My axiology

last edited 2024-11-05

Previously:

To recap, the idea of a formal moral system is to consciously understand the rules by which conscience operates. So, here I'm going to lay out what I think the rules are.

There are 3 things that are fundamentally valuable:

Happiness

Knowledge

Agency - the ability to take meaningful actions. I call it "agency" instead of "freedom" because for many people, particularly libertarians, the definition of *freedom* is closer to *peace* (see below) than agency.

Good behavior is what increases these things for people. Bad behavior is what decreases them.

Note these are all independent values; although knowledge and agency usually make a person happier, they are valuable even when they don't. For example, being in a relationship that your partner thinks is monogamous while secretly being in another relationship is wrong, even if it would be possible to live out your entire life without your partner finding out, and they would be happier that way.

As that example suggests, the moral significance of a given piece of knowledge is its emotional significance. The same for agency.

There is a rule about how these values are to be pursued:

Peace - good behavior aims not to affect others without their consent, provided they afford others the same option. Again, affecting someone without their consent usually makes them unhappy, but this is a thing even when it doesn't.

Argument for peace being a thing

Longer exploration

There are some fairly obvious rules about how merit and guilt work, but I'll detail them anyway. A "good person" is one who takes good actions even when it's hard (that is, when doing so will cause them to suffer). If you always do the morally best thing, but it's always what's most comfortable for you anyway, then you're not really a good person, you've just never been tested. The amount of goodness of an action (for example, the amount of happiness it gives to someone else) is irrelevant to how good of a person you are for doing it; the only relevant thing is how hard it is.

You might object that means it's morally better to do a worse but still good action if it's harder. That loophole is plugged by the axiom of necessary motivation: that's not possible and if you think it is, it's because you have an emotional incentive to take the harder action, such that it isn't actually harder.

Notes on choice and intention

For bad actions, their "badness" likewise depends on the amount of temptation as well as the amount of harm. If you are going to experience torture if you don't do a small harm to someone else, you don't deserve as much guilt for doing it.

Finally, there are 3 factors that make someone deserve help more than someone else:

Merit - good people are more important than bad people.

Equality - the unfortunate are more important than the fortunate.

Fairness - benefactors are more important than freeloaders. (It's more ignoble to not help someone who's helped you in the past than to not help someone you've helped in the past.)

That concludes my axiology. I believe every other question about morality or politics is about how to apply these principles and weigh them against each other.