"Axiology" is one of those words often used when you fancy yourself too sophisticated to say "morality". The distinctions are almost entirely superficial and predicated on misunderstanding of what morality fundamentally is. Morality is the all-consuming baselayer of value discernment. All the aesthetic and epistemic things axiology bundles within itself... those are moral derivatives. Morality is not necessarily prescriptive, it's a set of value judgements using moral frameworks like care/harm, sanctity/degradation, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, etc.. Whereas ethics is prescriptive, meaning "here's how we will behave based on these moral beliefs" (eg a code of conduct). The political is essentially prescriptive morality at the national scale. Axiology either misstates this distinction or intentionally ignores it so it can offer a more stilted term for the same things morality entails. The best justification I see for the word is people seem to chronically misinterpret "morality" as only a good/bad thing and feel like it pivots the discussion into blame-game territory, and "axiology" diffuses this by offering a sterilized word that won't upset anyone but performs exactly the same duties. There is nothing that operates at a more foundational substrate of "what do we value and why?" than morality. If you want to venture into a deeper territory than this, you are delving into the genetic, the neurological. It's no longer a philosophical endeavor beyond morality; moral foundations are the supreme ethical, aesthetic, and political authority through which all values and stances are derived. Slapping cerebral-sounding terms onto straightforward concepts doesn’t make them more intellectual, only opaque and inaccessible so as to impress your Less Wrong friends: - “Straussian analysis”? Oh, you mean like reading between the lines. - “Optimizing for disparate utility functions"? Yes, I too prefer different things sometimes. - “Stochastic”? You could have said "random" and been just fine. And so on, and so forth. The rationalist community in particular loves this kind of rebranding because it makes everyday observations sound like you're engaged in sophisticated big-brain thinking. But your grandma could describe the same situations just as accurately with simpler language. It's the same pattern: take a common concept (I'm "stuck between a rock and a hard place") and wrap it in pseudo-sophisticated florid nomenclature (I'm now "in a suboptimum equilibrium within a Molochian system"), and suddenly you're not complaining about a bad situation, you're analyzing coordination failures in multi-agent systems. Morality is the hypernym structure that everything value-oriented resides under; "axiology" is just morality wearing a fancy suit.