And what do you think of Long’s discussion here, p.19-21? Here’s the last paragraph:
Whatever else they may disagree on, Friedman and Mises agree that an a priori ethics is impossible. Those who defend the possibility of a rationally justifiable ethics, Mises contends, are essentially claiming that moral knowledge is “imparted to man by an inner voice, i.e., by intuition,” and fail to recognize that “with regard to the interpretation of the inner voice . . . no method of peacefully settling . . . disagreements can be found” (Mises 1985, p. 53). The parallel between Mises’s criticism of a priori ethics and Friedman’s criticism of Mises’s own a priori economics is striking—and should lead us to suspect that Mises has here fallen into Friedman’s own confusion between the private character of an “inner voice” and the public character of logic.
So given that Mises’ rejection of a priori ethics is exactly analogous to Friedman’s rejection of a priori economics, it would seem that praxeologists are committed to objective, a priori ethics.
From what I understand about praxeological economics, the starting axiom is that “individuals act to increase their satisfaction” which I think is descriptive of behavior that Mises observed, or the conclusions he drew from thinking about the behavior of individuals. This sort of descriptive axiom is the result of observations of action, applied to attempt to understand future action. I have a hard time envisioning a morality based statement that could be applied as broadly as the action axiom.
In the realm of economics, it is not possible to reasonably disagree on human action. The only disagreement that Friedman could be talking about is in the logical steps of deduction. If the people are reasonable, they will find the error one is making. If one is unreasonable, he will act as Friedman suggests, but that person would thereby exclude himself from the community of economists. Empirically, consider that, whatever else Alabama might be, it is reasonably good on gun rights. Yet there has never been a shootout at the meetings of Austrian economists.
Analogies can be misleading. To say that two things are analogous is not a guarantee that they are both true or both false. In this case, though, it’s irrelevant. One could believe in objective ethics without believing that arguing about ethics is as useful as arguing about economics.
This is an argument from ignorance. Economics, properly constrained, is a sub-discipline of praxeology. Law can embody cultural or individual subjective preference, but praxeology applied to legal philosophy must remain value-free.
I guess I didn’t realize by “morality”, you meant what I call “ethics”. Do you understand a bit now what I meant by the ethical-aesthetical and moral-legal divide? See how ethics and morality get used interchangeably and the problems it causes?
I guess so, at least insomuch as we understand the human form of life. I wouldn’t get hung up on considering a moral law being “absolute”. People aren’t homogeneous elements, with valuations we can subject to typical empirical testing. Our actions will be necessarily colored with out personal preferences, but the framework within which we strive is a different matter. Sorry if I can’t explain it better for now. Reinach also called this “the essential laws of right”.
Yes, and again I am sorry that I can’t offer a better explanation for now. The paper in the OP looks pretty good and I am going to have a read through it.
Non sequitur. Even if a rejection of a doctrine is unsound, it doesn’t thereby follow that the doctrine in question is necessarily sound.
And anyway, Long is misrepresenting Mises’ argument. In that passage from Theory and History, chapter 3, Mises isn’t even addressing a priori ethics as a whole. He’s specifically addressing intuitionism: “the traditional manner of dealing with ethical precepts” that common people, not philosophers, tend to adopt. He’s not saying ALL a priori ethical doctrines are intuitionist, or stem from an inner voice; much less does he dismiss natural law ethical doctrines for allegedly being “intuitionist.” He discusses natural law ethical doctrines, and their own inherent particular weakness, in an earlier section, where he marshals an entirely different argument (emphasis added):
The chief accomplishment of the natural law idea was its rejection of the doctrine (sometimes called legal positivism) according to which the ultimate source of statute law is to be seen in the superior military power of the legislator who is in a position to beat into submission all those defying his ordinances. Natural law taught that statutory laws can be bad laws, and it contrasted with the bad laws the good laws to which it ascribed divine or natural origin. But it was an illusion to deny that the best system of laws cannot be put into practice unless supported and enforced by military supremacy. The philosophers shut their eyes to manifest historical facts. They refused to admit that the causes they considered just made progress only because their partisans defeated the defenders of the bad causes. The Christian faith owes it success to a long series of victorious battles and campaigns, from various battles between rival Roman imperators and caesars down to the campaigns that opened the Orient to the activities of missionaries. The cause of American independence triumphed because the British forces were defeated by the insurgents and the French. It is a sad truth that Mars is for the big battalions, not for the good causes. To maintain the opposite opinion implies the belief that the outcome of an armed conflict is an ordeal by combat in which God always grants victory to the champions of the just cause. But such an assumption would annul all the essentials of the doctrine of natural law, whose basic idea was to contrast to the positive laws, promulgated and enforced by those in power, a “higher” law grounded in the innermost nature of man.
