Value: is there such a thing as intrinsic Good?

Position: Axiological pluralism

The concepts of norms and reasons as philosophical staples is fairly recent. In a more distant past, discussions of a meta-ethical or meta-aesthectic nature were more readily couched in the language of value.

Re-framing norms as value judgments

Values are certainly part of everyday speech and as such, have become fair game for philosophical theorization early on. The "classical triad", which morphed during the medieval era into the "transcendentals" is based on Plato’s trilogy of beauty, goodness and truth. More complex distinctions have emegerged, among which we’ll quote a single example, out of Frankena’s Ethics. Frankena sorts various purported values into six groups:

1. Beauty, harmony, proportion, aesthetic experience

2. Moral disposition, virtue, pleasure, happiness, contentment

3. Truth, knowledge, understanding, wisdom, honour, esteem

4. Life, health, strength, peace, security

5. Love, affection, friendship, cooperation

6. Power, achievement, freedom, adventure, novelty

The term’s usage has become a bit muddled, running the gamut from Platonic universals, to individual traits (someone’s "personal values"). To re-center the topic, I should start by pointing out once more the equivalence between statements about reasons, normativity, and values.

Have we achieved anything at all here? Or did we only show value discourse to be one re-phrasing away from the normative or the rational discourse we’ve been tackling so far? That is indeed the case. However the shift to a value perspective will help see through the mists of language and answer important questions about the true nature of normativity.

Intrinsic value

There’s a traditional distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value. An archetypical example is money. Most agents would say it has no intrinsic value, but only instrumental value (it is not good in itself, but good because of what one can get with it). For most reasons, the corresponding value is then instrumental, but as we hark back through the rational arguments that make up the links of our reasons’ chain, we supposedly could reach some "ultimate", primitive reasons that are not grounded in other reasons, and would reflect intrinsic value.

It is clear there are many forms of intrinsic value, hence the endorsement in this subsection of axiological pluralism. As it turns out, the taxonomy that we’ve developed will not lead us to choose one option, but instead will help classify reasons and acknowledge their diverse ontological status.

1. For dessert, Alice may get an apple and Elly some berries. The ultimate ground for many reasons to choose one thing over the other seems to be that "there’s no accounting for taste". Subjective minds develop their thoughts based on rationality, but when you pull back that thread, it happens you end up on some irreducible, purely individual preference. That looks a lot like expressivism. Alice’s reason to eat an apple might then be identified with a deeply rooted desire for apples.

   We also need to acknowledge that expressivism doesn’t have to be the last word here. It seems sensible to assume that these deeply rooted preferences supervene on the physico-mental features associated with subjective minds. Such reasons may then be simply grounded in natural properties.

2. There is a more overt kind of normative naturalism that’s directly predicated on the biology of subjective beings. Being hungry is a reason to seek some sustenance. That simple statement is plausibly an ultimate reason, irreducible to simpler ones, and is clearly grounded in the biological or evolutionary features of our bodies. Ghrelin and other hormones elicit physical reactions and specific mental states that drive food-seeking behavior. So, that normative principle (or even a more universal one like "all animals want to eat enough to stay alive") can theoretically be shown as reflective of a causal chain that’s firmly embedded in the natural world. Reductive normative naturalism is thus the relevant thesis for large swathes of our reasons.

3. We’ve already evoked the case of artifical rules. When we play chess, follow etiquette or replicate a dance routine, our reasons are grounded in a number of axioms forming an internalized rulebook. The corresponding value — what makes a legal chess move, a correct social behavior, or a good dance step — does not stem directly from natural properties but from a formal, fictional normative system that becomes an abstract add-on to our rationality posits.

All of those approaches have something in common: they can accommodate some form of normative relativism. Whatever we may think should be an absolute moral or aesthetic principle, true in all scenarios and in all possible worlds, seems bound to be jeopardized in all these models.

Expressivism is about the attitudes of speakers, which undermines the mere concept of principle. If only one agent has a genuine pro-attitude towards the idea of murdering someone (in itself, independent from any motive), and if moral cognitivism was wrong, then we couldn’t erect any commandment-style principle putting murder firmly in the "bad column". Humanity has learnt the hard way that any depraved moral or aesthetic attitude we could conjure has likely been hailed as good by someone, somewhere...

