A Praxeological Foundation for Randian Ethics

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1

After carefully reading Tara Smith’s books (Viable Values and Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics), and Rasmussen’s paper A Groundwork for Rights, I’m convinced Ayn Rand provided a solid grounding for libertarian ethics. The problem is that Objectivists usually cloak their meta-ethical arguments in incomprehensible jargon. I believe Rand’s argument is best understood in an Aristotelian way:

  1. Living beings engage in goal-directed action, pursuing “values” that they “act to gain and/or keep”, in Rand’s words.
    a. Any attempt to deny that living beings act purposefully would itself constitute purposeful action, hence self-refuting.
    b. Action is distinguished from unconscious, involuntary responses to physical stimuli. A person asleep or in a coma does not act. But the proposition is that living being acts, i.e. that one of its distinguishing features is conscious, self-directed (or “self-generated”, as Rand termed it) behaviour – not that it always acts.
  2. At the bottom of every decision to engage in a particular action is the decision to engage in any action whatsoever: the, as it were, decision to make decisions. In order to act at all, a living being must evaluate that it would be preferable to be an acting, choosing entity than a non-acting, non-choosing entity.
  3. No decision and evaluations can be made without reference to a standard, a parameter to be maximized. Since most ends are merely means to other ends, there must be an end-in-itself, an ultimate standard or, in Rand’s words, “ultimate value” to prevent an infinite regress. Ultimate value gives rise to the phenomenon of choice (i.e. action), by providing a living being with the capacity to reject alternative states of affairs as suboptimal.
  4. The decision to act is the decision that existence (life) is preferable to non-existence (death), because life requires, not just particular actions (getting food, shelter, etc.), but action in itself.
  5. A living being engaged in goal-directed action must therefore accepted life as its ultimate value. At the most fundamental level, it has decided to maximize this parameter by fulfilling its basic requirement: engaging in action. Consequently, at all other levels, no matter the content of the action (decisions about content also constituting action), life remains the ultimate standard throughout, because without it there could be no evaluation of action as preferable to non-action in the first place.
    a. This is also axiomatic. Any attempt to deny that action has life as its ultimate standard qua value would constitute an action affirming life as its ultimate standard qua value: like the action axiom, also self-contradictory and self-refuting.
    b. Unlike other ends, life is an end-in-itself, because it is a means to itself. “Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action”; i.e. it is composed of action (good or bad) that takes the shape of a structural,circular chain. Goal-directed action requires life qua ultimate value. Life qua ultimate value requires goal-direction action, which itself requires life qua ultimate value. Et cetera. (Conscious living beings cannot avoid engaging in action since the decision not to act would itself be an action.)

What is meant by life is merely survival: promoting the optimal conditions for the operation of your essence across your natural lifespan. But survival includes psychological as well as physical health. In order to pursue sustenance, human beings must first be convinced their life is worth sustaining. For example, a person who pursues passions, fruitful relationships, hobbies, and lives a life of self-esteem clearly has better survival prospects than someone who is antisocial and suffers recurring bouts of mania and psychological depression. Human beings must therefore not only eat and have a pulse, but must flourish: live in such a way as to be able to continue to live.

Flourishing is thus, in keeping with the Aristotelian-scholastic moral tradition in which Randian ethics can be categorized, man’s natural end. One can, of course, fail or err with regards to achieving one’s natural end. (This is why even someone who commits suicide still necessarily has life as his/her ultimate value.) But because all human beings accept the basic “ought” that they should do what is necessary to promote their lives (or else they would not and could not act), they accept the other “oughts” that follow: namely, those principles that promote human flourishing.

2

Here’s what Patrick O’Neil says about this:

“A decision, a volition, at time t can only be meaningful in relation to life-at-time-t+1 or life-at-time-t+1, t+2 or life-at-time-t+1, t+2, …, t+n. We can only will concerning life in the future (however proximate that future), for the presence of life at the moment of willing is a given condition for the act of willing, and must therefore be accepted (no act of volition being necessary or possible in regard to it)–it cannot in any case be altered, for it is simultaneous with the act of willing–i.e., it is as much outside the effective operation of our wills as is our being or non-being at any point in time prior to that act of willing.”

