Axiology and Material Reality

I want to thank Danny Shahar for continuing to provide detailed responses to my questions. In his latest post in our dialogue, he corrects a couple of my misconceptions, responds to a number of my points, and expands the discussion in a number of very interesting directions. I hope that he is enjoying this as much as I am, because I feel like he is increasing my understanding of the challenges that ideas face in scholarly or academic review.

I want to respond to a particular point in this post and pick up the other points in future posts. I think this might help focus my mind and will, perhaps, result in more readable posts.

I proposed a thought experiment in response to one posed by Danny. In short, there are 3 scenarios. In the first: You are sitting in a coffee shop and a stranger walks in. You kill the stranger. With no further information, it would be reasonable to conclude that you had acted "wrongly." Second scenario: Same coffee shop; the stranger walks in with a gun pointed at you and every indication is that he plans to kill you. You kill the stranger (nice quick-draw, by the way). It would be reasonable to conclude that you had not acted "wrongly." Third scenario: identical to the second in every way except that the stranger has a metal shield in his pocket with the symbols F.B.I. stamped on it.

Materially, there is no difference between the second and third scenarios. My concern with philosophical ethics (generalization ahead) is that it goes outside of the realm of the material--that which most if not all of us have access to--into the realm of abstract ideas to derive "values." Once there, almost any action can be justified by imbuing a concept (race, country, religion, tribe) with a greater "moral weight" than material entities (individual humans).

Danny informs me that this area of study is axiology:

What I do want to point out is that you've now moved into the realm of axiology (that is, the study of value, or more specifically for our purposes, the study of what kinds of things have moral weight and why). Once we enter into this area of thinking, consensus among philosophers breaks down extremely quickly, and so I'm not particularly eager to critique Stefan [Molyneux]'s views through an axiological alternative of my own (of course, we can discuss my own views on the grounding principles of ethics later if you want). But I will note that Stefan doesn't actually provide a rigorous axiology in his book (this was my final objection in the other post), except to say that we should come to an understanding of ethical principles through the scientific method.

Firstly, I want to note that Danny goes on to critique the scientific method. I hope to respond to the critique in a future post. For now, let's assume that the scientific method cannot directly provide a "rigorous" axiology. Secondly, I would like to express interest in a fully formed axiological alternative for my own edification as to what that would look like.

Conceding that I do not know the full requirements of a rigorous axiology, I am curious if material reality could fulfill those requirement. If not (if for example, a concept like "property" is necessary--and it seems reasonable that it would be), can we not ground the concepts on materially accessible foundations?

To revisit a point that I made in my initial post, the philosophy of ethics seems (going out on a bit of a limb), historically, to delineate one set of permissible actions for the powerless and a different set for the powerful. While this doesn't invalidate a particular ethical framework, it should at least invite investigation as to what axiology or set of values permits such inconsistencies.

Many ethical systems seem to require arbitrarily defined concepts (the will of god, the public good, the national interest) to "trump" values that are based on physical reality (that all humans seem to be roughly the same biological entity or that voluntary interactions serve the preferences of all involved parties).

These systems have typically been generated by religious scholars, court philosophers and state academicians and they typically justify the actions of the "ruling class" or, in material terms, those that are most heavily armed or direct those who are.

For these reasons, I continue to wonder if divorcing axiology (and, therefore ethics) from grounding in material reality isn't a failure of philosophy that should be examined and redressed.

Thanks again to Danny for his continued help in my understanding of these topics.