From http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/
Axiology is the study of what’s good. If you want to get all reductive, think of it as comparing the values of world-states. A world-state where everybody is happy seems better than a world-state where everybody is sad. A world-state with lots of beautiful art is better than a world-state containing only featureless concrete cubes. Maybe some people think a world-state full of people living in harmony with nature is better than a world-state full of gleaming domed cities, and other people believe the opposite; when they debate the point, they’re debating axiology.
Morality is the study of what the right thing to do is. If someone says “don’t murder”, they’re making a moral commandment. If someone says “Pirating music is wrong”, they’re making a moral claim. Maybe some people believe you should pull the lever on the trolley problem, and other people believe you shouldn’t; when they debate the point, they’re debating morality.
(this definition elides a complicated distinction between individual conscience and social pressure; fixing that would be really hard and I’m going to keep eliding it)
Law is – oh, come on, you know this one. If someone says “Don’t go above the speed limit, there’s a cop car behind that corner”, that’s law. If someone says “my state doesn’t allow recreational marijuana, but it will next year”, that’s law too. Maybe some people believe that zoning restrictions should ban skyscrapers in historic areas, and other people believe they shouldn’t; when they debate the point, they’re debating law.
I’ve been to write a lot more about this distinction and all its implications (like, write an entire book.) But to generalize it further – from an axiological perspective, the OP is correct that all social order no matter how unspoken is order and we should not deny that.
But from a morality/community perspective, we prefer something more concrete in defining social order. We still understand there are unspoken rules and ambiguities, but we acknowledge some unofficial rules like “the family patriarch” or “the gossipy sewing circle.”
And on the legal level, we don’t want to acknowledge any order than what is explicitly written down and we can pretend is objectively verifiable.
Where most Marxists go astray is that they are so committed to axiological values (like “no one should go hungry, even if that’s not one of your written down civil rights”) that they lose sight of how much normal people really really like having a distinction between that and the moral and social orders. It may be “good” to wish everyone in the world is well taken care of and loved, but almost no one wants the responsibility for doing that for the whole world themselves, and when you make people have that responsibility they become extremely unhappy and anxious.
kenny-evittConsequentialism is always the axiology answer. It does not care about the community or law, except as tools to achieve an optimal result, but always judged by your axiology. This is one of the many ways the True answer of a question will be the axiological one, and axiology can back itself up with facts and arguments the best.
Are you not a consequentialist with respect to your ideal axiology?
That being said, you would have to be a bull-headed social engineer or philosopher to not realize that people are not pure axiology. They do not care just what the “best” action is, but what is allowed by the community and what is legal under the law.
(Imagine a law saying you are forced to marry… the person who will make you the happiest. Yes in some sense that encourages “more happiness”, but people would rebel over that coercion over the private sphere in a split second. I would rebel.)
Understanding how these three types of morality intersect are not really valuable as an ethical matter – since yeah, consequentialist axiology still wins the ethics – but they are key for building an accurate model of how people work and what will make them happy.
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