In other words, life-at-time-t cannot be a value because it has already been acheived and utilized in action (the moment we act, that “now” becomes the past). Action is necessarily future oriented–it is a logical impossiblity to aim towards end to be acheived before this moment. So in order to hold life as a value at all, it must be life-at-time-t+n which is some point in the future. Once this is established, the self-refuting aspect of Rand’s thesis dissolves. I am able to say that life is not the ultimate value because the life utilized to make such a claim isn’t the life that could possibly held as an end, it has already passed, and I am speaking only of life in the future.

3

I see no reason to believe this. A entails B (life entails acting) does not entail B requires valuing A (to act requires valuing life).

Rand is missing the hedonic mediation of action. Our body/brain converts external stimuli into pleasure or pain and it is these to which our acting mind responds. Bastiat says (Economic Harmonies, ch. 2):

The soul (or, not to become involved in spiritual questions, man) is endowed with the faculty of sense perception. Whether sense perception resides in the body or in the soul, the fact remains that as a passive being he experiences sensations that are painful or pleasurable. As an active being he strives to banish the former and multiply the latter. The result, which affects him again as a passive being, can be called satisfaction.

Man acts to alleviate felt uneasiness. Whether such action is helpful or detrimental to life and survival is a function of the adaptedness of our biology to our present circumstances. The monkey that keeps pushing the button to inject himself with cocaine until he ODs is definitely acting and his actions are definitely the cause of his death. The same is true for the human heroin addict who behaves similarly. All action has as its ultimate goal the satisfaction of wants or, stated more negatively, the alleviation of felt uneasiness. Nowhere is the acting being required to value life or being alive.

Clayton -

4

Clayton, Rand doesn’t say that man necessarily acts in the pursuit of his own life. If you’ve read any of her books, you’ll see many of the characters ultimately work for the destruction of their own lives.

What she says is that life qua man requires consistent action for the promotion of his life, because life is a process of self-sustaining and self generating action. A man engaging in self-destructive action is taking steps toward death. In any moment he can choose death if he wishes, but if the purpose of morality is to show us how to live our lives, then such actions are wrong.

Note that Rand does not equate life with mere biological sustenance.

5

mikachusetts

Life is a process.

6

@mikachusetts

I’m familiar with O’Neil’s critique. But he totally misconstrues the argument. The point being made is not that you have to be alive in order to act, which, as Tara Smith notes, is true but trivial. You can’t base an ethics on that.

The point is much more subtle. As I said, when you make a choice, you are evaluating one state of affairs as more preferable than another. You can only do this with reference to some kind of standard. E.g. if I choose strawberry ice cream over spinach, my standard might be good-tasting food (as opposed to healthy food). I can choose by virtue of the fact that my standard gives me a criterion of optimization; it allows me to reject certain alternatives as suboptimal.

Every standard is question-begging, and is usually justified by reference to a higher standard. But this means-ends chain cannot regress infinitely. There must be some ultimate standard, by which we can evaluate that acting to gain anything is preferable than not acting to gain anything in the first place. Because life and only life has action as a fundamental requirement (a pretty good way to die would be to shut down and not act, if that were possible), by deciding to act and choosing action over non-action, I maintain you have adopted life as your ultimate standard.

It’s important to grasp why only life qualifies. Death (in the sense of non-life) cannot qualify as the ultimate standard of value, because, as Rasmussen noted in reply to O’neil, death is the absence of life and value. Death cannot give rise to action because death requires no action to maintain itself, whereas life does. Consequently, if you decide to inhale noxious fumes or plunge a knife into your chest, your immediate goal is not death qua non-life, but death qua dying, a “positive existential state”. Your ultimate standard must necessarily still be life, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to act.

