Book I/ The confusion between ethics and axiology

I/ A necessary distinction

Axiology, that is, the discipline (-logia) whose object is the study of values (axia), must be carefully distinguished from ethics.
It is often said that the problem of values is an ethical problem, to be solved by ethics or moral philosophy, a discipline which determines what our duties are, or how to achieve wisdom or happiness.
In fact, the study of values is probably not the purpose of ethics, because asking whether something has a real value has nothing to do with wondering whether we have duties, and what they are, or how to become wise or happy.

We certainly think that values concern morality because we most often talk about moral values. However, there are not only moral values. For example, when a critic denounces a film as worthless, is he or she saying that the film does not make us morally better? Certainly not. When the aesthete praises the value of the work done by a perfume designer, is he saying that the perfume in question is moral? In the same way, we can exclaim in front of this pastry, which means giving it great value, without claiming that we are doing our duty by tasting it.

Therefore, moral values are only a part of all possible values. The best proof that 'value' and 'morality' are not synonyms is that we can ask whether morality has any real value, as the immoralist, or even the authentic moralist, does. If these two terms were synonymous, the question would not arise: to say ‘Morality has value’ would be the same as saying ‘A car is a car’. However, the fact that the question ‘Does morality have a value?’ remains an open question, shows that value is something other than morality, and that the attribution of one to the other is a problem: the problem of values, which is therefore not a moral problem, but an axiological problem.
In other words, there is another discipline, distinct from ethics because it has a truly distinct object: axiology.

Axiology is concerned with the value of everything=X, and the value of morality is only one problem among others for this discipline, a particular example. It also has to determine the value of music, of such and such music, of art, of truth, of wisdom, of madness, of matter, of spirit, of space, of time, of being, of nothingness, and so on.

In fact, prior to this search, we probably first have to find out whether the concept of value has a meaning, and what that meaning might be.
If we succeed, this will enable us to pose the problem of values in its authentic formulation, i.e. to understand the very problem it is trying to pose. Then, perhaps, we will be able to solve it.

It could be that the problem of values has been badly posed, that is, that it has never been posed at all. As Aristotle remarked, It is necessary, with a view to the science which we are investigating, that we first describe the questions which should be discussed because It is not possible to untie a knot of which one does not know. Indeed, in such a case, we do not even know what we are looking for, and we are like people who do not know where they are going; besides, one does not even know whether the thing required has been found or not ¹.

However, the fact that axiology and morality have been confused in this way has meant that the problem of values has been posed in moral terms, i.e. that moral concepts have been used to formulate the problem of values (instead of using axiological concepts).
What are these concepts? That is what we are going to look at now.

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1. Metaphysics, B, 1