The case for basic goods -- civic evangelicalism part 5

This is part 5 of an ongoing series. See part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

In a post last week I examined the unfortunate and immature, "progressive Christian" obsession with human conditions such as wealth and poverty, pleasure and pain. This obsession is borne largely out of an inability (or a refusal) to distinguish between basic goods, instrumental goods, and non-goods in the created universe.

By basic goods I mean things that are worth choosing for their own sake. These include knowledge, beauty, and human life.

By instrumental goods I mean things that are valuable only because they enable us to obtain more basic goods. Money, for example, is not something to be pursued for its own sake. Rather, it is to be pursued because it enables the pursuer to feed his family, stay healthy, and give charitably to those who are less fortunate.

By non-goods I mean things that are not to be pursued at all, but are mere by-products of choice. Pleasure is a good example. Neither pleasure nor pain is something to be chosen, though we often experience pleasure and pain as a consequence of our choices. We will experience pleasure as a result of our right choice to have a child, but that child will also bring us pain and suffering. We can also experience both pleasure (short-term) and suffering (long-term) as a result of the wrong choice to engage in sex acts outside of marriage.

Among the basic goods that Christians recognize are two of contemporary importance: human life and conjugal marriage (the union of one man and one woman in lifetime commitment). Many progressives deny that these are basic goods by first denying that basic goods exist in the first place. So, before we get to the cases for the intrinsic value of human life and of marriage (in later posts) we must first defend the notion of intrinsic value. Here we will respond with inductive reasoning, starting with particular cases and working our way out to general principles.

In my native New England, stone walls line the landscape. Historically, stone walls served two valuable purposes. The soil in New England is very rocky, and before it can be tilled and cultivated it must yield its rocks. The stone wall served as a place for farmers to store the rocks once they were removed from the soil. Once constructed, the wall also helped to mark boundary lines between farms or between fields in a single farm.

Today, farms in New England simply cannot compete with the agri-businesses in the West, and most New England farms have stopped operating commercially. In fact, many farmers have sold their land to vacationers who wish to escape the city and establish a second home in a quiet setting. These vacationers often restore stone walls that have decayed over the years. Often they find that the stones on their properties are insufficient to serve the particular aesthetic (the "look") they seek. So they buy stones and have them delivered onto their properties.

Now, the old farmer scratches his head in bewilderment at the sight of trucks bringing rocks onto the land. The farmer always had altogether too many rocks, so the notion that one would bring more rocks in seems like madness. In this respect, the vacationer's treatment of the stone wall is the opposite of the farmer's. But is the vacationer acting immorally?

Of course not. Why not? As the farmer reasonably chose to build a stone wall for the extrinsic benefits of tillable soil and boundary demarcation, the vacationer reasonably chose to re-build the stone wall for the extrinsic value of beauty. Both the farmer and the vacationer instrumentalize the wall, choose it because it is instrumentally valuable for the attainment of extrinsic ends. But there's nothing wrong with that because the wall has no intrinsic value, no value in itself, only instrumental value.

Now imagine a guy who wants to bed a girl who loves poetry. So before taking her to dinner, he memorizes some Keats. After his successful sexual conquest, he dumps her. The guy has acted immorally in at least two respects because he has instrumentalized beauty, knowledge, and another member of the human race. He has used poetry to get the girl and has used the girl to satisfy his desires. The first makes us uncomfortable, the second awakens our sense of injustice. Why?

Unless beauty, knowledge, and human persons have instrinsic value, using beauty, knowledge, and human persons instrumentally to achieve extrinsic ends would not strike us as troublesome. We conclude from this observation that some objects of choice, such as poetry and women, are valuable in and of themselves and are reasonably chosen for their own intrinsic value. Those objects of choice we call basic goods, goods that are chosen not for any more fundamental reason but as reasons themselves.