Do all men have the same end (telos)?

Miscellaneous General
1

Is it true to say that all men seek in all their actions their own happiness? If so is possible to extract the internal state from the means in the external world or do they collapse into synonyms?

For example I eat an apple. Do I do this because it causes me happiness or do I eat because I like the flavour and it curtails hunger pains in my stomach? If it’s the latter then it would seem at that moment eating an apple= happiness rather than eating an apple causes happiness.

Consquently would it be more proper to state the ends of man with reference to particular external objects rather than the end of man in an abstract sense?

2

It depends on the purpose of your analysis. If it’s for economics, for example, you’ll want to incorporate objects. Or are you asking whether action is (or is motivated by) pain or pleasure (happiness or unhappiness, etc.)?

3

I think, in all actions, that it is untrue. Happiness is clearly the goal that most strive for in an overall sense. But at what point do we delineate, for instance, the happiness we derive from eating junk food and candy all day everyday versus being fit, healthy, and attractive? We contradict our parameter for seeking happiness in the long term if we simultaneously think that we derive happiness from being healthy and fit and buy junk food which produces our ends opposite.

Deriving the internal state (I’m assuming you mean an intentioned disposition at any given time) is a matter of causal chains for actions taken in the external world. Donald Davidson has a classic example in Actions, Reasons, and Causes:

From the example, can you infer the mental state of the agent through the actions in the external world?

Do hunger pains cause happiness? Or unhappiness? Ultimately we have one end and weak wills.

(Donald Davidson, How is Weakness of the Will Possible)

Happiness is not a state or disposition. It is a fleeting feeling and by its nature you resolve yourself to it after you grow used to conditions.

(See: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents)

What particular external objects? Pie? Sex? Beauty?

Happiness, likely, is to be interpreted as an abstract end (although neuro-philosophers and psychologists may argue).

4

I don’t think it’s (necessarily) a contradiction. The problem, as I see it, is that we tend to use the word happiness in colloquial speech for some kind of an ultimate state of pleasure and well-being - in that respect, no, not every. single. action is necessarily performed to bring about (even partially) that kind of state. When you eat an apple, presumably you don’t normally reason about that single action in the broad context of “attaining happiness”.

However, to basically paraphrase Mises - you do act, and an action is by definition guided by some purpose, which lies in an uneasiness you’re trying to alleviate - because that’s a prerequisite of an action, otherwise you wouldn’t act, because if you were in a perfect state (literally perfect, something that’s complete in all of its parts and has no need for action of any sort because it has no goals to attain or changes it wants to bring about), an action would be a contradiction in terms. So, your small mundane action is guided by a desire to replace a state of things you prefer less with a state of things you find more satisfactory and in that respect, you are aiming at “happiness”, in a sense of a preferable state of things. When you’re hungry, it’s preferable to eat and you’re motivated by hunger, and other times you may be motivated to eat, say, out of boredom - but in all of those cases, you’re looking into increasing your well-being and changing something that you find less comfortable with something that you find more comfortable. So think of that “happiness” not in a sense that there’s this Big Idea Of Ultimate Happiness that somehow “guides” all of your actions towards an Ultimate Goal, but in a sense of an expectation of a future better state of things that’s at the core of your every action, and action as such, and that wouldn’t happen without your interference.

So, it’s one and the same - you eat an apple because you prefer “eating an apple” and a future “having eaten an apple and alleviated hunger”, which is the expected source of “happiness” for you in that particular case.

Let’s say you don’t eat an apple. If the apple is in front of you and you don’t eat it, you see your expected source of “happiness” in something else - for example, a personal accomplishment, say you’re on diet, in having resisted the temptation, so however you look at it, you always end up going for “happiness”, i.e. for what you deem to be the most satisfactory choice for you. Or may have a poor self-control and beat yourself up after, so succumb to the temptation, and realize that in most states of mind not eating an apple would be preferable and would make you “happier” in the long run, but in that very moment when the decision was done, your priorities were different and you did prefer eating an apple to a feeling of accomplishment in not having done so. Unless you’re physically coerced, i.e. unless somebody shoves it down your throat against your will or a physical possibility to prevent it, whatever you did or didn’t do, you did make a choice that at the time of action you felt would make you “happy”.