Yet all these deficiencies and contradictions of the doctrine of natural law must not prevent us from recognizing its sound nucleus. Hidden in a heap of illusions and quite arbitrary prepossessions was the idea that every valid law of a country was open to critical examination by reason. About the standard to be applied in such an examination the older representatives of the school had only vague notions. They referred to nature and were reluctant to admit that the ultimate standard of good and bad must be found in the effects produced by a law. Utilitarianism finally completed the intellectual evolution inaugurated by the Greek Sophists.
But neither utilitarianism nor any of the varieties of the doctrine of natural law could or did find a way to eliminate the conflict of antagonistic judgments of value. It is useless to emphasize that nature is the ultimate arbiter of what is right and what is wrong. Nature does not clearly reveal its plans and intentions to man. Thus the appeal to natural law does not settle the dispute. It merely substitutes dissent concerning the interpretation of natural law for dissenting judgments of value. Utilitarianism, on the other hand, does not deal at all with ultimate ends and judgments of value. It invariably refers only to means.
The issue is whether in speaking about a priori, we are speaking about the content or the form of actions.
Mises’s economics is a priori to the extent it only refers to the form of economic propositions, and not their material content:
“Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences.” (HA, 3rd rev. p.32)(emphasis added)
So Misesian praxeology is a priori because it refers only to categories of action without reference to the content of the particular action.
The objective, a priori ethics you are referring to, as I understand it, is one that refers to the content of the individual case. (i.e., eating poisonous mushrooms is “objectively” immoral) Mises would deny that an a priori ethics that tries to make universally valid propositions using “contentual” as opposed to “formal” reasoning, is possible.
He would not deny that an a priori science that studies “ethical actions” (actions of an ethical nature) is impossible. Because it is possible to study such actions formally, without reference to any particular ethical action.
As Mises stated:
“It would be preposterous to assert apodictically that science will never succeed in developing a praxeological aprioristic doctrine of political organization…” (UF, p.98)
The difference between what Mises had in mind, and what objective ethics has in mind, is a purely formal approach, versus an approach that tries to reach conclusions that refer to partcular content but are still universally valid (i.e, eating poisonous mushrooms is “objectively” immoral).
It is important to realize that this conception of things didn’t originate with Mises. This view is essential to Menger’s conception of theoretical exact science, which is Menger’s term for praxeology:
“Strict (exact) laws of phenomena can never be the result of the realistic school of thought in theoretical research even if this were the most perfect conceivable and its fundamental observation the most comprehensive and most critical.”
Menger’s point is the same as Mises’s. To make universally valid, a priori propositions, the concepts must be stripped of material content:
“…with the assumption of strictly typical elements, of their exact measure, and of their complete isolation form all other causative factors, it (praxeology) does to be sure, and indeed on the basis of the rules of cognition characterized by us above, arrive at laws of phenomena which are not only absolute, but according to our laws of thinking simply cannot be thought of in any other way but as absolute. That is, it arrives at exact laws, the so-called “laws of nature” of phenomena.” (Menger, Investigations, Book 1, Chapter 4)(emphasis added)
So the issue is whether in discussing the idea of an a priori ethics, we are talking about the attempt to arrive at an a priori “justification” for a set of concrete ethical norms, or, whether we are talking about a set of a priori propositions concerning actions of an ethical nature (actions directed toward another person) that are universally valid based on the beginning presuppositions and because the propositions do not refer to specific content. Objective ethics is concerned with the former, praxeology with the latter.
