The serving spheres aim at qualities that are obviously useful and wanted: wealth, health, security, justice, education, information. No one doubts of their worth, no one wants to miss them. What is less obvious is that they would be useless and threatened by Sisyphean absurdity if there were no nonserving spheres or activities that are done for their own sake and not for their utility. Economists agree that economic activities pursue, as Adam Smith expressed in the title of his economic work, the wealth of nations, which means, as a nineteenth-century economist said, they serve to “maximize the utility of the produce,” and utility presupposes something it is useful for.

This does not exclude that the activities of the serving spheres are done for their own sake. On the contrary, values, whether serving or nonserving, would not be values if they could not be pursued for their own sake. Nonetheless, without the existence of nonserving values, even the pursuit of justice would be futile. The fact that people pursue justice for its own sake does not free justice enforcement from its dependence on actions outside the sphere of justice enforcement that can be performed justly or unjustly. True, justice is something sacrosanct, as it must not be violated. But it is false to conclude that it does not serve other activities, in particular such as become possible only because justice is enforced. Similarly, merchants and managers often enough aim at increasing wealth for its own sake.