But the amount of energy can be measured and we can predict exactly how much energy will be released. That doesn't really fit in with the idea that energy has no intrinsic value.
If you count the number of bricks in a house and you know the cost of a brick, you know how much financial value those bricks will have if you pull down the house, and if you know the cost of an acre of land, you know how much land the sale of those bricks will get you. The financial value of the bricks and the land is just a number that quantifies the conversion rate of one thing to another, i.e. relates how much of one thing can be converted into some other thing, be it land, bricks, gold, numbers in a bank account, a workman's labour, currency notes, etc.
Energy is analogous (except that, unlike financial value, it is constant and conserved, not subjective). Such numbers have no intrinsic value, they quantify the value of other things.
But the value of a good or service is subjective. The example I gave of a glass of water shows that.
Sure. but the subjective value is the
extrinsic value.
Intrinsic value is how much value something is perceived to have. A glass of water has a higher intrinsic value to a dehydrated man than to a man who has just drunk a liter. After all, the dehydrated man feels a greater need for the water, while the man who's just drunk a liter may not be feeling any thirst at all. Likewise, a service also has no objective value. A person who is extremely busy is likely going to see my dog-walking service as more valuable if they have little time to walk the dog themselves, whereas a retired pensioner who enjoys going for long walks is going to find little value in my service.
We seem to be using different understandings of intrinsic value. The subjective value something has in a particular situation is its
extrinsic value. The
intrinsic value is the objective value that that thing has in itself, or in its own right, i.e. its fundamental properties that can be objectively measured, things that are not dependent on market demand, user preference or sentiment.
For the Porsche that would presumably inhere in the amount and quality of the materials it is made of, the workmanship, the construction, functionality, its performance, economy, etc. For the glass of water, likewise, the quantity and quality of the glass, the design & functionality, the amount and suitability of the water for drinking, and so-on. There are some philosophical issues about precisely what constitutes intrinsic value (e.g. distilled water is not great drinking water, so does the intended purpose count?), but it's the principle that matters.
But the amount of energy released for a certain amount of petrol when burned can be objectively measured. It's not going to produce a different amount of energy for different people based on how important they find that energy.
Yes, energy quantifies an intrinsic property equivalence. Rearranging the molecular binding of a certain amount oxygen and the hydrocarbons of petrol produces a predictable amount of high-frequency photons and fast-moving molecules, that produce vibrating & colliding atoms in nearby material (heat), and a local increase in the amount and velocity of gas molecules (pressure). This conversion is quantified using an indirectly observed abstract conserved property called energy.
Molecular binding energy, light energy, thermal energy, kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy, etc., are the names we give to the values of certain properties (states or contexts) of stuff, using a common unit that we use to quantify the conversion between those properties.