The "Ought" World
To live is to act (because life is conditional).
To act is to choose.
To choose is to prefer.
To prefer is to value or to pursue values. (Being fallible, we can err in thinking something is good when it is in fact bad.)
To think is to act.
Therefore, to think is to value. (James Ellias of Inductica calls this the "value axiom.")
Whether we like it or not, we're immersed in the "ought" world. Hume et al. were wrong.
Note the irony: "ought" is associated with choice and free will, yet as long as we are alive, we cannot avoid valuing. No pre-moral choices exist. As Aristotle noticed, all action, logically, aims at an ultimate end--the good, happiness, contentment, call it what you will--because an infinite series of means leading nowhere is incoherent. (How would one resolve conflicting subordinate ends?) Aiming at a certain kind of life is intrinsic to action. It's baked in, pre-"chosen" for us by the logic of action. "For Aristotle, this ultimate end or good is not chosen; it is implicit in every desire and every choice, and all our other ends are to be understood as subordinate to it. The end is, as it were, forced on us; and the task of practical reason is simply to identify it," Roderick T. Long writes in Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand.
Ludwig von Mises, the praxeologist, understood this too. Yet Roderick Long has shown elsewhere that Mises, who thought reason could not judge ultimate ends, mistook constitutive means to the ultimate end for the ultimate end itself. A constitutive, or internal, means--as opposed to an instrumental, or external, means--is that without which the end cannot be conceived. To use Long's example, wearing a tie is constitutive of traditional dressing up. Buying a tie is instrumental. In other words, every time a man dresses up, he must wear a tie to be considered dressed up, but every time he dresses up, he need not buy a tie.
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Years ago, I discovered a biconditional proposition, a proposition of the form “p if and only if q,” where “p” is replaced with a value judgment and “q” with a statement of fact so that p and q are materially equivalent; that is p and q have the same truth value. In this way, I connected values with facts. The biconditional proposition is this: Values exist if and only if life exists. As philosopher Ayn Rand said, “The concept 'value' presupposes the concept 'life'.” It is only to a living being that anything may be good or evil. Values cannot exist in a vacuum, independent of everything else. Anything that is of value must be of value to someone or some thing. Imagine a universe devoid of life. Nothing could be of value in such a universe. Nothing could be of value to inanimate matter or energy, such as a rock, a drop of water, a molecule of air, or a light beam. Nor could anything be of value to a unit of time or a region of empty space. Only the existence of life makes the existence of values possible. That is, the existence of life is a necessary condition for the existence of values. In other words: If values exist, then life exists. I also read an article written by a biologist who tried to define the term “life,” which is harder to do than you may imagine if you haven't tried. He said that one characteristic that distinguishes living things from nonliving things is this: All organisms exhibit self-generated actions used as means to attain ends. For instance, animals forage for food, and plants send roots down into the soil to obtain water. But an end is just a value. (Something may be of value to an organism even if the organism lacks the intelligence to evaluate it.) This implies that the existence of life is a sufficient condition for the existence of values. In other words: If life exists, then values exist. (In a conditional proposition of the form “if p, then q,” p, the antecedent, represents the sufficient condition, and q, the consequent, represents the necessary condition.) The two conditionals “If values exist, then life exists” and “If life exists, then values exist” can be combined by means of the biconditional equivalence rule to yield: Values exist if and only if life exists. This implies that whatever is pro-life is pro-value (good) and whatever is anti-life is anti-value (bad or evil). That's my starting point for an axiological theory, which I won't develop further here.
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Metaethical realist theories must account for three types of statements: axiological (value-centered), teleological (goal-oriented), and deontological (duty-centered). The reason for the three theories is this: All of a moral agent's acts are motivated by the desire to acquire, retain, or somehow bring about something of positive value or to avoid or dispose of something of negative value (disvalue). A positive value is something that is, or is believed to be, good; a negative value is something that is, or is believed to be, bad or evil. The reason for the axiological theory is to guide such value judgments. Once a value judgment is made, some means to accomplish the desired outcome must be chosen. This accounts for the teleological theory. The deontological theory places constraints on the means that may properly be used to accomplish the desired outcome. Axiological theory tries to bridge the fact/value gap. Deontological theory tries to bridge the related is/ought gap. The two gaps are often conflated. Despite the title of your post, it's about axiological theory, not deontological theory. I'll end by focusing on axiological theory.