Value Theory/Axiology
01 Types of “Good” or “Value”
- Pleasure is good.
- It is good that you came.
- It is good for him to talk to her.
- That is a good knife.
Sentences like 1, in which “good” is predicated of a mass term, constitute a central part of traditional axiology, in which philosophers have wanted to know what things (of which there can be more or less) are good. I’ll stipulatively call them value claims, and use the word “stuff” for the kind of thing of which they predicate value (like pleasure, knowledge, and money). Sentences like 2 make claims about what I’ll (again stipulatively) call goodness simpliciter; this is the kind of goodness appealed to by traditional utilitarianism. Sentences like 3 are good for sentences, and when the subject following “for” is a person, we usually take them to be claims about welfare or well-being. And sentences like 4 are what, following Geach [1956], I’ll call attributive uses of “good”, because “good” functions as a predicate modifier, rather than as a predicate in its own right.
— SEP
Consequentialism says you ought to do whatever action is such that it would be best if you did it. But doesn’t define good.
01.01 Good Simpliciter
- Point of view theory — is good from a general/universe point of view
- Agglomerative theory — kind of utilitarian good for all the people summed
There is more stuff here but honestly it feels like a language game that doesn’t change actions that I’m not here for.
People try to relate all four cases called the “end-relational” theory. Good for or attributive good are different ways of making those purposes more/less explicit. This has been shown to be problematic, not going into it.
Skipping 1.1.4 and most of 1.2. Want to get to traditional questions.
02 Intrinsic vs. Instrumental Value
Defining intrinsic and instrumental value
Of course, the central question philosophers have been interested in, is that of what is of intrinsic value, which is taken to contrast with instrumental value. Paradigmatically, money is supposed to be good, but not intrinsically good: it is supposed to be good because it leads to other good things: HD TV’s and houses in desirable school districts and vanilla lattes, for example. These things, in turn, may only be good for what they lead to: exciting NFL Sundays and adequate educations and caffeine highs, for example. And those things, in turn, may be good only for what they lead to, but eventually, it is argued, something must be good, and not just for what it leads to. Such things are said to be intrinsically good.
— SEP
Relying on saying something is intrinsic is disputed. Many philosophers believe something can be non-instrumentally good in virtue of its relation to something else. (The relationship may have intrinsic value.) Non-instrumental value can be called “telic” or “final” instead of “intrinsic” but from now on we will speak about intrinsic.
Note on constitutive values but I didn’t understand.
Only talking about value claims (sentence 1) going forward.
03 Monism vs. Pluralism
Monists — One fundamental intrinsic value
Pluralists — More than one fundamental intrinsic value
Philosophers on Monism/Pluralism
For example, as important as he held the value of knowledge to be, Mill was committed to holding that its value is instrumental, not intrinsic. G.E. Moore disagreed, holding that knowledge is indeed a value, but an intrinsic one, and this expanded Moore’s list of basic values. Mill’s theory famously has a pluralistic element as well, in contrast with Bentham’s, but whether Mill properly counts as a pluralist about value depends on whether his view was that there is only one value — happiness — but two different kinds of pleasure which contribute to it, one more effectively than the other, or whether his view was that each kind of pleasure is a distinctive value.
— SEP
04 Incomparability
04.01 Personal Note on Incomparable States
To not have a single value means that these two things are not comparable. (One state is only better than another state if ALL values are greater in that state). I guess there is nothing that says that comparability has to exist, but intuitively it doesn’t make sense.
If you intrinsically value say beauty and pleasure, then it must be the case that a world is only good if it has both more beauty and more pleasure (or more for one and unchanged for the other) or worse if it has less beauty and less pleasure. Take our world for example, world A. Now take a world where everyone is suffering as slaves to increase the world’s beauty, world B. Planting trees everywhere, building wonderful waterfalls, making gorgeous art. You would have to say this world is NOT COMPARABLE with world A. (Maybe you could argue that these people would be better off making everything more beautiful if they were not slaves I suppose.) (There is some linear algebra claim for this but I can’t recall.)
There were comments of pluralism that I didn’t understand here about whether pluralism can exist.
I think you could probably make a strong claim that there is some kind of monistic value, but you can’t really know it and it isn’t communicable and just say it is a very nonlinear function of all other values.
I wonder if pluralist values, LITERALLY not being able to compare different situations, might be a way to more safely engineer AGI.
04.02 Arguments and Criticisms
Some pluralists say that monists are fetishizing adherence to a single number because it sounds good. (Ya know this could be true. There might be multiple values in which different things are just not comparable. You could say value those you know and separately everyone else. You could say that if you had to choose between killing everyone you know or killing the rest of the world, these are two incomparable situations and you might as well flip a coin to decide.) But also this feels like giving up! Just saying haha yeah these aren’t comparable lol without critically thinking about it. (Okay SEP straight up agrees with this, would quote but I probably get the idea.)
Fun fact: The symbol (≷) can be used to denote incomparability (greater-than less-than)
The “Greater-Than or Less-Than (≷)” Symbol in Mathematics
There is weak and strong incomparability. Didn’t understand this here. Read this perhaps:
Incomparability and Incommensurability
05 Conclusion
My idea is that monism probably doesn’t exist but pluralism is typically a lazy way to patch up your value system.
But I’m also a moral antirealist — I don’t think there is some beautiful set of values (or a single value) out there that the universe cares about — and even if there is, we couldn’t know anything about it. And I think that animal brains are incredibly complicated and it seems it could go either way on whether animals care about more than one thing intrinsically or not. There may legitimately be situations in which different universes are entirely incomparable, not just because you are uncertain about which one is better or because the choice is so hard you’d rather not chose or want to choose both, but because they are LITERALLY incomparable in the human brain that we freeze up. While our value system may be pluralistic, reality is monistic. We only have one action we can take. Only one timeline. Therefore, even under value pluralism, we have to take ONE decision. Even if this situation is incomparable, you have to decide. This is not to say “there is a correct answer you just don’t know it” but rather — flip a coin, it’s impossible to decide.