Was your experience good or bad? Was it lovely or grotesque? As we recount our experiences we, as a matter of course, subject them to value judgments. This paper argues that narratives give individuals in a community a ground-floor for interpreting and ascribing value to their experiences. Both the ethical and the aesthetic can be understood through a narrative—hermeneutical lens, so a narrative axiology supplies evaluators the appropriate criteria for evaluation.
Drawing from the work of philosophers Noël Carrol and Alasdair MacIntyre, this paper argues that a socially determined telos drives the axiological valuation of our experiences. This topic is important for our global pluralistic age as it affirms the existence of various narrative traditions and offers a method for determining and understanding a tradition’s culturally delegated values. Rather than observing set rules, a narrative framework looks at story-based principles that guide value judgments. This approach can be used to better understand one’s own narrative theological tradition, and can be useful for cross-cultural interaction.