My engagement with Nietzsche and other fragments of continental philosophy may have made me unduly pessimistic about the value of theory during my twenties. Yet while I’m trending more optimistic about explicit moral reasoning, properly contextualised, I’m still skeptical that the correct theory of value will be simple. There may be useful theories of value that are simplifications. But the claim that it all comes down to the pleasure/pain axis... I’m tempted to dismiss this with cries of “physics envy”, though I know I should try harder than that (#todo). Yes, if we can take anything as axiomatic, it might be “extreme involuntary suffering is bad”. But... I think we should have a fairly strong presumption in favour of there being more than one kind of value… One suggestion that this is right: the people who go for the simple theories tend to leave their “singular” value rather broadly or rather vaguely defined. I sometimes wonder whether, if you really grilled the value monists, you’d find that they were presenting a theory they hoped to be a useful simplification, rather than one they thought likely to be true. And just to be clear, I’m all in favour of useful simplifications, so long as we don't let them blind us to the more complicated reality. ## Notes Baggini: It’s not that anything goes, simply that more than one thing goes.