The flowers are lovely, thank you.
As to the question about ethics. Ethics as prescriptive in this case would NOT tell us how to achieve goals we desire. The subject of ethics as described historically is “What is the Good?” It getd divided into Meta-Ethics questions and Ethics questions. Meta-Ethics asks what does it mean to be good. Ethics asks is this Good. or some such.
My point is that without purposeful action, there is no question of good or bad. So while Mises points out rightly that knowledge has no basis for existing outside of the context of action and thus any valid epistemology must account for the role of action in its theory, so I would add that without action there is no question what is the good? What does it mean to be Good? and thus any valid study of Ethics must account for action.
Traditionally Ethics and Politics tend to bleed into each other. In my personal intellectual journey, I came to the point where I viewed both Ethics and Politics as normative. Now I categorically reject a Universal Good, due to a reduction issue which leads to an authority issue. I can’t know what the right ends are for you. Science can’t tell us what the right ends are. All attempts to do so result in a declarative statement that asks each individual to either accept it as an End or reject it as an End. I can’t make you pick that end. That’a liberty objection. I can’t control your mind, and I can’t control your actions.
So, indirect influence is the only way. That’s the reduction issue. Secondly the authority issue, why is your End right and my end wrong in a universal way? Why does my end supercede your end? I can’t make an is argument that’s true for all times an all places. This leads us to the social realm, where we have to stand together in groups wherein we align our ends, in order to pursue the cooperative behaviors which make life easier (in terms of overcoming the natural resistance that reality provides to the attainment of ends).
So, by my eye, there is a clear distinction between the individuals choosing of final ends or “the Good for Me”, and a socially constructed/emergent final Ends that bind groups together. The way in which we cooperate and self-organize seems to me to be predicated on solving the Means/Ends mismatch in social groups. Think of it as impedance matching. That become the realm of Politics. The process of producing for oneself ultimate ends is the field of Ethics, the process of determining what is the Good is bounded to individual action.
Bam, I drop a line in the sand between the two normative disciplines Ethics bounded to the individual in isolation, and Political bounded to the social interaction. Now in saying this I don’t mean that a man’s Ethical system doesn’t consider how he interacts with society or the consequences of his choices within a greater social context. I simply mean, that he determines for himself what he determines to be “The Good”. If you value “lying”, make your case, and good luck with that, I’ll probably disagree.
Again, just to be even more clear, within a group there may be discussion of different ethical standards of the individuals. We may discuss and argue about the ends we wish to achieve within our cooperative endeavor, we may also argue about the means we wish to use, and the ethical implications that each of us use internally to justify such behaviors and such ends. These discussions may lead us into conflict.
Social norms play a role in both the internal ethics of the men who hold them and arise out of the internal ethical systems of the members of he social group. So, a specific political technology will arise out of the internal ethics of it’s members as an emergent phenomena.
By breaking these various fields apart from each other and by dividing them into science and technology, my hope is to help drive forward the effecitveness of the technological solutions we put forward, and to better explain how these systems interact. Modern sociology is hopeless IMO, because it’s mired in statistical questions, which don’t really tell us anything because we don’t have good science that explains the underlying phenomena that produces these macro-level statistical variations.
I like to think of it like germ theory. Before the theory of germs a scientist collecting data of people with battlefield injuries might have noticed that the use of clean water and soap had a strong correlation with reduced levels of wound infection. But he wouldn’t know why. He would have produced a graph that showed that x% of wounds became infected when fresh water wasn’t used to clean the wound, and x% of wounds became infected when water wasn’t used to clean the wound. The germ theory proposed a solution to this observation. The statistics were neat, but didn’t explain WHY. The accuracy of the germ theory lead to additional technological solutions that took advantage the logical conclusions of a germ theory of infections and disease.
Well, modern sociology, economics (not austrian) and politics are woefully ignorant of the implications of praxeology. But when I read the Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, for the first time I realized, that our Philosophy suffers too, because we hadn’t applied the same logical insights into the fields of philosophy also.