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Mother Pelican
A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability

Vol. 15, No. 11, November 2019
Luis T. Gutiérrez, Editor
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Life-Value Onto-Axiology ~ A Contemporary Theory of Value

Giorgio Baruchello

November 2019


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Business as usual is killing us and mother earth—or the other way around, for we depend on her in order to live. Unlike corporate mouthpieces, scientists agree on a basic and terrifying point: due to our global economic order, the planet is on its way to catastrophe on a grand systemic level. The thought is scary and the scale of the challenge enormous. Certainly, laws have been passed, agreements signed, technologies improved. Still, to date, all these course corrections have been far too little.

The measure of their failure is not hard to grasp, for they have neither arrested nor overturned key-planetary life-harms: chemical pollution of the atmosphere; loss of arable topsoil by desertification; depletion of fresh-water sources, tropical and boreal forests, and fish stocks; rapid shrinkage of bio-diversity and bio-tout court; increase in the unequal distribution of incomes; pro-active manufacturing, advertising, sale and intake of addictive sugar- or fat-laden pathogenic foodstuff; proliferation of non-contagious pathologies; reduction of investment in life-enabling public-sector institutions.

Unless so-called “economic development” swings markedly towards the opposite pole and facilitates the regeneration of life-support systems in lieu of their degradation, standard business practice at large remains not sustainable and, essentially, irresponsible. Re-orienting today’s consumerist civilisation is a massive task, though, which requires nothing less than a paradigm shift. In short, we must think differently about the most basic, most abstract, most comprehensive concepts guiding our approach to reality. The brainchild of Canada’s leading contemporary philosopher, John McMurtry, LVOA (i.e “life-value onto-axiology”) offers the intellectual bearings for such a shift.

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John McMurtry
LVOA pivots around the reasoned belief that, pace much post-modern relativism and earlier positivist value-neutrality, it is possible for human reason to determine a universal and objective ground of value. There exists most certainly a plurality of conceptions regarding what may be claimed to be good and what to be bad, and disagreement can be as vocal as it can be varied. Nonetheless, some preferences are, au fond, truly better than the others, for in their absence no preference whatsoever could be expressed. Thus, as McMurtry (“What is Good? What is Bad?”, Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, Oxford: Unesco’s EOLSS Publ., 2009–2010, para. 1.16) argues, we can “follow reason where it leads”, namely “to recover step by step the missing life-ground of values and the ultimate meaning of how we are to live.”

McMurtry (2009–2010, para. 6.1) takes life to manifest itself in three fundamental ways: “action” (aka “biological movement” or “motility”), “felt being” (aka “experience” or “feeling”) and “thought”. The plausibility of this additional step is supported by human experience at many levels. Nurses and physicians, for example, encounter these three fundamental ways of life-manifestation in terms of physical, affective and cognitive health (or lack thereof). Religious persons encounter them, say, in the believer’s thankfulness for one’s own being alive, the reassuring or stirring sense of the presence of the divine within oneself (e.g. during meditation), and the intellectually stimulating intricacies of theological dispute. On their part, human rights activists, lawyers, courts and legislators encounter them as constitutional provisions about “rest, leisure and reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay”, “age limits below which the paid employment of child labor should be prohibited and punishable by law”, and “the diffusion of science and culture” (ICESCR, 1966, arts. 7(d), 10 & 15). The list could go on and on, like the examples of civil commons enumerated by McMurtry.

In essence, LVOA states that all that is intuitively acknowledged as excellence, fairness, happiness or health is—if it is genuinely good—a fruitful and comprehensive expression of life-value, in one or more of the three ways in which life is taken to manifest itself: action (e.g. physical vigour), felt being (e.g. marvel at nature’s elaborate beauty) and thought (e.g. wisdom and proportionality in the verdicts of a just court of law). Whilst logically distinguishable from one another, no ontological tri- or dualism is implicit in McMurtry’s (2009–2010, para. 6.3) tri-partition of life-manifestation:

Although we can distinguish the cognitive and feeling capacities of any person, this does not mean dividing them into separate worlds as has occurred in the traditional divisions between mind and body, reason and the emotions. Life-value onto-axiology begins from their unity as the nature of the human organism.

Thus, the fundamental axioms of LVOA are:

X is value if and only if, and to the extent that, x consists in or enables a more coherently inclusive range of thought/feeling/action than without it

X is disvalue if and only if, and to the extent that, x reduces/disables any range of thought/experience/action.

(McMurtry, EOLSS, 2009–2010, para. 6.1)

These fundamental axioms are applicable to all forms of agency that our species is capable of. LVOA accomplishes a classic philosophical aim, for it determines in principle what is good and what is bad, cutting across entrenched dualisms that, far too often, unduly polarise and ergo limit intellectual pursuits in many disciplines, e.g. mind versus body, nurture versus nature, laissez-faire versus central planning, mutuality versus competitiveness, belief versus scepticism, monetary value versus ecological value, present well-being maximisation versus future generations’, etc.

LVOA allows us to distinguish between good and bad wealth, good and bad growth, good and bad development, good and bad democracy, good and bad competition, etc. All the terms that are used a-critically as either positive (e.g. “freedom”, “justice”, “free markets”) or negative (e.g. “paternalism”, “inequality”, “socialism”) must be reconsidered. Their rhetorical chaff must be separated from the life-pertaining grain—the sort of intellectual exercise that philosophy alone has specialised in since the time of Socrates, the alleged founder of the discipline, which means literally the “love of wisdom”. If we cannot learn to think differently, more wisely, then we will be unlikely to escape from the cage in which we have trapped our civilisation, its institutions, and the present and future populations of our planet.

Alternative conceptual frameworks and comprehensive theories exist, in fact, which may lead to a wiser understanding of economic phenomena in light of environmental and social needs. One of them, the Social Doctrine of the Church, will be the subject of a future contribution of mine.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Genoa, Italy, Giorgio Baruchello is an Icelandic citizen and works as Professor of Philosophy at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Akureyri, Iceland. He read philosophy in Genoa and Reykjavík, Iceland, and holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Guelph, Canada. His publications encompass several different areas, especially social philosophy, theory of value, and intellectual history. Northwest Passage Books has recently published five volumes of collected essays by him.


"There are no dangerous thoughts;
thinking itself is dangerous."


Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

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