Formalism fares no better, as it suggests that murder is bad by virtue of a formal moral code we’ve internalized. But there’s really nothing to respond to individuals, or societies, that hold opposite moral tenets. To say that some civilizations were wrong to encourage human sacrifice would then be nothing more than a formal "move" from players in the "game" of Western morality. (I’m asking for some leniency here, being conscious I may present a caricature of some views; I’m lacking space and time to do them justice. That ever-present issue somehow seems more fraught in the context of moral discourse).

As to naturalism, it seems more likely to accommodate absolute principles at first sight, since natural properties are grounded into an evolutionary process that is independent from individualities and prior to social organization. Yet, we should not forget about the infinite riches of (perhaps) our own universe, and of (surely) the modal realm of possible worlds. Whatever natural property \(N\) we reduce "good" to, there might be a planet and a species somewhere for which murdering their offspring is \(N\). Is it murder then possibly good?

Meta-epistemology as a remedy to relativism

Relativism is certainly, to me, hard to countenance. But even partial acceptance of normative Platonism can seem equally uncomfortable at first. To better understand my view of it, I suggest a detour via epistemology. It is most definitely normative, yet distinct from, and prior to, deontic and evaluative studies.

Epistemology is traditionally presented as the study of knowledge (or other forms of cognitive success, but to simplify here we’ll only talk of knowledge). The now-canonical definition of knowledge is as justified true belief (JTB), Epistemology thus finds itself at the nexus of normativity (justification), semantics (truth) and mind (belief). Let’s consider those in turn.

• Belief: to know something is at the very least to believe it. What I know is a distinguished sub-set of my beliefs.

• Truth might be slightly less obvious. Colloquially, someone may know something that is false; the word then serves to emphasize that they really, really, believe it. But in philosophical usage, truth is always a condition precedent to knowledge. So I cannot know that Mitt Romney was President (in the actual world), because that is not true. Aristotle thought that he knew heavy bodies fell faster than lighter bodies; but he didn’t, for that was false.

• Justification, as we’ve seen, is a quality possessed by what we should, or what we’re entitled to believe. It was shown to be a necessary condition for knowledge from Plato’s Meno. Plato insists that not everything we believe is believed knowledgeably, for it may lack aitias logismos (reasoned explanation). Dharmottara in medieval India, or Peter of Mantua in Renaissance Italy, would offer examples of the distinction.

  If I walk in the desert and see a vast blue oasis, I may form the belief that there’s water there. Once arrived, I may realize that it was a mirage, but still find out that behind some rocks there was a small stream. My belief that there would be water turned out to be true, but clearly wasn’t justified. Technically I didn’t know there was water

  On another topic, some people firmly believe, and others firmly disbelieve, there is another technically advanced species in our universe. One of of those groups believes a truth, yet it is doubtful that its members have proper reasons for their belief...

Of course justification, and thus the relevant laws of rationality, are at the center of all epistemological questions. Justification as it was traditionally understood, or even the mere acceptance of its historical prominence, have been hotly debated. But I would argue that critics are arguing to reform justification, making it more sophisticated, rather than abolishing it as a concept. If everyone agrees that there is more to knowledge than just true belief, then justification is just what fills the gap.

The goal here is not to develop an epistemology, though, it is to flesh out a meta-epistemology, which hopefully might then be a guiding light towards a general view of meta-normativity. I would sum up the JTB view as such:

1. Epistemic principles + Rational inference \(\rightarrow\) Justification

2. Justification + Belief \(\rightarrow\) Justified belief

3. Justified belief + Truth \(\rightarrow\) Knowledge

Then I would generalize it in this way:

1. Normative principles + Rational inference \(\rightarrow\) Justification

2. Justification + Mental state \(\rightarrow\) Rationality

3. Rationality + Absolue Value \(\rightarrow\) Virtue

The first line is straightforwardly derived from our own definition of justification: reasons to believe, act or feel are generated via rational inference, but their ultimate ground resides in irreducible principles.

The second line is also a re-statement of our previous musings: the laws of rationality may be many, but it is clear that to \(X\) when one is justified to \(X\) is a hallmark of rational behavior.

The last line is more speculative and takes us right into our present topic, but it also does lots of the conceptual work we need by re-framing epistemic considerations in the value space... Truth is an absolute value in my framework, since I subscribe to the correspondence theory: a true proposition reflects a fact that exists in the actual world. Once we analyze language, eliminate the pragmatics and ambiguous terms, nothing can be true to me and false to somebody else.

