This picture brings us back to the distinction between foundational and non-foundational pluralism. Notice that the monist theories being imagined here are foundationally monist, because they claim that there is fundamentally one value, such as pleasure, and they are pluralist at the level of ordinary choice because they claim that there are intermediate values, such as knowledge and beauty, which are valuable because of the amount of pleasure they produce (or realize, or contain—the exact rela