Thinking Clearly About the Useful and the Useless
Some people use ‘useless’ as if it must refer to something worthless. Doing so is to confuse usefulness with value. But the useless is not necessarily lacking in value. Some things possess intrinsic value and thus are valuable regardless of whether they are used or usable.
Consider a person, a friendship, the possession of some item of knowledge, or the act of creating a poem or a painting. Such things might not be useful relative to the attainment of some other end, and yet they have intrinsic worth. However, things that have merely instrumental value and yet are not feasible to be used are useless things – such as a pencil dropped into some uninhabited part of the Mojave Desert, a car abandoned somewhere in Antarctica, or a suitcase of cash buried in some unknown location in the Australian Outback, where it stays buried until the universe perishes in its heat death.
Usefulness is one kind of value. In the business of philosophy, we philosophers refer to useful value as “instrumental value.” But as noted above, there is also intrinsic value.
Here’s an analogy to summarize the matter. Those of you who took the Miller Analogies Test, as I did, will recognize the point:
Useful is to valuable as apple is to fruit. If something isn’t an apple, it doesn’t follow that it’s not a fruit. Similarly, if something isn’t useful, it doesn’t follow that it isn’t valuable.
*This analogy, by the way, is useful with students who ask: “Why do I have to take this class? I can’t use it to get a job and make money. It’s a worthless class and a waste of my time.”