‘‘Are there some things whose value depends solely on their nature and to which value is also assigned by valuers not valuing on the basis of their own welfare?’’, the answer is ‘Yes, at least occasionally’, for this plausibly applies to the flourishing of people and of at least some other living creatures, at least when valuers value such flourishing, as they sometimes do. But now a related question arises: are there intrinsically valuable entities which lack existencevalue? And here the answer is also probably ‘yes’. Thus, if the flourishing of all living creatures, or alternatively of living creatures in some way comparable to human beings, has intrinsic value, then there will be myriads of cases of intrinsically valuable entities lacking existence-value, since no human valuer happens to value them (except possibly as a class) and in many such cases no human valuer probably will ever value them. For many of them are hitherto undiscovered and undreamed of, and there is no guarantee that all of them will ever be as much as dreamed of, let alone discovered. There is also a second reason for an affirmative answer, and for accepting intrinsic value in the absence of existence value: many things of intrinsic value are not yet in existence, and their existence can be prevented by the actions of current agents. Thus in many cases valuers will either not assign any value to them or not assign sufficient value to allow them to come into existence, although their value is such that they ought to be brought into existence. Future members of many rare species are likely examples, particularly inconspicuous species. Accordingly, even if Aldred is right to suppose that some intrinsically valuable entities happen to have existence-value, he is wrong to suggest, as apparently he does, that they all do. And even if existence value were regarded

as extending to the present valuing of prospective existence, it still fails to attach to many entities of intrinsic value.

3. Willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept These are the two proposed methods of measuring existence-values. Of these, Aldred himself points out an inconsistency involving the employment of willingness to accept compensation for accepting the destruction of the thing in question. For this method implies that the agent can be compensated for her or his loss of welfare. But by definition, the agent does not receive any welfare benefit from the existence-value of this entity, since existence-value is to be defined as excluding welfare value. So there would be no welfare loss for which she or he could be compensated. This leaves willingness to pay to avert an existing entity’s destruction. While on occasion there is nothing hypothetical about this measure, since the only effective way to prevent destruction is to purchase property rights (whether on a private or a public basis) before the destruction can occur, this approach embodies more often a form of contingent valuation, in which respondents are asked how much they would give to save something they cherish. Now a large number of salient criticisms of willingness-to-pay as a criterion of environmental value are presented in the article published immediately before Aldred’s article, ‘What is the Value of Rangitoto Island?’ by Dan Vadnjal and Martin O’Connor (Sagoff, 1982; Vadnjal and O’Connor, 1994), who argue that ‘‘the meaning respondents attach to the actual dollar values they offer or bid are inconsistent with the conventional logic that underlies contingent valuation.’’ Far from supplying estimates of what preservation is worth to them, they ‘‘might be seen to be expressing views about how things ought to be in society’’, or even finding ‘‘something of the transcendent in their environment’’… There is no need to chronicle or to qualify all these criticisms here, even though my sense of intrinsic value does not completely coincide with that of these authors.

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It may be more useful to offer some further criticisms of the willingness-to-pay criterion. One obvious point is that willingness-to-pay is bound to be affected by ability to pay. Faced with identical destruction, a poor community and a rich one are likely to come up with hugely different totals which they are willing to pay to avert the destruction of similar forests, and this is likely to remain true even if they are asked to imagine having unlimited resources. But it is implausible that this signifies that (say) the two forests earmarked for possible destruction are of different environmental value. Other criticisms echo ones already made concerning undiscovered species, and relatedly entities far removed from the media and the public gaze. The willingness-to-pay criterion would award these a low or negligible value, whereas many of these creatures, or many states of these creatures (states such as their flourishing) could well be held to have a considerable environmental value. This could take the form, either of a high intrinsic value, or (in a few cases) of a high aesthetic value, or (much more commonly) of a considerable instrumental value, granted the pivotal positions in food-chains which many such creatures would turn out to occupy. And since these kinds of value would often offer no welfarebenefit to particular valuers, these values would, from the point of view of any valuer who might eventually come to value them, consist in existence-value. Here then is a further reason why, at any given time, the willingness-to-pay method would yield a misleading estimate of existencevalue, even as it stands in the present. None of this shows that it is pointless to discover and quantify willingness-to-pay; for example, the results could exercise a beneficial political influence in environmental disputes. But it casts strong doubts on whether such willingness measures anything like existence value at all, let alone intrinsic value. There is, of course, an ultimate reply which the defenders of the willingness-topay criterion could adduce. For they could always define existence-value in terms of willingness-topay, and this would ensure that the latter was an accurate measure of the former. Unfortunately, this would also mean that the notion of existence

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value was even more tenuously related to the kinds of value which exercise environmentalists than has hitherto appeared. Thus, willingness-to-pay is a poor measure of existence-value, unless existence-value is defined as willingness-to-pay; and if it is thus defined, it probably has little bearing on what really ought to be taken into account in decision-making.