It may seem paradoxical to say that someone committing suicide has life as their ultimate end/value. But one of the central Austrian insights is that we live in a world of uncertainty and human beings can always err and miscalculate what means are appropriate for their chosen ends. A case of suicide is a dire miscalculation. (That’s not to say Randian ethics rules out as immoral any and all cases of suicide. If you rationally evaluate that the future offers you no prospects for flourishing, suicide would, again perhaps paradoxically, be a life-affirming action. Yet since most actual cases of suicide are irrational, involving all sorts of faulty judgements and fallacious reasoning, they would qualify as immoral.)

7

Very well. Explain willful suicide. The subject acts to destroy his own life. How has he affirmed life as the ultimate standard of value?

8

@Malachi

See my post above.

@Clayton

I believe you are confusing action as an economic category with action as an ethical category. As Rothbard writes in Man, Economy, and State:

It is important to realize that economics does not propound any laws about the content of man’s ends. […] The concept of action involves the use of scarce means for satisfying the most urgent wants at some point in the future, and the truths of economic theory involve the formal rela­tions between ends and means, and not their specific contents. A man’s ends may be “egoistic” or “altruistic,” “refined” or “vulgar.” They may emphasize the enjoyment of “material goods” and comforts, or they may stress the ascetic life. Economics is not concerned with their content, and its laws apply regardless of the nature of these ends. […] Psychology and ethics deal with the content of human ends; they ask, why does the man choose such and such ends, or what ends should men value? Praxeology and economics deal with any given ends and with the formal implications of the fact that men have ends and employ means to attain them.

(“Funadmentals of Human Action: Appendix A”, p. 72-3, emphasis mine)

All that I meant by a “praxeological” foundation for Rand’s ethics is that they can be presentated in such a way as to be based on the action axiom, like I did in my post. Rand’s analysis, however, deals not with the formal hedonic relation between means and ends but the necessary contents of man’s ends.

The following passage from one of Nathaniel Branden’s essays in The Virtue of Selfishness may also clarify the difference between economic action and ethical action:

The basic fallacy in the “everyone is selfish” argument consists of an extraordinarily crude equivocation. It is a psychological truism - a tautology - that all purposeful behaviour is motivated. But to equate “motivated behaviour” with “selfish behaviour” is to blank out the distinction between an elementary fact of human psychology and the phenomenon of ethical choice. It is to evade the central problem of ethics, namely: by what is man to be motivated?

(“Isn’t Everyone Selfish?”, p. 70, emphasis original)

Don’t misinterpret Branden here. He is not saying the Misesian analysis of action is worthless. One could reply to the above by saying that even Mises himself acknowledged that the action axiom appears insignificant, but it has certain necessary implications which are indispensable. Again, all he is saying is that ethical questions and economic questions are different.

9

I must have missed this paragraph earlier.

It’s important to grasp why only life qualifies. Death (in the sense of non-life) cannot qualify as the ultimate standard of value, because, as Rasmussen noted in reply to O’neil, death is the absence of life and value. Death cannot give rise to action because death requires no action to maintain itself, whereas life does. Consequently, if you decide to inhale noxious fumes or plunge a knife into your chest, your immediate goal is not death qua non-life, but death qua dying, a “positive existential state”. Your ultimate standard must necessarily still be life, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to act.>>>>

if my ultimate standard is to alleviate a felt uneasiness, and my only escape from this sense of unease is suicide, have I not just affirmed that escape from a life of unease in death is preferable to the process of life?

As for the rest, your position appears to be internally consistent. I suppose I will have to examine it further.

10

@Malachi

There is a difference between a standard and a motivation, as I noted in response to Clayton.

As Rand wrote in TVOS: “An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means—and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated” (“The Objectivist Ethics”, p. 17, emphasis original). If you have a standard qua value, you have some parameter you are trying to maximize. You “should” reject all alternatives that fail to maximize that parameter. E.g. if you want to win a marathon, you should train.

