Isocritism: A Theory of Valuation with Metaethics as a Special Case

Isocritism is a Carnapian explication of moral concepts: a vocabulary for describing evaluator-activity, within which substantive moral views (Kantian, consequentialist, virtue-theoretic, divine-command, contractualist, particularist) are themselves describable. It treats morality as one sub-region of a wider landscape of valuation, handling the bimetallic strip and the human deliberator alike. The vocabulary is organized around a single individuation principle: evaluators are constituted by internal agreement on the target, verdict, and goal-set of evaluation, and individuated apart by the failure of that agreement. It applies uniformly across cells, momentary states, persons, groups, and physical discriminators. Three central commitments follow. First, a flat treatment of evaluators: no ranking, no aggregation, no view from nowhere. Second, a maximal inclusion criterion: any system that discriminates between outcomes counts, since excluding some would require a ranking the vocabulary does not supply. Third, a two-layer structure separating morality (the distribution of evaluations across evaluators) from ethics (the consistency of an action with a specified goal-set, given the evaluator's information at the time). The morality/ethics split is a practical advantage: "the contractor breached the contract" is a fully decidable ethical description that neither inherits nor licenses a moral verdict. The vocabulary generates no normative recommendations, including tolerance, and applies its principles reflexively to its own content. Isocritism is one evaluator's proposed vocabulary, defensible on definitional criteria within communities sharing them, not a discovery of what morality "really is." Its nearest relatives are Spinoza on conatus-grounded evaluation and the Madhyamaka tradition on reflexive consistency; what is distinctive is the synthesis.