Axiology The Science Of Values Ethics The Science Of Oughtness

This book expounds the basic principles of Axiology as a major field of philosophical inquiry. Those principles can be discovered and demonstrated by scientific method. In treating scientific inquiry the book throws light on what values are and how they are known. It explores questions of Good and Bad, Ends and Means, and Appearance and Reality as applied to values. Axiology, argues the author, provides the basis for ethics as the science of oughtness: the power that a greater good has over a lesser good in compelling our choices. The book concludes with a survey of efforts to establish Axiology as a science.

This book makes a forceful case for the scientific aspirations of ethics and for the necessity of ethics to our humanity. It is written as a challenge to those who are reluctant to recognize that science can deal decisively with questions in ethical theory. It throws new light on group responsibilities, apparent oughtness, and the responsibility we have for expanding our awareness of responsibilities.

This book expounds the basic principles of Axiology as a major field of philosophical inquiry. Those principles can be discovered and demonstrated by scientific method. In treating scientific inquiry the book throws light on what values are and how they are known. It explores questions of Good and Bad, Ends and Means, and Appearance and Reality as applied to values. Axiology, argues the author, provides the basis for ethics as the science of oughtness : the power that a greater good has over a lesser good in compelling our choices. The book concludes with a survey of efforts to establish Axiology as a science.

Philosophy of science used to be identified with the logical and methodological analysis of scientific theories, and any allusion to values was considered as a deplorable intromission in a philosophical investigation that should remain strictly epistemological. As a reaction against this view, an opposite «sociological» approach downplayed the usual virtues of scientific knowledge (such as logical rigor and empirical adequacy) as artificial imageries that cover the actual nature of science, that is a social product submitted to all the kinds of social conditionings and compromises. A more balanced view is badly needed today, when technoscience is permeating all aspects of our civilization and wise persons understand that we cannot survive without using science and technology but at the same time we need to steer their development in view of the real benefit of humankind. We must investigate how science, technology and values are legitimately interconnected and, in particular, how the discourses of ethics, politics and religion can enter a fruitful dialogue with science. The essays presented in this volume offer a valuable contribution to this interdisciplinary study.

This study of axiology explores the axiocentricity of being human. Human beings dwell in the realm of value. Values are not simply what persons have; values in large part are what persons are. The mystique of values is analyzed here in terms of their cultural, phenomenological, and ontological status. The relationship between science and values is debated. Values should not be submitted to reductionism. Postmodernism raises new problems for the future of a philosophy of values. Yet, we may direct our hopes toward happiness, universalism, and humanism as inseparable from value-life.

Originally published in 1987 and re-issued in 2020 with a new Preface, this book presents and elaborates interrelated solutions to a number of problems in moral philosophy, from the location of intrinsic value and the nature of a worthwhile life, via the limits of obligation and the nature of justice, to the status of moral utterances. After developing a biocentric account of moral standing, the author locates worthwhile life in the development of the generic capacities of a creature, whether human or nonhuman, and presents an account of relative intrinsic value which later generates a theory of interspecific justice. This value-theory also informs a consequentialist understanding of obligation, of moral rightness and of supererogation. The understanding thus supplied is shown to cope with the problems of integrity, of justice and of the ‘Repugnant Conclusion’ in population ethics. A cognitivist account of ethical conclusions such as those so far reached is then defended against non-cognitivist and relativist objections and a far-reaching naturalist theory is defended, integrating earlier conclusions with an account of the logic of the fundamental ethical concepts. This wide-ranging volume which maps the whole area of morality is thoroughly argued with reference both to contemporary philosophical developments and to classical theories.