Thank you, Arjun Sambhi, for this interesting question.
I want to argue that diamonds are intrinsically valuable because they are intrinsically beautiful and resistant to change, both of which are intrinsically valuable properties. Let’s start with beauty.
Beauty is an intrinsically valuable property. To see this, consider two worlds that are identical in all respects, except that one is beautiful and one is not. Suppose you were tasked with choosing which world to bring into existence. Would you prefer to create the beautiful world or the world without beauty? I think that most people, on reflection, would prefer to create the beautiful world. It would be perverse to prefer the unbeautiful world, given that there is no greater cost to creating the beautiful one. What we would prefer on reflection is just what is valuable. And notice that our preference for the beautiful world is due to the world’s beauty and nothing else, since these worlds are identical in all other respects. It follows that beauty is intrinsically valuable. And diamonds are intrinsically beautiful. The only evidence we can give for this claim, to paraphrase J.S. Mill, is that people agree with it. So, if beauty is intrinsically valuable and diamonds are intrinsically beautiful, then diamonds are intrinsically valuable.
The second argument is that diamonds are intrinsically valuable because they are intrinsically stable or resistant to change. Since at least Plato, philosophers have urged the superiority of all things eternal and unchanging over things that are temporal and mutable. Again, think about two worlds that are qualitatively identical at a certain point in time. Imagine that the natural processes in one world are dramatically faster than those in the other. In the fast world, mountains spring up and fall in a matter of hours, animal species come into existence and die out in a matter of minutes, and human civilizations rise and fall in a matter of seconds. In the slow world, natural processes take place on time scales similar to those in our world. Would we not prefer the relative constancy of the slower world, even if we could not experience it? Now diamonds are, we are told, forever. Even if this is not quite true, it is true that they seem fairly stable. Thus, relative to many other things, they are unchanging. This constancy is intrinsic to diamonds: it is a property they have in virtue of their basic structure. If constancy is intrinsically valuable and diamonds are intrinsically constant, then, once again, diamonds are intrinsically valuable.
So, since diamonds are beautiful and resistant to change, I think they are intrinsically valuable. However, they are also instrumentally valuable; in this way, they are like health, rather than pleasure.
What do you think? Are beauty and constancy both intrinsically valuable? Let us know in the comments.
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I received my BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago and my PhD from the University of Notre Dame. I specialize in ethics, with a particular focus on the nature of normative reasons and the ethics of hypocrisy in its myriad forms. My favorite philosopher is Henry Sidgwick, since I believe—to borrow a line from Alfred North Whitehead, speaking about Plato—that much of analytic ethics in the 20th century is a series of footnotes to Sidgwick.