When we say man acts to remove a felt uneasiness, we are only making a statement about the formal relation between man’s means and ends, as Rothbard noted. I.e. we are saying man does A because he wants to avoid B. That’s fine as far as economics goes. But, to repeat myself, by what standard does man evaluate that B is worth avoiding? That’s the ethical problem.

“if my ultimate standard is to alleviate a felt uneasiness, and my only escape from this sense of unease is suicide, have I not just affirmed that escape from a life of unease in death is preferable to the process of life?”

There’s two problem with your question. The first is just a nitpick. As you say, man acts to alleviate a felt uneasiness. An act of suicide would not be any different. It would be an act in response to a felt uneasiness (the turmoil of this mortal coil). But the more important point is that the removal of uneasiness is just a necessary truth about means and ends. It is not a standard or end in itself. Instead, what qualifies as “uneasiness” and what might remove it depends on the given valuations and standards of the agent. I believe that man’s standard is his natural end.

11

It doesn’t follow that the thing stopping an infinite regress of ends is an ultimate end and not a biological limit. Couldn’t it be the case that values hold primacy because our brain chemistry makes it that way?

How is this a true statement? Language, art and commerce fundamentally require action too.

12

I’m afraid I don’t understand what this means. Could you explain? What could possibly stop an infinite regress of ends other than a final or ultimate end? Anything else would surely be a category mistake.

Yes, obviously you’re right. I shouldn’t have worded it that way. All ends require you to act. But most ends are only justified by reference to higher-order ends. E.g. why does Joe buy a gun? To rob a bank. Why? Because he needs the cash. Why? Because he’s a junkie and the street price of heroin has risen. And so on. Life, on the other hand, isn’t justified by reference to another end but is self-justifying. It’s an end-in-itself or “ultimate end” because it is the ultimate means to all ends, which are themselves means to life. (They are not in all cases the correct means, since man can err.) So, contrary to what I wrote earlier, life is not just an end but an end-in-itself with a fundamental requirement of action, and the only one (since the only alternative, non-life or death, doesn’t give rise to action as I already explained).

13

Well, what I mean in the first part is that the infinite regression of “but why’s” doesn’t need to be met with an ultimate answer. In your example of Joe robbing the bank, we can get to the point where we say “he does it because he wants to.” Your answer to “why does he want to” is something like: “because he holds life as his ultimate end.” My argument is that maybe “because he wants to” is as far as it goes; there is no further justification that can be ascertained by reason because we are the limits of knowledge, but its ok because any given individual’s values are presented to him by his mind without need of further justification. So from one’s own perspective, the problem of infinite regression doesn’t exist.

This would be a problem for Rand though because it leads to ethical subjectivism.

With the whole life-as-ultimate-end business, I’m still skeptical on how that position is reached. Again, when you differentiate between life right now (t) and life going forward (t+n), things aren’t as clear cut as when you treat life monistically. Sure, life-at-t doesn’t require justification because it already is, but why one should continue to value life-at-t+n? All of a sudden, life does require another justification.

14

Ok I see now. You’re making the Humean point that rationality only perscribes the means to our ends, but our ends per se are merely the subject of our passions, and are not subject to rational evaluation. I simply disagree. There is a good article by Darryl Wright in Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue that compares Rand’s view of reason and ends to Hume’s, Moore’s, Kant’s, and Aristotle’s. Basically, Rand’s view, and mine, is that it is possible to evaluate our ends. Simply reference an ultimate end.

(Incidentally, there is no stage in the means-ends chain that simply consists of “because I want to”. All of my ends are “because I want to”. Every goal can be viewed superficially – insofar as ethics is concerned – as some kind of caprice, as a desire to remove felt uneasiness. This is just to beg the question. As I noted above, “what qualifies as ‘uneasiness’ and what might remove it depends on the given valuations and standards of the agent.” Why do you want to? This is the difference between economics and ethics.)

There’s two ways to address your point.