Different men are in different circumstances, and desire different things, and sometimes in same circumstances desire different things for a number of reasons, from individual disposition to feeling societally constrained or “obligated” to act in certain ways, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t even matter what the “ultimate” reason for doing something was. People can make choices that they philosophically disagree with, and they can make choices that are uncomfortable for them, just like they can make choices that are congenial to them - but in all of those cases, they choose from the options they have the ones they believe would bring about a more satisfactory state of things.

A person on a diet will not be “comfortable” with the choice to forgo the apple, and may even grieve it, but the fact alone that they chose to do it means that they valued something else above their (current) comfort level, and that - paradoxally perhaps - constitutes their “happiness” in that act.

5

GoldenRetriever’s covered the time preference confusion well, but there are several other confusions that need to be cleared away before action can be understood clearly. Now I might have a better idea what OP is asking: “is action happiness”? My answer is that, in the Misesian conception, as far as I can follow, action is in fact synonymous with pain.

Yes, you read that right. This is merely a matter of definition: since to Mises, the essence of action is in the decision to act (not the physical action itself - in fact, Mises says even wishing counts as action), and the decision (not to be confused with any deliberation process leading to the decision) is itself only recognizable consciously as a desire, which is synonymous with felt uneasiness, which is just another word for pain in the most general sense. Action is an attempt to substitute a less favorable state of affairs for a more favorable one, but in fact even a wish or desire for that change to take place counts as an attempt - in fact is the very essence of it. Action is an attempt to remove felt uneasiness, yes, but action itself IS felt uneasiness. I see no way to distinguish the two, once the incidental/nonessential aspects have been swept aside.

A rephrasing to make this sound clearer by looking only at the essence of action: the pain and the wishing for it to go away are one and the same. Unease = desire = wishing = action.

6

It is useful to define - tautologically - the purpose of all action as “satisfaction” or “happiness” or whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Similarly, it is useful to define action in terms of “ends” and leave open the matter of whether these are all, ultimately, the same end. This is the approach that Mises takes in HA and it is useful for economics because we don’t really need a psychological theory in order to have an economic theory, so you get some separation of concerns.

You can study your own ends merely as a matter of introspection. The results of such study are final; they are not hypothetical. If you perceive your own ends to be X, Y and Z, then that is what they are as far as anybody can know since you certainly know your own state of mind better than anyone else. But as soon as we begin to speak of the ends of “men”, then introspection is no longer sufficient. Here, you must actually go out and study in the field what sorts of ends people pursue. Complicating this is the fact that people are often not consciously aware of what ends they are pursuing or, even worse, are actively concealing the ends they are pursuing. So, there is just a subset of human ends which can be discovered by simply walking up to people and asking “what is your purpose?” To get a more comprehensive list, you have to be more clever.

All men have the same end in the tautological sense. All men do not have the same ends in the more limited sense of “whatever they’re trying to accomplish at the moment.”

Clayton -

7

+1 to Clayton’s final paragraph. We all strive to remove felt uneasiness, but what unease we feel differs among us.

8

For clarification:

By happiness I mean a contented internal state (a intentioned disposition) towards life not a rush of pleasure such as in sex for example.

My purpose of this analysis isn’t strictly confined to economics but is universal since all men act. However since we are constrained beings we must use means to achieve our ends.

NB. I don’t think action implies uneasiness. It is perfectly possible to act to avoid an undesirable state of affairs arising in the future. At the point of action I don’t need to have felt uneasiness. For example before I long journey I will attempt to wee to avoid the potential pain caused by holding it in the actual journey. At the point weeing however it would be facile to state I had genuine sense of felt uneasiness however it would demonstrate preference. Further the only thing that causes action is the will (I treat it as basic), not uneasiness or anything else. To state otherwise condemns one to determinism which I believe to manifestly wrong.

Consequently I am trying work out whether the justication, not the cause, for all actions can be abstracted as happiness or is there a seperate justification for each individual action. For example do I eat a Mars Bar because I want to be happy or because I like the flavour. It is clear that eating demonstrates preference but what is the reason for the action?

In the back of my head I have Long’s arguments regarding constituitive means. I don’t know how or why but it might be related.

Does that clear my thoughts up even if you may disagree with it?