4. Willingness-to-pay and environmental decision-making Let us retain Aldred’s definition of existencevalue and not define this as willingness-to-pay. It was on this basis that I concluded in my second section that a good deal of intrinsic value, as usually understood, is not included within the scope of existence-value, as we might expect from the respective distinctive definitions. We also found, however, that sometimes items of intrinsic value will happen to be included in any adequate account of the location or extension of the bearers of existence-value. This consideration suggests that measures of existence-value could still have some part to play in rational environmental decision-making. But in my third section, I concluded that if existence-value is defined as willingness-to-pay, it perforce omits (and thus, perforce, fails to capture) many, and perhaps most, of the values of environmentalists and ethicists, and that if existence-value is not so defined, then willingness-topay is a poor measure of it. However, retaining Aldred’s definition of existence-value retains for existence-value some shreds of credibility, particularly if we do not make the stipulation (related to the willingness-to-pay definition) that valuings are insincere unless valuers are willing to sacrifice resources. But what happens if we now ask; how good a measure willingness-to-pay is of what gives such credibility as remains to the concept of existencevalue? What upholds credibility for the concept of existence-value is largely (although admittedly not exclusively) the inclusion in the class of bearers of existence-value of some of the bearers of intrinsic value. But the willingness-to-pay criterion is very

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seldom likely to produce a sufficiently positive valuation where such value is present, as will now be argued. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that intrinsic value attaches to the flourishing of present and future living creatures of every kind, a view which is at least plausible in the light of the definition of intrinsic value provided earlier. Now willingness-to-pay is likely to reflect popular environmental consciousness, however indirectly, as habits of valuation are (plausibly) themselves psychologically influenced (at least to some degree) by the valuer’s ability to pay. But very seldom indeed is this willingness likely to reflect the extension of intrinsic value which we have just assumed to hold. In case this argument should seem to depend on too unstable an assumption, let us change our assumption about the location of intrinsic value and instead assume that intrinsic value is associated with rarity. Once again, surely, the result is the same. For popular environmental consciousness will seldom give pride of place to what is rare, partly because what is rare is seldom wellpublicised; and many of those with a good understanding of rarity will be so influenced by their own slender ability to pay, as to return low figures if asked about even their hypothetical willingnessto-pay. The argument could be repeated for many other properties, with the exception of the property of environmental popularity with wealthy valuers. But this exception underlines the poorness of willingness-to-pay as a measure of intrinsic value. These considerations suggest that if environmental decision-making is to cope at all adequately with environmental value, whether instrumental or intrinsic, this should not be done on the basis of the valuations of valuers in a free market. While there is no space even to delineate a less unsuitable method here, a suggestion may be in place for further consideration. Thus, where values which do not correspond to welfare benefits for current human valuers are in question, methods have to be found which more di-

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rectly take into account the value or the good or the needs of future human beings and of nonhuman entities. This could possibly be done for nonhuman entities through the estimates of human proxies of their interests, proxies who might be authorised to treat interests which nonhuman creatures share with human beings equally with the value currently put on those human interests in the society in question. A similar approach should be considered for the interests of future human beings, of young children and perhaps of foetuses. Such an approach (Attfield and Dell, 1996) bristles with difficulties (O’Neill, 1993; Attfield, 1994a,b). Since, however, the employment of existence-values, as measured by willingness-to-pay, is a massively inappropriate approach, relevant alternatives at least have the rather unspectacular property of being no worse than the approach which is currently most fashionable.

References Aldred, J., 1994. Existence value, welfare and altruism. Environ. Values 3.4, 381 – 402. Attfield, R., 1994a. Reasoning about the environment, Environmental Philosophy: Principles and Prospects. Avebury: Aldershot and Ashgate: Brookfield, Vermont, 1994a, pp. 135 – 149. Attfield, R., 1994b. Environmental Philosophy: Principles and Prospects. Avebury: Aldershot and Ashgate: Brookfield, Vermont, 1994b. Attfield, R., 1995. Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics (Value Inquiry Books, series, 30). Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 1995. Attfield, R., Dell, K. (Eds.), 1996. Values, Conflict and the Environment, 2nd edn. Avebury: Aldershot and Ashgate: Brookfield, Vermont. Brennan, A., 1992. Moral pluralism and the environment. Environ. Values 1.1, 15 – 33. Hammond, M., 1994. Environ. Values (preface) 3.4, 283 – 284. O’Neill, J., 1993. Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human WellBeing and the Natural World. Routledge, London. Sagoff, M., 1982. At the shrine of Our Lady of Fa`tima, or why political questions are not all economic. Arizona Law Rev. 23, 1281 – 1298. Vadnjal, D., O’Connor, M.O., 1994. What is the value of Rangitoto Island? Environ. Values 3.4, 369 – 380.