First is just with regards to this particular example. Remember that because you choose a means to an end does not mean you chose the correct means. I can want $5 million dollars and believe the best way to get it is to spend all day flapping my arms. Now, the only reason we have a pleasure-pain mechanism is because it is an aid to survival. Ideally, things that are good for us feel good, and things that are bad for us feel bad. Of course, this only held true as a general rule back when we roamed the savannah butt-naked. (And it wasn’t totally reliable even back then.) Nowadays, we can isolate pleasurable chemicals, make substances out of them, and abuse them, which is why pleasure-pain is no longer an adequate guide to what promotes our lives.

When Joe reacts to the pleasure that heroin gives him, he is making use of a mechanism that aids (or is supposed to aid, anyway) his struggle for survival. He is acting to achieve his ultimate end (though perhaps unaware of it). The crucial point, however, is that he chose a very bad means for achieving his ultimate end!

But there’s a more fundamental issue. Every action you take affirms your ultimate end, because action per se affirms your ultimate end. (For example, as Rasmussen noted in Norms of Liberty, arguing about your natural end means seeking truth, which is a means of promoting your natural end. In the Mises Review, David Gordon wasn’t persuaded.) All ends-means chains culminate in the pursuit of life. For example, in the case of Joe, his actions could be represented as follows:

Buy a gun → Rob a bank → Get cash → Get heroin → Feel good → Obey demands of pleasure-pain mechanism

Life qua ultimate value is the ultimate means (for reasons already given). So all actions, Joe’s included, can be reduced to:

(I wanna)–> Act --(so by implication I have) → Life qua ultimate value --(so I’d better*)–> Get life --(so I can)–> Act

*The means the agent chooses to acquire life may not be correct. The chain is circular because life is an end-in-itself.

This is what it means to say life is the summum bonum, the goal at which all action aims. Of course, just because your natural end is always affirmed doesn’t mean it is always achieved. That’s where moral perscriptions and political systems come in.

I should also say that the entire contents of a means-end chain are not always clear; they just happened to be in the case of Joe. All we can know a priori is that an agent that acts has rejected the alternative of non-action, which means that the requirements of his natural end is his standard for making choices; his means-end chain stops at life. As a result, all his actions are means to acheiving his natural end, though they may not be the right means. His ultimate end is life; the lesser means depend on the circumstance.

I thought I already said the argument was not that you have to be alive in order to act. The argument is that you have to have life as your standard, as a goal to be achieved in the future, in order to act.

15

Almost every post I’ve made here has been a response to an objection I’ve already addressed in my initial argument. Before you attempt a critique, please go over my first post carefully and make an effort to grasp it. I didn’t personally understand this natural-end stuff until I’d mulled over it for months. I’ve tried as hard as I can to be clear, but language only goes so far.

16

@tunk: No, I’m not confusing means with ends. It is simply not true that life is the ultimate end. The ultimate end is satisfaction. Unsurprisingly, my biology is hardwired in such a way that my satisfaction almost always overlaps with my survival. The point is that the correlation is not necessary and, hence, point 4 in the OP is not true.

Clayton -

17

Satisfaction is not the ultimate end. It isn’t even an immediate end. Satisfaction is a particular existential state in which your ends are achieved. It has nothing to do with the content of your ends, which is what I’m concerned with. Saying action aims at satisfaction is saying “the aim of a goal is the goal of the aim”. It’s tautology.

Really? Because something makes you feel good is reason to think it’s in your interests?

18

I don’t disagree with you here, but this just doesn’t logically necessitate life as an ultimate standard. You just keep asserting that its the case. But lets leave it be for now.

The proof you put forward (I think) is that in acting we are affirming life as a value and that in denying life as a value, we are still acting and thus utilizing and affirming life anyway. So lets accept this as it is (assuming that I correctly stated your position). If it is a descriptive statement about ethical reality, then all men have the same meta-normative standard within which they operate and we can judge their ends within this framework as in-line or out-of-line with their ultimate end, the same way as we can judge means as appropriate or inappropriate for given ends.

