3/ The Epoché of Values

1/ Description and Legitimisation of the Suspension of Value Judgements

It may now be time to describe the state of mind a researcher must adopt in order to grasp fully the significance and implications of axiology as a discipline.

First, I suggested that since values were without foundation prior to the establishment of this discipline, it is currently impossible to confirm or deny the value of what we love or hate. Second, we observed that the axiological field is composed of an overwhelming diversity of value judgements. Finally, I introduced the idea that many of these judgements represent axiological positions that are astonishing, scandalous, absurd, or immoral—positions that cannot simply be dismissed.
What state of mind should this produce?

If there is no definitive proof in the realm of values and nothing can be said to possess intrinsic value, it seems we must suspend all value judgements—though not all judgements altogether.
Once we accept our profound ignorance regarding what does or does not hold value, we must cease condemning what we find despicable (such as violence) and refrain from praising what we find admirable. This state of axiological neutrality is precisely the stance we have maintained since the outset of our inquiry.

Such a disposition is rare; it resembles becoming a kind of 'sponge'—existing without attachment, without loving or despising anything. Although it may seem an absurd state of mind, we hold it to be essential to intellectual honesty, once we genuinely understand and accept that no value has yet been established.

This disposition stands in stark contrast to the peculiar contemporary attitude MacIntyre describes, which might be called 'perpetual indignation'. It consists, essentially, in masking our inability to establish values by protesting, loudly and persistently, against any value judgement we find shocking, absurd, or scandalous.

MacIntyre observes that this phenomenon bears particularly on moral value judgements: In the United Nations declaration on human rights of 1949 what has since become the normal UN practice of not giving good reasons for any assertions whatsoever is followed with great rigor ¹. Conversely, any perceived violation of rights is met with the utmost fervour, as though emotional intensity could substitute for reason or serve as justification in itself. Since we are unable to refute unwelcome value judgements by rational means—by argument—we attempt to dismiss them by emotional ones: through tone, through indignation—an ineffective method if ever there was one. Or rather, as MacIntyre puts it: This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective ².

Other emotional strategies are also deployed—laughter and sarcasm, for instance, as when the nihilist is held up to ridicule. One sees this in media interventions by advocacy groups, perpetually indignant and intent on moving their audiences, seeking to lend weight to their cause through every rhetorical instrument of emotion at their disposal.

Yet as Aristotle observed in the Rhetoric, rhetoric that lacks enthymemes—syllogisms or argumentative proofs—and relies solely on emotional appeal is an empty discipline. It cannot function without rational process: Proofs are the only things in it that come within the province of art; everything else [emotions raised by a discourse] is merely an accessory ³.

1. After Virtue, ch. 6, p. 70
2. Ibid., p. 71
3. Rhetoric, Book I, ch. 1