Nobyeni! Thank you for responding, and I'm so sorry it took me so long to respond. You posted it right after I went to bed and I wanted to wait until I got home from work because I thought my response to you deserved my full attention.

Could you clarify for me what you mean by "not helpful"? I reread your post as well, and I'm still not exactly sure what you mean by it not being helpful. I interpret it as you believe that not all issues are best approached from an economic perspective. If I'm incorrect, I welcome the correction. I'm going to operate off that assumption, so feel free to kick me in the ass if everything I'm about to write addresses a position you don't even hold.

In that I would certainly disagree that it is not helpful. Since all living things behave and change their behavior based upon incentives, I find it to be deeply meaningful to seek to understand these incentives and to use them to our advantage when we seek to further a cause. Does that mean you aren't correct in saying that it's not the best way to approach certain problems? I think you're absolutely correct in that, and one example in particular comes to mind: Slavery.

When the great debate was underway in the West on the value of slavery, before we decided to abolish it, it was commonly understood that slavery had enormous economic value. In fact, it was seen as economically necessary and had been seen that way for tens of thousands of years. After all, what successful society existed or had ever existed which did not have slaves? At that point, it was a strong argument. None had. None did. So we had the choice of making a decision for the sake of economics, or to make a decision based on our evolving understanding of what it was to be good, and virtuous, and moral men. I'm glad the economic argument lost, but I want to point out that this position lost out in the marketplace of ideas. Though it may not have been because of monetary valuation, it was still a free market of speech and ideas that allowed the counter argument to be made and to emerge victorious in the first place. In the end, though, it turned out to be a wonderful economic decision as well. Who would've known that we would have responded to the lack of slave labor with amazing industrial innovation that would become almost a second Renaissance? That leads to your question...

I certainly recognize that there is value that is not economical, as in my example above. It's a big subject, and there's a lot in it. So much in philosophical exploration of value has no overlap at all with economic value. My only point of disagreement I suppose would be with the fact that there is or isn't some overlap between economic value and philosophical value, and whether or not that overlap or perspective is helpful. To clarify further, I think this overlap only exists when looking through the lens of truly free market economics. Where there is control, or force in the economic market, there can be no overlap with philosophy.

For that matter, where there is control or force present in ideas, I would also say there could be little or no advancement in philosophy and those ideas. Socrates was murdered for communicating his ideas in the open market. Had they been onto him sooner, we would have even less of his work. Had they allowed him to advance his ideas in the open market, we'd have even more of his work to better the world. Same goes for Aristotle. That a man that brilliant would have to die on the run, and from some likely curable illness, while having all his written works destroyed (which was said, according to some who read it, was a writing superior to Socrates) is tragic. How many more great philosophers would we be referencing in our conversations today had they not been afraid of being killed for voicing their ideas?

Have you noticed yet that I tend to ramble? ;)

Thanks again for your reply.