So maybe it is impossible to not hold life as the ultimate standard, but I’m sure we both agree that individuals can consistently choose to aim at ends which are inappropriate to life as the ultimate standard. Furthermore, they can do so consciously aware that their actions are unethical within the natural law tradition. Your response to this (I think) would be that just because he affirms life as an end-in-itself it doesn’t mean that he achieves life as an end-in-itself. But then the question resurfaces: why should he want to achieve life? Although he is unable to deny life as the ultimate standard, he is still able to defy life as the ultimate standard, which in my opinion breaks ethics back down into a subjective utilitarian discipline.

19

I’ve restated my case several times. If you really believe this, then, to be blunt, you have simply failed to grasp my position.

I don’t want to repeat the entirety of my claim again. I’ve done so several times, and anyone who’s interested in my actual position should go over my intial post very carefully and seriously try to digest what I’m saying. (Reading Rasmussen and Smith would help.)

For the third and final time, my claim is not that you have to be alive in order to act. My claim, in a nutshell, is as follows. Before an agent acts, it must first “decide” whether or not to act. (This choice doesn’t have to be explicit, it can merely be implied.) Decisions can only be made in light of a standard: a parameter to be optimized. (Standards are what allow you to choose one state of affairs over another.) The only fundamental, non-question begging and self-justifying standard that recommends action is life. Non-life has no requirements. (I’ve yet to see this disputed.) As a result, the parameter an acting agent has chosen to optimize is life. To act, you must accept the normative premise that you “ought” to do what sustains your existence (the basic means to which is action). Otherwise, you could not have rejected the alternative of non-action (you would have had no standard by which to do so) and wouldn’t have been able to act. Life is the ultimate end because adopting it as an end is the ultimate means. The argument simply cannot be made any clearer than this and I won’t try. If you get it, you get it.

You might object to this and ask, “Isn’t action a means to all ends, not just life? What makes life so special?” But choosing what kind of action you want to undertake (skipping through the park, licking a stamp, etc.) is itself an action. The first choice is whether or not to act at all. And language is extremely fuzzy here. Even that basic choice is itself an action, which presupposes that choice, etc., suggesting an infinite regress that could never really exist since we wouldn’t be able to act in that case. This is why I say that first crossroads is the basic one, which only life qua ultimate standard can guide you through.

The argument for ethical principles just goes like this:

  1. If you want to achieve goal F, you “should” do A, B, C, and “shouldn’t” do X, Y, Z.
  2. You want to achieve goal F.
  3. Therefore, you “should” do A, B, C, and “shouldn’t” do X, Y, Z.

Asking, “Why should I do as life requires” is like asking, “Why should I train for the marathon?” Why run the marathon in that case? Irfan Khawaja, in a helpful review of Viable Values, suggested the following (emphasis mine):

The key to understanding the “choice to live,” as I see it, is to think of the binding force of an ultimate value by analogy with the binding force of a logical axiom, on the Aristotelian conception of an axiom (cf.VV, p. 107) […]

At Metaphysics IV.3, Aristotle enunciates the PNC: “A thing cannot be and not-be at the same, in the same respect.” This is an undeniable and foundational truth; its truth is merely re-affirmed in the attempt to doubt or deny it. Note, however, that the Principle is not a categorical injunction to engage in thought. In fact, it says nothing at all about thought, nor is it a prescription of any kind. It merely states a fact about the world—one that becomes a guide for thought when and only when one chooses to think. In choosing to engage in thought, one sees in one’s own case that if one is to do so successfully (i.e., at all), onemust obey the Principle without exception. […]

One can escape the PNC-- if one is willing to pay the price. The PNC binds all thought; one way to evade it, then, is simply to stop thinking. […] It doesn’t apply to a non-thinker. On the other hand, its non-application to the non-thinker is hardly a threat to its logical or epistemic authority. A non-thinker can’t raise an objection (or even have one), and thus cannot constitute a problem for the PNC. […]

