Here's more about value and Searle's distinctions of ontological versus epistemic objectivity/ subjectivity. You can distinguish: [1] "to value" as an act performed by a person [2] "having value" as a judgement made by a person about an object. [3] "having value" as a property of an object, a property that does not depend on a person's experience of it for its existence. In my last post, I quoted Dr. Perry, who wrote that: "We judge a thing to be intrinsically good 'where we judge, concerning a particular state of things that it would be worthwhile - would be 'a good thing' - that that state of things should exist, even if nothing else were to exist besides, either at the same time or afterwards.  If a thing derives value from its relation to an interest taken in it, it would seem impossible that anything whatsoever should possess value in itself.  But in that case value would seem always to be borrowed, and never owned; value would shine by a reflected glory having no original source." If an object can have value whether or not someone is around to experience that value, that is, if an object can have value like a food can have salt in it, (whether or not anyone is there to eat the food), then that object can be said to have ontologically objective value.  That value could be named "intrinsic value".   If an object can't have value unless it is judged by someone to have value, then value as a property of an object is ontologically subjective, so that value as as an object property depends entirely on the experience of the valuer, in the same way that a painful electrode depends on a person to experience the pain for it be attributed the property "painful".  If an object is judged to be intrinsically valuable by someone, then that someone finds, epistemically subjectively, that the object is valuable for the sake of itself, even if the existence of that object were to serve no further purpose for the person.  I'm characterizing a belief that someone would have about an object, a belief that the object has intrinsic value.  I believe that judging an object to have the property valuable_for_the_sake_of_itself requires an attitude, that the judgement is really an attitude toward the object, and so is an epistemically subjective judgement.  But it is plausible for a person to judge an object to have the property "valuable_for_the_sake_of_itself" to be a property as epistemically objective as the property of a mountain having mass.  I simply don't believe that the property "valuable_for_the_sake_of_itself" is an epistemically objective property. -nj