9

Yeah, we have to be careful because we can quickly end up going in pointless circles. Epicurus defined happiness as the absence of uneasiness (and nothing more, such as positive pleasures from eating or sex). Aristotle investigates happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics Book I and concludes that it is the final end that lies behind all other ends. I think Aristotle’s discussion is quite enlightening:

I think this is the correct litmust test - is this end chosen for its own sake or for the sake of something else? And I think it can probably also be stated that no end is ever happiness-itself. In other words, the idea of happiness/ataraxia/satisfaction is a purely formal one, which is why I think it is dangerous to intertwine anything to do with psychological states into the definition because as soon as we do this, we are no longer dealing with a purely formal concept.

That said, I think we can certainly talk about the psychological correlates of this formal concept - in other words, how does the “wetware” of the human brain actually influence our decision-making in terms of what it deems to be “happiness” or not. On the basis of personal experience of stress, I believe that the brain’s “subconscious” influence on our behavior (through manipulation of our conscious sense of well-being) is vastly more subtle and sophisticated than might be first suspected.

Absolutely and I think that’s why we have to integrate the human capacity to anticipate the long-run consequences of various courses of action. In fact, this is the whole crux of my theory of morality - “wrong” is nothing more or less than a failure to correctly anticipate the long-run consequences of one’s actions, a definition that is perfectly in line with Buddhism as expounded by the Dalai Lama. Since no conscious being ever knowingly chooses its own pain, it is ignorance, he says, which is the cause of all suffering. And if we have taken “suffering” as the antipode of “satisfaction” (the formal poles of choice), then it is easy to see that morality is nothing more or less than enlightenment regarding the long-run consequences of one’s choices.

I’m not familiar with Long’s constitutive means. As for why you eat a Mars Bar, I think it is not difficult to say that eating something that tastes good makes you happy, that Mars Bars taste good, and thus, you eat the Mars Bar in order to be happy. I’m not being glib, the point is expounded in Aristotle above, that means and ends are linked in a “chain” of “sakeness”, so to speak… we do X for the sake of Y, which we do for the sake of Z, which we do for the sake of happiness (that is, no further “sake of” can be given).

Clayton -

10

Can I add a question?

AJ - you say that according to Mises even a wish or desire for a change to take place counts as an attempt, i.e. as a fully-fledged action. I’m confused by this, because I understood action to be a manifestation of one’s will, and I thought Mises contrasted it to a wish? In HA 1.1 he says:

“Action is not simply giving preference (…) He who only wishes and hopes does not interfere actively with the course of events and with the shaping of his own destiny. But active man chooses, determines and tries to reach an end (…) To express wishes and hopes and to announce planned action may be forms of action in so far as they aim in themselves at the realization of a certain purpose. But they must not be confused with the actions to which they refer. (…) Action is a real thing. (…) Action means the employment of means for the attainment of ends.”

I looked this up because when I read your reply I thought I may have misunderstood Mises’ idea, but it seems to be in accordance with what I thought - that he does distinguish action from “just a wish” and there seems to be a prerequisite of employing some means (and that alone would take an acting man outside the purely mental realm, no?) to attain a definite goal for something to count as an action? Or am I getting something wrong? I understand the decision to act as the constitutive moment of action, but I thought it had to be a decision embodied, manifested in some way, rather than action being also the internal state?

11

@GR: I think AJ’s point is that even “choosing not to do anything” can be action… and Mises states precisely this in HA. It is true that wishes/preferences do not constitute action… Mises mentions the weather, in the very paragraph you quoted, as an example where men have preferences but clearly they do not act. But it is incorrect to understand action in some kind of physical sense of “motion”. Action may consist as much in sitting still and doing nothing as it does in moving. The key ingredient is the “employment of means to bring about an end”, whether that employment is visible to the external observer or not.

Clayton -

12

http://mises.org/daily/2103

What do you make of the above?

If true it would mean those actions such as eating a chocolate bar would be internal to the end of attaining happiness rather than just a means towards it. It would be constituitive rather than instrumental. Thinking about this it does seem to ground action more in reality without removing the formal end of happiness.

13

Physiocrat,

Although I agree with Long, I’m not sure that such a distinction works with your example of eating chocolate in reference to hapiness (in the formal sense). I think we might be able to say that eating chocolate is instrumental to bringing about pleasure, and pleasure is constitutive of happiness. But eating chocolate in itself isn’t part of happiness.