However, it may well be that justification is relative. Even if the principles of rational inference are absolute (a point that has not been proved here), the ultimate normative principles may be relative, should we adopt a non-Platonist perspective. There are countless positions among epistemologists themselves that are in stark contrast to each other about what science can know, for instance. Put ten of them in a room, and you may find that knowledge is relative, for they may interpret the same true belief as either justified or unjustified according to their models, all perfectly rational perhaps, but differing in the deeply held principles they’re grounded upon.

The point here that saves us from "pessimistic" relativism, is that absolute truth can serve as the ultimate judge. Belief aims at truth, and justification should be an efficient mechanism that leads us to truth. A naive way to sort out "good" from "bad" epistemologies would be to take them on a test run. An epistemology that is based exclusively on horoscopes and hits the bull’s-eye of truth only half the time might reasonably be called deficient. Some epistemologies may correctly justify lots of true belief, but also incorrectly justify false beliefs. Conversely, other may avoid false beliefs, but be too skimpy with their justification, leading us to become radical skeptics.

Whatever methodology we choose, this should start to explain the vocabulary that I’ll be using. Knowledge is a virtue because it’s a way not only of believing the truth, but of believing well.

Virtue normativity

This helps re-frame normativity as a search for virtue, where that elusive notion is defined as doing something well: doing the right thing, for the right reasons.

That approach can help illuminate the reducibly normative "values" (from formalism or naturalism) as well as the irreducibly normative ones. In a game of cards, the only right thing, the ultimate value, is a win. But one can win by playing well or not. If a player wins by only making moves that are justified by the player’s aim to win (taking into account the laws of rationality and the rules of the game), it is sensible to say that she played well — that’s akin to what we call virtue. But a player who wins by sheer luck, after making ill-thought moves, did not play well. A player who misunderstood the rules and lost might still be called rational, provided they would have won, had the rules been such as she imagined.

We can spin the same thread for those normative principles that reduce to natural facts. Reducible normative principles can then be re-branded as the rules in a "game of life", and "acting well" as the behavioral strategy most conducive to natural success, the telos that emerges from the complexities of living systems (notwithstanding their purely causal roots).

But this parallel with epistemology was originally introduced to help cast out the specter of radical relativism. What if there were absolute values, analogues of truth; what if virtuous deeds and feelings were those that not only were worthy of those values, but also rationally justified ways to those ends?

Let’s recapitulate the concepts from epistemology we’ve evoked here as well as in previous sections:

1. Some propositions are true.

2. Knowledge is an epistemically justified belief in a true proposition.

3. A scenario is a set of beliefs, for instance those held by a given agent.

4. A priori propositions are true in every scenario. Every ideal epistemic agent believes them.

5. Conceivable propositions are true in at least some scenarios.

6. A posteriori propositions are false in at least some scenarios.

7. Inconceivable propositions appear false in every scenario. No ideal epistemic agent believes them.

Let’s define the analogues for the deontic value we call morality:

1. Some actions are right.

2. A righteous act is a morally justified right action.

3. A storyline is a set of actions, for instance those taken by a given agent.

4. Obligatory actions are righteous in every storyline. Every ideal moral agent takes them.

5. Permissible actions are righteous in at least some storylines.

6. Omissible is what we may call actions that, in at least some storylines, it is righteous to abstain from taking.

7. Forbidden actions aren’t righteous in any storyline. No ideal moral agent takes them.

And let’s proceed with the evaluative value of beauty:

1. Some things are beautiful.

2. Appreciation is an aesthetically justified feeling towards a beautiful thing.

3. Taste is a set of feelings, for instance those felt by a given agent.

4. Sublime things ought to be appreciated, regardless of taste. Every ideal aesthetic agent feels that way.

5. Admirable things can be appreciated, according to some tastes.

6. Imperfect things can be unappreciated, according to some tastes.

7. Awful things shouldn’t be appreciated, regardless of taste. No ideal aesthetic agent would.

The ontology of absolute values

These constructions invite some key questions. Are some things really absolutely right or absolutely beautiful, and if so, what would clear the bar? Are those just examples or could there be more values? Lastly, what ontological categories do these primitive concepts fit in?