Those that come through the Rothard school typically mis-conceive the nature of Mises’s a priori system. Hoppe makes the same mistake:
“Mises, however, although his idea of praxeology and his construction of an entire body of praxeological thought places him among the greats of the modern Western tradition of rationalism in the search for certain foundations, does not think that another claim of this tradition can be made good: the claim for certain foundations also in ethical matters. According to Mises there exists no ultimate justification for ethical propositions in the same sense as there exists one for economic propositions.” (“On the Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property”)
Mises’s system is based on a formal construct that derives from the phenomenon of action; aiming at ends. The foundations of his system are certain because they are anchored in this phenomenon and deduced from it without reference to the concrete objects of action:
“Praxeology envisages the successful attainment of these goals though the scrutiny of human affairs from a specific point of view that recognizes the teleological and rational nature of human action. This point of view makes possible the construction of chains of reasoning that are purely formal, in the sense that they refer to goods, services or factors of production only abstractly; they depend for their validity not on the specific objects with which human action may be concretely concerned, but only on postulated attitudes of men towards them.” (Kirzner, The Economic Point of View, p.179)(emphasis added)
What Rothbard, Hoppe, Long, and others failed to consider, is whether there are actions of an ethical nature in contradistinction to actions aimed toward the market economy. Rothbard supported the concept of human action and the logic of action to the extent it reached conclusions he was in agreement with concerning market phenomena. But he abandoned and rejected the entire idea of human action in the realms of human action outside the market economy. But this was a mistake, since there are obviously human actions (goal-directed actions) that traditional economics does not treat:
“The subject matter of economics came to be connected with the material things that are the objects of traffic in the market; it came to be linked peculiarly with the use of money in market transactions or with the special social relationships that characterize the market system. Where writers came closest to the recognition that these criteria were only accidental characteristics of the affairs upon which economic analysis could be brought to bear, where they were able to glimpse the congenerousness of the specifically economic type of analysis with the underlying actions of men, they were unable to follow this clue to the conclusion to which it pointed.”
“In finding the economic aspect of activities in general to consist in concern with the ends-means relationship, this conception too includes within its scope kinds of actions with which economics has had traditionally little to do.” (Kirzner, The Economic Point of View, p.183)(emphasis added)
So what has happened is that following Rothbard, most Austrian social theorists have conceived ethics as a contentual-oriented discipline, and economics via praxeology as a formal, logical, and deductive discipline. They have concluded that praxeology as a discipline can shed no light on the subject realm of ethics.
“This procedure is perfectly proper for the formal science of praxeology, or economic theory, but not necessarily elsewhere.” (EOL, p.12)
Then they ask, since economics is a priori, why can’t ethics be a priori ? And they simply don’t realize or refuse to recognize, it is because one is based on formal reasoning while the other departs from formal reasoning and tries to arrive at a system of universally valid concrete norms of behavior (eating poisonous mushrooms is objectively immoral).
In other words, on the one hand they assert that praxeology doesn’t apply to ethical phenomena, then, on the other hand they ask: why can’t ethics be a priori?
Wrong, totally wrong. Massive strawman & non sequitur right there.
There is a difference between political philosophy & personal morality / ethics. One being universal (political philosophy) & the other being individual, both being objective however.
In Rothbard’s writings he was putting forward a system / theory of political philosophy, folks like you then strawman him - much like that ‘chimera’ post… contending that he was trying to put forward a ‘universal’ objective value [and force it on others], within the ‘individual’ / personal ethics realm, which he was not. You and others don’t make a distinction & that is epic fail.
