This would suggest that the concept of value may be synonymous with 'good', yet cannot provide an analysis of its meaning. Two remarks are in order.

To determine whether value can provide an analysis of 'good', Moore would need to examine the concept of value in its own right. But once again, he never undertakes this examination. Moore thus deprives 'value', without any justification, of the capacity to provide an analysis of 'good'.

We should also bear in mind that Moore defined good as a kind of value. Now, to analyse things, thought has long proceeded by classifying them according to genus and species. The meaning of a thing was held to be understood when one could identify the species to which it belonged, then the class, and finally the genus, and so on. To analyse a concept, in other words, was to identify the class within which it was embedded. We knew what man was by defining him as a 'mammal, warm-blooded biped, and so on'.
Moore follows this traditional approach by identifying the genus to which 'the good' belongs: value. Yet he refuses to accept—despite the evidence—that this identification yields an analysis of the meaning of 'good'; as though one were to acknowledge that man is a warm-blooded mammal, while insisting that these terms are mere synonyms that tell us nothing about what man truly is.

5) Conclusion

What is fascinating about the evolution of Moore's thinking is that it points in the very direction we wish to take. At the outset, value does not even have the dignity of a synonym; it is no more than a signifier, a shadow that appears only to vanish. It is then explicitly conceptualised by Moore who, without realising it—since he maintains the irreconcilable assertion that nothing can replace the good except synonyms—grants it the highest importance by defining the good as a kind of value.

Value turns out to be this elusive concept that encompasses the good and furnishes it with its meaning, its conditions of intelligibility.

Value moves from being an obscure element to becoming the keystone of ethics, and the author who unwittingly promotes it never notices.
Everything points in this direction: any genuine enquiry into the foundations of ethics must engage with the concept of value, and examine what lies concealed within a concept that has not yet fully unfolded in its own domain.

The oblivion of value is not the only consequence of the confusion of morality and axiology.
We may assume that the failure to grasp the concept of value has made it impossible to establish a basis for morality. To found morality is probably not to prove that we ought to be moral, or that being moral makes us happy. It is precisely to show that morality has value—that being moral has more value than being immoral or amoral. Consequently, only axiology, insofar as its task is to determine what has value and what does not, may be in a position to uncover the foundations of morality. This is the new hypothesis we are about to explore.