Axiology

What it asks

Some things are worth having, doing or being, and others are not. Axiology asks what that comes to, at a level above any particular kind of worth.

Ethics asks which acts are good. Aesthetics asks which works are beautiful. Both presuppose that there is such a thing as something mattering, and neither examines that presupposition. This branch does, which is why it sits with them as a core division rather than under either.

The recurring problems

Intrinsic and instrumental value. A vaccine is good for what it prevents. Is anything good in itself, and if so what? If nothing is, then every chain of justification runs on for ever without arriving anywhere.

Whether value is in the object or the response. Either things have worth and our valuing tracks it, or our valuing is what makes them worth anything. The first has trouble saying where the worth resides; the second has trouble explaining how anyone can value something wrongly.

Incommensurability. A career against a friendship, a life against a landscape. If they cannot be measured on one scale, then a great many decisions have no best answer, only defensible ones - and most theories of rational choice assume otherwise.

Whether the kinds unify. Moral worth, beauty, usefulness, health, holiness. Calling all of these value may be a genuine discovery or an artefact of one word doing several jobs.

How it developed

The questions are ancient. Plato's Form of the Good is an answer to them, and Aristotle's distinction between things chosen for themselves and things chosen for something else is still the standard framework.

The field became separate in the late nineteenth century, in German and Austrian philosophy. Lotze, Brentano and Meinong treated value as its own subject matter rather than a department of ethics, and Scheler and Hartmann built elaborate hierarchies of value kinds.

In English-language philosophy the name never fully took, and the questions were absorbed into metaethics and value theory instead. That is why the branch is real and active while the word is rarely used - much axiology is conducted by people who would not describe themselves as doing it.

The pragmatists took a different route, treating value as arising from the resolution of practical problems rather than as a standing property, and that line runs into current work in economics and decision theory.

The positions within it

Value realism holds that things have worth independently of anyone's attitude; subjectivism and expressivism deny it. Fitting-attitude theories define value as what it would be appropriate to value, which relocates the problem rather than solving it - deliberately.

Monism holds that all value reduces to one kind, most often wellbeing; pluralism denies it. All are covered in Schools.

Where it stands now

Most of the live work happens under other names - in metaethics, in wellbeing research, in decision theory and in economics, where the question of whether goods are commensurable is not academic.

Incommensurability is the most active problem, because it bears directly on how institutions weigh lives against costs. The other growth area is the value of things that are not experiences: species, languages, works, places, and whether any of them matter apart from mattering to someone.