Where Long’s distinction really shines is with morality. Once we treat morality as part of happiness, the good life, eudaimonia, etc., we can bypass those problems where immoral actions lead to good consequences. That is, even though stealing might make me better off in some sense, I cannot truly pursue my own hapiness while rejecting justice because justice is simply part of my own hapiness. This is where praxeological analysis ends and conceptual analysis begins by way of constructing a coherent picture where no one part conflicts with another.

14

When faced with the prospect of something bad happening in the future unless you do Action X now, don’t you automatically feel uneasy not doing Action X now?

Say you just downed a 64-oz. of Mountain Dew and got on a bus that you know you won’t be able to get off of for 5 hours (and has no restroom). Of course if you have your wits about you you’ll realize this could end in disaster, despite you feeling (otherwise!) fine right now. Isn’t the terror you feel at that future outcome a felt uneasiness?

You might reply that you could simply “note” that if you don’t get to a bathroom before the bus trip it will be disastrous. But that just changes the timing: if you actually start to set foot on the bus while realizing that you haven’t wizzed and there’s no turning back if you take one more step, I’d say you’re going to experience some massive uneasiness right then.

15

@Phys: Thanks for the link. I think that the Misesean view of happiness (he uses the term “satisfaction”) is not any particular physical state. Rather, it is a hypothetical mental state of complete absence of suffering, complete absence of fear (about the future) or regret (about the past) and so on. The reason we hold this mental state to be hypothetical is precisely because the means which are consistutive of such a mental state are not physically realizable - only in a Garden of Eden where there is no scarcity, where your wishes materialize without instrumentality, etc. can such happiness exist.

Now, this is not to say that every form of scarcity or instumentality must be anhedonic; for example, the hunter relishes the challenge before him precisely by virtue of the scarcity of the game. If game were too abundant, the hunt would have no challenge and, thus, no pleasure. Similarly, playing the piano or swimming a race are situations where the instrumentality is part of the pleasure.

But this is why it’s key to not confuse pleasure itself with satisfaction. Satisfaction is the result of pleasure. In other words, the end of playing the Moonlight Sonata is the enjoyment of hearing it played (by yourself) - else you could wear earplugs and gain just as much pleasure from the playing.

Finally, things get more complex when you enter satisfaction that arises from social dynamics (that is, applause). I think a lot of the complications that arise from thinking about pleasure are the result of the fact that we enjoy doing things (even, for example, working) in part because of the social rewards. In any case, we can always properly orient the discussion by clearly noting that satisfaction is a hypothetical mental state to which all action is, ultimately aiming.

Clayton -

16

Mises was a bit confusing on this point. Adam Knott clarifies this well here:

Regardless of whether Mises was confused or just speaking at different levels of detail in different passages, I contend that once the distracting aspects are cleared away it will be noncontroversial that the essential characteristic of action is wishing.

17

Hmm, I think that you have to include both the wish (the imagined end) and the choice (the “psychokinetic” motion of the body). Both ends and means are bound together in action. Choice unguided by a telos is not action and wishes without the mediation of realizable means are not action.

Clayton -

18

Is it even possible to wish, for instance, to move your finger without actually choosing to move it? I recommend taking a few seconds to try this now.

Alternatively, suppose you awaken one morning and find that your hand is uncomfortably hot. You notice the Sun is shining on it. Imagine two scenarios:

  1. You wish to move it (and choose to move it, and do move it) out of the sunlight.
  2. You wish to move it (and choose to move it), but you find it doesn’t initially respond - perhaps you were sleeping on your stomach with your arm under the pillow and you whole arm has been temporarily paralyzed (happens to me sometimes).

If we say that no action occured in (2), we would seem to be saying that only successful actions count as actions. This seems like it will lead to a dead end, doesn’t it?

19

Debate on Long’s constitutive means.

20

But you are arbitrarily restricting the analysis of means to the body, that is, the part of the world over which you have psychokinetic control. You can wish to move a one-ton boulder but it will not move. Nevertheless, with the appropriate application of a fulcrum and lever, it can be moved. Hence, wishes (preferences) and means are inextricably linked. In the case of control of the body under normal circumstances, I think you’re roughly correct that wishes and action are coextensive (but what if you wish to leap a 10-story building? Or wish to pause your heartbeat for 10 seconds?)

Clayton -