To the first question, I would answer in the affirmative. After all, the value framework has been introduced precisely to keep relativism at bay. At the same time, it is important to not mistake this proposal for some neo-religious normative frenzy. The idea is not codify human action under a moral straitjacket, or to legislate on aesthetics with absolute edicts. Either attitude would be unwarranted, notwithstanding their continuing popularity.

Let’s go back, once more, to the question of knowledge. Some things are true and "always knowable": they are a priori truths (paradigmatically: mathematical facts or analytical ones). Nobody does in fact know them all, but in principle, an ideal cognizer doesn’t need epistemic justification (perception, conversations,...) to know them. Then, there are things that are in fact true, but a posteriori. To unearth as many of those as possible, cognizers develop their own epistemic principles, from which they deem a number of beliefs to be justified, building up a scenario of what the world is like.

Similarly, a number of actions are absolutely right. Moral agents are behaving after a set of moral principles to justify the acts they bring about. Some actions are "automatically" right and that judgment doesn’t require moral justification: ideal moral agents would always consider them as obligatory.

Now, couched in this colloquial language of morality, the last few sentences might seem slightly unhinged. We’re using that language for convenience, because it’s non-technical and easy to grasp, but one shouldn’t take it too literally and see "right" or morality as something that’s prone to open Heaven’s gate. Moral agents are not theologians or philosophers, they’re subjective beings with a set of attitudes they wouldn’t necessarily call a moral system.

A deranged person who takes pleasure in hurting others, even if he calls himself "evil" would still be aiming for right, because "right" in this context is just a way to label what individuals consider a measure of practical success. However, the absolutist point we’re making is that hurting others is in fact not right in itself: sadistic principles miss the mark as much as their epistemic principles fail flat-earthers in their quest for truth.

However, the goal of moral platonism is not to evaluate all actions — far from it! To understand, we need a brief excursion into act individuation: we’ve been talking of actions in a freewheeling way, but it’s far from obvious how granular we can be. Alvin Goldman argues for a fine-grained account of coincident action. The act of pulling a trigger and the act of killing are different in that account. We could argue that context and generality are also arbitrary when discussing acts: the act of punching someone, the act of punching an attacker, the act of punching a thirteen-year-old attacker may be coincident but might call for different moral evaluations. In short, I don’t believe that moral realism can help to adjudicate concrete moral dilemmas.

To reprise a famous one: Sartre evokes the case of a student, brother of a slained résistant, who wants to join the Free French forces and fight the Germans, but also knows he ought to stay near his mother, being her last comfort in tragic times. Moral properties apply to acts exactly as they may be described, in isolation. The act of fighting a violent enemy who murders innocents indiscriminately might be an absolutely good thing, and comforting one’s mother might be another. Our modest and understated moral Platonism doesn’t provide a solution to the dilemma, and there probably isn’t one. But it acknowledges that in some situations, moral teleology is real — the famed "moral compass". Someone who’s adopted as part of their "code" the tenet that resisting an evil force and comforting one’s parent are both good, then uses rational means to weigh them, and come up with a justification to take one action or another, is making a decision we can call righteous. But someone who’s adopted as a code that none of those things matter and acts accordingly is misguided, regardless of individuality or circumstances.

One last point would be to evoke the distinction between merely good acts and obligatory ones. That is a similar notion to what a priori is in epistemology: an action that is self-evidently inevitable to a moral agent. Such an action would need to be extremely generic, because any real-life act, as "obviously good" as most people would consider it, could still be left unevaluated in storylines (moral scenarios) without contradiction. Obligatory actions should only reflect a sort of "moral analyticity". Those could embody meta-normative ideas such as "to acquire knowledge is obligatory". Coming to know something is then not only good, which is consistent with a normative view of epistemic matters, but good in every "storyline", every moral scenario adopted by agents.

That may seem to run counter to common sense: actual agents could deem it preferrable in many situations to not know some specific thing, or to never have known it. That is why action individuation is key. To know something, in isolation, is better than to have false beliefs, or lucky true beliefs, or no belief at all. But that is only the case in isolation. To know what Jane wrote in her diary is likely bad. The action of acquiring knowledge of Jane’s diary (bad) is coincident with the action of acquiring knowledge in general (good). Reasons to not do the former would likely win out in this simple case; it is left to agents to weigh the scales.

