The Value Sequence
From Agency to Ethics
Value is the most misunderstood concept in philosophy. Traditions either try to anchor it in metaphysics (”objective value”) or dissolve it into relativism (”anything goes”). Both positions fail for the same structural reason: they attempt to locate value outside the agent. Axio rejects that mistake.
In the Axio framework, value is neither cosmic law nor subjective whim. It is the architecture of preference an agent constructs in order to navigate the world, constrained by coherence, opportunity cost, and the physics of agency. Value emerges where an agent binds itself to a hierarchy of preferred futures—and must pay real costs to sustain that hierarchy.
The Value Sequence develops this architecture systematically: dismantling the illusions of objective value, formalizing preference hierarchies, reframing ethics as coordination, defining harm and consent with mathematical clarity, and culminating in Phosphorism—the Axionic value framework grounded in life, intelligence, complexity, flourishing, and authenticity.
What follows is the complete sequence.
Part 0 — Orientation
Assessing preference structures under selection pressure
This post serves as the executive summary of the Value Sequence.
It reframes Axio’s treatment of value not as morality but as viability: the behavior of preference architectures under recursive, thermodynamic, and informational constraints. It introduces Conditionalism, models value as a control-theoretic structure, explains collapse mechanisms as predictive fragility, and presents Phosphorism as a long-run attractor rather than a moral doctrine.
This is the conceptual gateway to the entire Value Sequence.
Part I — Breaking Objective Value
1. The Myth of Objective Value
Why value without agents is a category error, and why attempts to ground “good” in the universe itself inevitably smuggle in hidden preferences.
2. Subjectivism vs. Moral Relativism
Clarifies agent-bound subjectivism as distinct from mushy relativism: moral claims can be objective given a vantage, even when they’re not universal.
3. Conditionalism
Lays the epistemic foundation: every truth (including moral truth) is conditional on background assumptions. Coherence, not correspondence, becomes the core test.
4. Sacred Coherence
Argues that the only defensible “sacred” is logical coherence itself—the value at the top of the hierarchy that adjudicates all the others.
5. The Coherence Criterion
Formalizes coherence as the operational test for both truth and ethics, tying Phosphorism’s value structure directly to rational consistency.
Part II — Preference, Price, and Exchange
6. Everything Has a Price
Explains why all value is ultimately exchangeable: if you’re ever forced to choose between two goods, you’ve implicitly assigned a price.
7. What Is Money?
Unpacks money as the common denominator of preference, not an independent measure of “real” value.
8. The Price Illusion
Shows why market prices encode revealed preferences, not metaphysical worth—and why confusing the two leads to bad economics and bad ethics.
9. Opportunity Cost
Defines value in terms of foregone futures: every choice burns alternative worlds; the cost is the agency you give up.
10. Willing and Able
Clarifies that value depends on both desire and capability. “Would pay” is meaningless without “can pay.”
11. Sacrifice as Signal
Argues that the only honest measure of value is what you’re willing to give up—time, comfort, money, reputation—to preserve it.
12. The Free Rider Fallacy
Dismantles the idea that public-goods problems prove objective value; they show coordination difficulty, not cosmic “oughts.”
Part III — Ethics as Coherent Coordination
13. The Death of Objective Morality
Concludes that moral realism fails; ethics survives as an agent-bound, coherence-constrained structure on top of subjective value.
14. Virtues, Consequences, and Codes
Reframes virtue ethics, consequentialism, and rule-based systems as tools for managing preferences, not as metaphysical authorities.
15. Effective Altruism Without Moral Realism
Shows how EA can be rescued as a voluntary value framework once it drops the claim to universal obligation.
16. Navigating Moral Realism with Agent-Binding
Explores how “moral facts” can emerge as stable regularities in agent-bound preferences without invoking objective value.
17. Reasonable Disagreement
Uses Conditionalism to explain why persistent moral disagreement is expected—even among rational, well-informed agents.
18. What Counts as Harm
Gives a functional definition: harm as reduction of viable futures for an agent, anchoring ethics directly in agency.
19. What Counts as Consent
Pins down the boundary between persuasion and coercion as a precondition for any meaningful talk of moral responsibility.
20. What Counts as Coercion
Formalizes coercion as a credible threat of harm used to control behavior, tying political analysis tightly back to value and agency.
Part IV — Phosphorism and the Highest Good
21. Phosphorism: Illuminating Agency
Introduces Phosphorism: a value system that explicitly prioritizes life, intelligence, complexity, flourishing, and authenticity as chosen, not discovered.
22. Valorism
Sketches a value system centered on courageous, self-authored striving—and why it’s admirable but incomplete on its own.
23. Valorism vs. Vitalism
Contrasts evolution’s ruthless selection for survival with our preference for meaningful, self-chosen struggle.
24. The Highest Good
Argues that any coherent value architecture must eventually pick a top node—Axio’s candidate is coherence-preserving agency.
25. Secular Sacredness
Shows how “the sacred” can be understood as whatever sits at the top of your value hierarchy—with no mysticism required.
26. Demystifying Evil
Retains “evil” as a meaningful concept by defining it in terms of deliberate, agency-destroying harm, rather than metaphysical darkness.
27. What Counts as Evil
Refines the definition: intentional harm, framed within the agency-and-coherence lens, not mere suffering or misfortune.
Part V — Edge Cases and Applied Value Theory
28. The Ethics of the Unconceived
Analyzes embryo selection, reproductive choices, and “potential persons” using agent-bound value instead of mystical personhood.
29. Shrimp Ethics
Dismantles population-ethics-style aggregation that leads to absurd moral priorities, using Axio’s agent-focused standard.
30. Agency, Not Equality
Argues that “equality” is the wrong target; the real ethical concern is preserving and expanding agency, not equalizing outcomes.
31. Inequality Is Not the Problem—Poverty Is
Explains why harm tracks deprivation of options, not differences in wealth per se.
32. The Myth of Equal Value
Challenges the slogan that all people are “equally valuable,” showing how it collapses under any non-trivial decision problem.
33. Judging Goodness
Uses Effective Altruism as a worked example of how to evaluate actions once value is explicitly subjective and agent-bound.
34. The Myth of Wealth Hoarding
Separates emotional resentment from actual harm, analyzing whether extreme wealth really reduces others’ agency.