The analogy to moral obligation applies as follows. As a matter of non-prescriptive fact, life can only be kept in existence by a constant process of self-sustaining action. Moreover, life is unique in this respect: it’s the underlying generator of practical requirements that explains why there are practical requirements at all, themselves requiring self-sustaining action. So life is the ultimate value. Life’s conditional character, however, is not by itself a prescription. It’s simply a fact about the world. The fact by itself generates no categorical duty to keep one’s own life (or anyone else’s life) in existence, or indeed, to value or do anything at all. Life’s conditional character becomes a guide for action when and only when one chooses to value and live, i.e., chooses to engage in goal-directed action […].

In choosing to live, one is conditionally bound by the requirements of life. […] [I]f I will life as an end, I must will the means to it; if I refuse to will the means, I must give up the end.

20

You really need to read the first three chapters of Economic Harmonies. Satisfaction is a state of affairs that will never be achieved while you are alive and acting. In fact, dissatisfaction is a necessary criterion for action. If you were not dissatisfied with the present state of affairs, you would not act.

I will quote Bastiat (ch. 3) at length,

Having spoken of our wants and the means we possess to satisfy them, I have a word to say about our satisfactions. They are the result of the whole mechanism. According to the degree of physical, moral, and intellectual satisfactions enjoyed by humanity, we know whether the machine is functioning well or badly. Hence, the word consommation (taken over in French by the economists to mean consumption) would have profound meaning, if, keeping its etymological sense, it were used as a synonym of end, achievement. Unfortunately, in common usage and even in the scientific language, it suggests to the mind a coarse and material connotation, accurate undoubtedly for physical wants, but not for wants of a higher order. The raising of wheat, the spinning of wool are concluded by an act of consumption. Can the word consumption be also applied to the works of the artist, the songs of the poet, the deliberations of the jurist, the sermons of the priest? Here again we encounter the difficulties of the basic error that led Adam Smith to confine political economy to material values; and the reader will pardon me if I often use the word satisfaction to apply to all our wants and to all our desires, since I think it better corresponds to the wider scope that I feel justified in giving to political economy.

Economists have often been reproached for concerning themselves exclusively with the interests of the consumer. “You forget the producer,” people say. But satisfaction being the goal, the end of all efforts, and, as it were, the final consummation of economic phenomena, is it not evident that it is the touchstone of all progress? A man’s well-being is not measured by his efforts, but by his satisfactions. This observation also holds true for men taken collectively. This again is one of those truths accepted by everybody when it is applied to the individual, but disputed endlessly when applied to society as a whole. The expression so much attacked means only this: The value of every economic activity is determined, not by the labor it entails, but by the positive effect it produces, which in turn results in increasing or decreasing the general welfare.

Satisfaction of wants or the alleviation of felt uneasiness is the end which lies beyond all ends. It is not a state of being which can be attained by a living human being. All particular ends which we might identify (say, being warm) are, in the most abstract view, really just means to the attainment of the only end which we have: satisfaction of wants and alleviation of felt uneasiness. This and only this is the ultimate end. It is not a normative matter but a matter of praxeological fact.

Yes, really. This is almost never false. It is true so much of the time that we hardly pay any attention to it. It’s like the running fan in the background that you can’t even hear once you’ve acclimated to it.

You are motivated to sleep by the reward of feeling rested. You are motivated to eat by the reward of feeling nourished. You are motivated to drink water by the reward of feeling quenched. And so on. Your entire day from moment to moment is dominated by an uncountable number of good feelings and subconscious rewards by which your animal brain pokes and prods you to leave the sedentary state and attend to your corporeal needs, whether or not your are even aware of their existence and urgency. Felt uneasiness is the negative side of the equation - it is the pains and aches with which your brain afflicts your conscious mind for the same purpose, to drive you out of the sedentary state and attend to your needs.

Clayton -