Some moral theory could also welcome more concrete obligatory actions. Hedonism may have it that actions leading to pleasure are obligatory — that is, that they are analytically good in every storyline, and that conscious disagreement by agents is just down to semantic obfuscation (so when someone consciously chooses "pain", it is just a label for what is actually pleasure to them, since they picked it, out of all things). Again, this needs to be understood in isolation, all else being equal. Hedonism doesn’t entail that the pleasure of agent supersedes the pain of others.

All these precautions apply in the same way to meta-aesthetics. Realism shouldn’t be interpreted as establishing an overarching classicist codification. Some "things" are absolutely beautiful, but again that is meant in isolation, and after going through the grinder of metaphysical individuation. Is "Guernica" beautiful in itself as an ordinary object? Is it beautiful given the historical context that inspired it? Is it beautiful given its place in the evolution of visual arts? The two latter cases would entail that the "beauty-bearing" things ought to be complex abstracta that encompass not only ordinary objects or types but their relations with a much broader sets of events. The attribution of objective aesthetic properties is not just about dividing all things into a "pretty" and an "ugly" columns.

I do strongly believe in genre eclectism. To a scholar of hip hop music, deeply rooted in the conventions of that genre and sensitive to its specific pleasure, a Mozart sonata might not seem worthy of appreciation. The reverse scenario is also easy to imagine. Aesthetic agents have tastes, sometimes passive, sometimes carefully constructed based on explicit critical tenets. If, as I believe, all genres of music can give rise to beautiful things (melodies, records,...), then a more open and eclectic taste system can be objectively better since it leads to more success in the search of beauty, just like good epistemic principles correctly aim for truth. But an excessively liberal taste can also overshoot and become unsuccessful by being too accepting.

Many questions remain. What type of things exactly are beauty-bearing? Can relative degrees of appreciation also be objective (e.g. "Penny Lane" being better than Schubert’s "Erlkönig")? Should there be negative degrees of appreciation (anything that’s not true is false, but everything that’s not beautiful is not necessarily ugly)? These open fields call for a fuller aesthetic theory that cannot be developed in these pages beyond this brief sketch.

Lastly, sublime things, in the same vein as obligatory actions, represent a sort of aesthetic analyticity, that can distinguish some meta-normative aspects, or very general principles. For the sake of argument, "symmetry is beautiful" might be one, which doesn’t at all entail that symmetrical things are all beautiful, or that they cannot be ugly. But like pleasure to the hedonist, it could be a principal component that shapes the distribution of a complex, multivariate function.

Can there be other irreducible values beyond the true, right or beautiful? This too warrants a much deeper study. This classical triad has stood the test of time, and I tend to believe there is a good case to be made for other values to be derivatives thereof; I will hold to that view in the present work.

This leaves us to discuss the place that value-statements occupy in our ontology. It’s important to distinguish value-statements from normative facts. The distinction is the same as that between truths and epistemic facts. The former are objective features of the actual world (a truth is equivalent to the mere existence of a fact), while the latter are about what cognizers know (and thus are grounded in justification, rationality, etc.).

So, value-statements about what’s right or beautiful are conceptually equivalent to truths. What is true depends on which facts exist, which in turn is guided by a hypothetical "ultimate" theory of the natural (physico-mental) world \(\mathfrak{ToPM}\). Out of all the possible well-formed facts allowed by the ontological formalism, a sub-set exists, but that space is not an amorphous blob: it is shaped by the aforementioned theory. Similarly, out of the vast expanse of possible actions and things (which, via individuation and context, is infinitely more vast than a simple set of discrete events or ordinary objects), a thin constellation is right, or beautiful.

One major difference however, is that value-statements cannot be considered a mere copula like truths. If they were, the consequences would be to establish a whole parallel, axiological semantics with its whole Tarskian T-schema, and so on. Perhaps that warrants further exploration, but that isn’t a hypothesis I would lightly deem viable. Instead, values will simply be distinguished properties. Just like the actual world is not chaotic because it is nomically possible, value-statements need to follow a (hitherto-unknown) theory of value \(\mathfrak{ToV}\) that constrains the shape that this outer garment takes, once draped over the natural world. In metaphysically possible worlds, "anything goes", but nomically possible worlds need to fit the laws of physics, of mentality, and of value (in that order, due to the corresponding inter-level dependence: mental intentionality supervenes on the physical-phenomenal interaction, and value in turn supervenes on the physico-mental facts). The model that truly governs \(\aleph\) then ought to be a theory of physics, mind and value \(\mathfrak{ToPMV}\).