The Uses of Intrinsic Value

Abstract

This chapter explores Bernard Williams’s genealogy in Truth and Truthfulness and argues that by emphasizing the historicity of needs and the ways in which practices can acquire or lose their points, Williams brings pragmatic genealogy from its Neo-Humean phase into its Neo-Nietzschean phase. The chapter begins by reconstructing Williams’s notoriously elusive genealogy and reveals its affinities with Cambridge pragmatism. It then addresses three influential challenges raised by Colin McGinn. Williams’s notion of intrinsic value is elucidated and his position distinguished from indirect utilitarianism. It emerges that Williams’s distinctive contribution to the pragmatic genealogical tradition is to identify the practical pressures driving thought away from a stance of instrumental valuation to a stance of intrinsic valuation, thus showing how intrinsic values have their uses, and to illustrate how the method equips one to do justice to self-effacingly functional practices. The chapter concludes by considering the depth of Williams’s debt to Nietzsche.