...does it have value at all?
I saw this question on another site and thought it'd make good discussion. My views on the matter follow.
There are three kinds of value: intrinsic, societal and personal. They can overlap.
Intrinsic value comes from the qualities or abilities of the object itself making it desirable. Gold is the classic example: its corrosion resistance and decent conductivity makes it valuable for manufacturing electronics, it has many medicinal uses, and looks pretty too.
Societal value is when a large group of people agree something is valuable, thus making it so. Case in point, paper money: it can buy goods and services within at least an entire country, but if you go elsewhere and the currency is not accepted, or the banking system that backs it were to collapse, it's just paper that's been printed on.
Personal value comes from when an object is special to you due to the memories or associations attached to it, but anyone else would classify as ordinary or even worthless. Anything you consider special and/or have owned for a long time can qualify; for me some examples are: the doodles I made at school, a rock I took from a McDonald's when I went out with a friend years ago, my 2004 custom-built desktop computer.
So, to answer the initial question: that something definitely has no societal value, if no one you come across considers it valuable. It definitely has personal value (since you are convinced it does) and it may have intrinsic value too depending on the object in question, although generally that and societal value correlate.
What do you think?
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