"Libertarianism, then, is a philosophy seeking a policy. But what else can a libertarian philosophy say about strategy, about “policy”? In the first place, surely—again in ’s words—it must say that liberty is the “highest political end,” the overriding goal of libertarian philosophy. Highest politicalend, of course, does not mean “highest end” for man in general. Indeed, every individual has a variety of personal ends and differing hierarchies of importance for these goals on his personal scale of values.Politicalphilosophy is that subset of ethical philosophy which deals specifically withpolitics, that is, the proper role ofviolencein human life (and hence the explication of such concepts as crime and property). Indeed, a libertarian world would beone in which every individual would at last be free to seek and pursue his own ends—to “pursue happiness,” in the felicitous Jeffersonian phrase." - TEOL, chp 30
In the natural law tradition, Mises has this wrong here, nature means intellect. (the rest of the human and the rest of the world, ie. reality). Intellect is means to ends. Intellect is deriving law out of the reality of circumstances with axioms and logical deductions. To self-reflect and experience - what is being self-reflected upon and what is known in experience is nature, ie reality. Human’s are not isolated but are part of nature. When a human self-reflects the human is self-reflecting upon nature but in this sense it is intellectually known that it is the nature of a human that is being reflected upon.
Conza did a good post of explaining the distinction between political and personal ethics.
There is a logical deduction of liberty, ie. the absence of initiated physical aggression and threat thereof, - politically - meaning what that means for each individual not having physical aggression initiated against him or her self. Wars and battles, initiating physical aggression type, are not economical, prosperous, nor obviously peaceful. To advocate making decisions to preemptive strike violates the NAP and then there is nothing left to distinguish between a libertarian and non-libertarian. Or simply put, a civil or uncivil human being.
Mises is right in that there can be no other way to decipher ethics, because they don’t exist, they are simply preferences. The only thing which we should focus on is the most logical and least violent type of inherently violent preferences possible, however both are basically wrong because objective ethics cannot exist, Mises has the far more logical position as he admits that there is nothing decipherable or very real about them, merely one’s consciousness.
Ethics are the final mysticism to be overcome by most people, but few actually do so.
^^^^ this is the kind of disinformation that always starts when strawman posts end up in threads.
edit: And TLAR, I will try to discuss with you, if you’re up to it, and though our last discussion was very healthy and I enjoyed it greatly it did end with me wondering if you conceive the difference between axiomatic and logical deductions. It would be an honor to go through that once again, but if we don’t have the terms down pat, then we may not reach the current discussion in this thread any time soon and it might be prudent to avoid a discussion in this thread on the topic as to not derail the thread. Maybe we could private message?
eating poisonuous mushrooms is aprior unethical? Nowhere has Rothbard or any rational science of justice adhered to anything remotely near such.
It is because of praxeologic that the criminal as well as the innocent are known. Natural law of human nature is able to make the distinction same as a praxeologic-economists is able to make the distinction between a socialist and free marketer. And it is human action to reach the ends based on the means, meaning, a decision is made by each individual. Which end does the individual want and what are the best means to such an end? To remain innocent or become a criminal? To form a socialist market or free market? A choice is made it is human action. Whether that choice is shared during any scientific investigation, ie when the economist refrains from being an entrepreneur, doesn’t mean the economist doesn’t shop around between various stores in the market, invest in stock, or own a business on the side of his or her studies; nor does the entrepreneur need to not investigate economist findings and make choices, ie. Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, etc…
I think to say that ethical views are “simply preferences” is stating the case a bit too strongly (which the opposition will nail you on), in that there are biological components to consider. It’s especially unsettling at first glance to be told that all moral impulses are merely arbitrary, and it provokes unfavorable initial reactions. I think this type of reaction can be mitigated with a little more of a complete picture.
Although not particularly libertarian, the discussion touches on nearly all the perennial topics of the recent ethics threads here on the LvMI forums, and even noted panarchist Patri Friedman joins in (as does Silas Barta who often posts on the Mises blog).