Are there ways in which it would be better if axiology were different? Here’s a suggestion that comes to mind:
- It would be better if cowardice, sloth, dishonesty, ignorance, suffering and all the other things that are actually intrinsic evils were instead great intrinsic goods.
For surely it would be better for there to be more goods!
On the other hand, one might have this optimistic thought:
- The actually true axiology is better than any actually false axiology.
(Theists are particularly likely to think this, since they will likely think that the true axiology is grounded in the nature of a perfect being.)
We have an evident tension between (1) and (2).
What’s going on?
One move is to say that it makes no sense to discuss the value of impossible scenarios. I am inclined to think that this isn’t quite correct. One might think it would be really good if the first eight thousand binary digits of π encoded the true moral code in English using ASCII coding, even though this is impossible (I assume). Likewise, it is impossible for a human to know all of mathematics, but it would be good to do so.
The solution I would go for is that axiology needs to be kept fixed in value comparisons. Imagine that I am living a blessed life of constant painless joy, and dissatisfied with that I find myself wishing for the scenario where joyless pain is even better than painless joy and I live a life of joyless pain. If one need not keep axiology fixed in value comparisons, that wish makes perfect sense, but I think it doesn’t—unlike the wish about π or the knowledge of mathematics.
One thing that I think is interesting is that, even though the question you are asking seems to make sense, we couldn’t replace ‘goodness’ with ‘size’. We couldn’t sensibly say (it would just be nonsense), “It would be bigger if the number 2 were bigger.”
ReplyDeleteMaybe the reason for this has to do with something like the convertibility of being and goodness, so that no part of reality winds up being outside the scope of axiologocal evaluation. So the correct axiology has to be able to evaluate itself. But if it were to find itself lacking, then there would be some sort of contradiction.