Quote:
Originally Posted by O.A.F.K.1.1
No value can be objective, value is subjective, it is a negotiation between subjects. This is inherent to value.
Nature = object.
The point you are missing is that you cant reduce nature to economics, thus it is priceless. You cant reduce the object to the subject.
You might try and find an economic solution for problems involving nature, but if you internalise that solution, view the mediation as the thing itself, then one has an alienated view of nature.
Economics might try to put a price on something, but that is purely symbolic, a representation. The important thing is to keep this in mind when making attempts to come to economic meaning.
The humanistic view is that everything that exists can be exploited for humanity benefit and no other consideration whatsoever should be made with everything that is not a human being.
Humans at the center of everything, human beings the only thing having intrinsic value, and everything else that exists having value (being worth preserving and so on) only and exclusively because of the value it generates for human beings.
This is not economic, this is a value scale.
This is not alienation , and this is not "internalizing the solution". This is having a belief that the only source of value in the universe are human beings (a few people generalize this to "intelligent beings").
So any form of life on earth that is not human (or maybe dolphin or some monkeys, depending on the intelligence thing) is worth as much as a rock on a planet 50 light years from earth (which is utterly 0), UNLESS it provides net value for humanity.
This, if you are humanist.
If you expouse other philosophies which stipulate an intrinsic value on life itself well, that's not "not being alienated", that's having a different value scale.
And we can properly call all value scales that expand intrisic value outside human beings as being literally ANTI-HUMAN, in the sense that giving intrinsic value to things that are not human ends up with leading to choice that don't maximize human quality of life, explicitly sacrificing human values for other living being values.
Which, in my view, is profoundly immoral in an intimate sense and deeply disturbing and disgusting.
Now in an humanistic point of view you can preserve species. But only if measurements add up, cost-benefit analyses, with NO number whatsoever coming from something "intrinsic" in the specie itself, all numbers only and always being number of human value.
That process can't be perfect and giving too much credit to some extimate of value coming from that process would be alienating.
But it is not alienating at all, it is actually the only way to live fully with a humane philosophy, to disgregard completly the idea that things that are not human beings have intrinsic value.