The Value of Beauty Never Seen

G.E. Moore was the Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in the early twentieth century when Cambridge was the center of the philosophical universe. Fellow Cantabrigians included Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand (the 3rd Earl of) Russell (one of only a trio of philosopher winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the others being Camus and Sartre), and Ludwig Wittgenstein, later Moore’s successor in the Professorship.

The Moore thesis for today is that it is better that a Beautiful World (hereinafter “BW”) exist, even if so distant that no one will ever see it. In this Moore was trying to refute ethical hedonism, as then expounded by utilitarian theorists, who claimed that the good (what is valuable in a way relevant for morality) is exhausted by desirable states of consciousness. Henry Sidgwick, the most prominent of these theorists, specifically contended that there could be no value in any beauty apart from its contemplation by conscious beings. [Methods of Ethics, book I, ch. IX, s. IV, pr. II, p.114).]

Intrinsic Value of an Eternal God – Nihilism, Perfectionism, Weird Deities, and Guilty Pleasures

The thesis for this piece is that it would be good for there to be an eternal God. This will not seem controversial enough to merit cloudspace for most believers, and unbelievers may think it equal in interest to how many angels could dance on the head of a pin if angels there were. The question of the intrinsic value of eternal persons is, admittedly, largely a conceptual etude. It is, however, I think of some interest that the proposition can be established with relatively little machinery. It is, in fact, a fairly easy theorem of intrinsic value theory, and depends on almost nothing in the way of theology. For example it ignores any good thing that God might do for human beings.