Good/bad (Value) vs good/bad (Success)

Introduce a pluralism about badness/goodness. Good (Value) refers to intrinsic goods, extrinsic goods, and saving goods. These are objective, undeniable, judgment-independent, and mistake-making in a non-goal sense.

That is, if a certain intrinsic good takes place, and someone denies that it takes place, then the denier is wrong. They are mistaken. And they are mistaken regardless of anyone's judgment as to whether they are mistaken. They are mistaken relative to a non-goal fact.

A failure, by contrast, is a mistake relative to a goal fact. Epistemic mistakes are failures, though in some cases they can be bad too. For example, it's bad to believe p without evidence that p. This is bad (failure), and may also be bad (value).

A mistake is to regard p as true when p is not true, where 'regarding' is some minimal doxastic attitude.

So just as physical facts (e.g. the earth is round) are mistake-making in a non-relative sense, value facts are mistake-making in a non-relative sense. Value facts include facts about happiness and pain, which are instantiations of intrinsic good and intrinsic evil. Depending on philosophy of mind, value facts are physical facts. Or you could say there are goal facts and non-goal facts (world facts). Both physical facts and value facts are world facts.

Good / bad (success) is when something is a success / failure with respect to some goal. 

If I write 'snuflowre', that's a mistake relative to the goal of spelling 'sunflower' correctly. Snuflowre is bad (success) spelling, but not necessarily bad (value).

The problem with only having value facts is that there are epistemic facts that are undeniable mistakes, but they don't necessarily constitute extrinsic or depriving evils. So we have to introduce a second kind of badness.

This seems to cut against monoaxiology. There is, in fact, more than one kind of badness / being wrong. Failure is not necessarily intrinsically bad, extrinsically bad, or a depriving bad. Depending on the system, failure can be intrinsically, extrinsically, and/or a saving good.

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.