Monoaxiology

I don't care for the term "hedonism", because it's often associated with a selfish pursuit of carnal pleasures. But in philosophy hedonism is the view that the only intrinsic good is positive mental states ('pleasure' or 'happiness'). You could put it as the view that value is necessarily conscious. Without conscious beings, there is no good or evil. So, goodness and badness must be realized consciously. So, the foundation of value, the only intrinsically valuable thing, is conscious experience that is worth it for its own sake – which is happiness.

 

(So consciousness is necessary, but not sufficient, for value. I say not sufficient because we can imagine a “blank” God that has omniscience but experiences no happiness and no pain – if the universe consisted of only this God, then you would have a universe with consciousness but no good and no evil. The blank God is itself extrinsically good in the case that it eventually causes creatures to emerge that generate intrinsic value.)

 

I thought of "monoaxiology" as a replacement term, but it's not great. (How do you use it as an adjective? "Monoaxiological"? Ugh.) Philosophy is full of non-ideal terminology, but... I kind of think language as a whole is like that. We make do with what we have and in the end it's not a big deal. It just means that every time I "defend hedonism", I have to explain that I'm not defending hedonism as a lifestyle, I'm defending a kind of "monoaxiology" – or a view that says there is only one category of intrinsic good, and it's upon this foundation that value is built; all goods ultimately derive their goodness from intrinsic, conscious goods and all evils ultimately derive their badness from intrinsic, conscious evils.

 

Besides being clunky, "monoaxiology" is vague. There is at least one other possible use for the term: the view that there is only one kind of wrongness.

 

Some folks might believe that being wrong / incorrect in an epistemic sense differs from being wrong in a moral sense; being stupid / ignorant / irrational and being evil / immoral / malicious are two totally separate things on this view. I reject this view entirely. I think being irrational and being evil go hand-in-hand. It's just that evil is a specific kind of irrationality. All instances of evil are instances of irrationality / stupidity, but not all instances of irrationality / stupidity are instances of evil. While getting poor test scores indicates a lack of understanding, it does not indicate a lack of moral virtues. As discussed elsewhere, I agree with Socrates that virtue itself is a kind of knowledge or understanding (or, virtue is a disposition that is caused by one's understanding). In both the epistemic sense of being wrong and the moral sense of being wrong, there is a disconnect between the person who is mistaken and reality.

 

So, I accept monoaxiology in both the sense that there is only one intrinsic good and in the sense that being wrong epistemically and being wrong morally are the same.