Going to war is destructive economically, and for people and property. In his usage of morality it makes sense. Expand on tending to the “welfare of society”. Protection of life, liberty, health, and private property is protection against aggression. It’s not necessarily a morality issue on how you see it.
and how exactly do I see it?
when I read ‘proving moral justification’, etc… how am I seeing it?
here’s the quotes:
"As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks. Everything that goes beyond this is an evil." - Mises
"we are at the same time providing proof of the moral justification for private property and for the capitalist social order based upon it.
Morality consists in" - Mises
Yes.
then what are you disagreeing with? why are you arguing against Mises being a Liberal? What’s wrong with Mises mentioned that life, liberty, health, and private property need to be protected? What’s wrong with the fact that life, liberty, health, and private property are natural rights? I don’t even need to label them as natural rights, but they are, and that doesn’t change the meaning of those concepts.
I’m not.
sorry i edited.
I don’t see how that changes anything.
Whatever your opinions may be on the necessary connections of concepts, and whatever your syncretic tendencies are, it is entirely misleading to say Mises was a natural rights proponent.
Well, beyond that. Beyond what Mises thought, because I’m already convinced he didn’t intellectually apprehend what natural law/rights were. That definition he provided is Hobbes and maybe Spinoza which from those very days the natural law tradition has abhorred as they changed the very meanings of “nature” and “natural” away from a tradition conceptualization that had been on-going for over a thousand years before and hundreds of years since. That is incidentally a side point. Yet within the natural law tradition those concepts “nature” and “natural” have retained their meaning. They mean logical, intellectual, and reasoned of reality.
Given that Mises made an error in his semantics that doesn’t change anything.
I’m asking you.
What is wrong with life, liberty, health, and private property being concepts of natural rights? As I stated. Take away the label natural rights and those concepts do not change in meaning one iota. So what is wrong with life, liberty, health, and private property being protected?
If you don’t think Mises even understood natural law/rights doctrine, then I’m assuming you now agree that he didn’t promote it. I’m glad we’ve at least found that much common ground.
According to my value judgment, nothing.
I’ve changed my rating of this thread from 1 star to 5, because I think we’ve covered important ground here.
Perhaps. [:P]
Right. He didn’t promote the natural law he was defining. And who would! Except Hobbesists.
I am pointing out that Mises unknowingly supported natural law in accord with it’s traditional usage. It’s the way logic is. To logically deduce that the protection of life, liberty, health, and private property is good is an exercise in natural law of human nature because all that means is to intellectually apprehend reality based on science. Logically it is sound to protect those ‘things’. (I say this hoping by now that you know that I know what Mises means and have that’s why I don’t know why you think otherwise when it comes to ethics). Look back on Bert’s post. You for awhile would say those kinds of thing: ‘not in the way I mean it’. How am I supposed to answer that? How does he or you know how I mean it? It would make it easier to point out something I wrote that misrepresents.
And that’s all it ever is. A value judgment. Nobody has ever disagreed with that. It’s axiomatic. It’s human action. It’s how we are. That’s why it has logically been comprehended that only individuals reason and have free-will. By free-will what I mean is only individuals choose to either do what meets their goal of prosperity and peace or to choose the incorrect means to attain such ends. Politics and law go a bit further because it would be horrible in not protecting life, liberty, health, and private property. Thereby institutions are established to protect those ‘rights’ or ‘things that are’. Some people choose not to. Protection becomes necessary for those people willing to protect them. It’s all value-judgments. It’s always based on the individual.
Do you see why I feel and Conza and others feel that there has been a lot of misconceptions and misrepresentations going on? I wasn’t trying to misrepresent Mises. I only quoted him. Where did I suggest anything that differed from your understanding? I only quoted him and then you said I am misrepresenting him. How can I be doing that when I only quoted him? In hindsight, as I was getting to, maybe you now know how it feels to be misrepresented and conceptualized for months. Think this was only one thread for one night and day. I feel like you and others have been conceptualizing what natural law is for months on end. Why do you think we keep saying over and over again that what you are saying is wrong about natural law and that’s not what natural law is, etc…? I mean we are not simply saying that for kicks. We even point out line by line referring to the misconceptions and showing why it is wrong. The mushroom topic of Adam’s. I mean, nowhere was Rothbard saying that that is a poltical-legal issue. He was simply pointing out an example of an ethical situation, like Mises saying to do good for the whole of society. I mean if I walked up to somebody that was about to eat a poison mushroom and said nothing. I mean I knew for a fact that that mushroom would kill that person, but didn’t say a word. I couldn’t go to jail or there would be no legal repercussions, but would it conflict with my conscience? Would I feel perturb to have not help him? Yes I would have thought about it long afterwards on how wrong and immoral that was of me, personally me, because I’m not that kind of guy. I would feel horrible the rest of my life knowing that I could have saved that person’s life and I said nothing.
Whether somebody wants to call those things natural rights or not. It doesn’t change the fact of what they are. It doesn’t change their nature, ie. definition. Life, liberty, health, and private property are what they are. I don’t need to define them you know what they mean.
I know this might be not kosher to comment on my own post but I want to infer an answer from this. The reason why I try to maintain natural rights is because my maintaining of them is my protecting of life, liberty, and property. I hope to only ever have to do that for the most part of my life philosophically and never have to get to the point of having to protect life, liberty, and property with physical self-defense. That’s the, maybe, only reason I philosophically maintain that position because for me to maintain is to protect. I am only trying to protect life, liberty, and property.
More at the topic Wertfreiheit.
Strictly speaking, this is true. However, I think part of Putnam’s point would be that science inherently presupposes what might be called epistemological normatives (most fundamentally, the value of truth). So we could say that the other side of the coin is that there really is no such thing as a fully value-free science in terms of human beings being the people investigating, already within the assumptions of certain norms, since there really is no such thing as stepping outside of the realm of human experience and value-laden perspective. The enterprise of science already is bound up in norms. Scientific methods are epistemic-normative formulas for obtaining truth-value, and scientists are not value-free observers.
Also, even if we grant that the object of science cannot be the discovery of oughts, I would disagree with the scientistic assumption that ethics has to be a scientific enterprise to contain truth-value in the first place. That is, even if we aknowledge that ethics is “philosophical but not scientific”, I don’t think that would make ethics any less valid of an enterprise because I don’t think that positive science has a monopoly on truth-value. I find the tendency to completely dismiss things because they “aren’t scientific” to be a bit superficial. Certainly not a sound understanding of the nature and scope of science, since science is not totalistic in nature and completely independant of philosophy.
Indeed, all actions presuppose values, including attempting a deduction or embarking upon research; there is no such thing as a value-free action. Misesian wertfrreiheit says nothing about some impossible value-free man who conducts science. That would be a contradiction in terms which Mises never put forth. The fact that a scientist’s motives cannot be value free does not imply that his method cannot be.
It would be a shame if Putnam’s “point” (whoever’s misconceptions it addresses) provided cover for those so eager to insert values into science to say, “Well the scientist as a man has values anyway, so we may as well derive oughts from is-es to our heart’s delight!”
To be clear, my own intent goes in two directions. On one hand, I strongly disagree with those who would attempt to claim that they can derive ethics directly from science, that they have a strictly “scientific ethics”. On the other hand, I strongly disagree with those who would to attempt to use this gulf between science and ethics as a basis for diminishing or nullifying ethics.
What I would say is that the fact/value dichotomy isn’t absolute. They aren’t completely disconnected. There definitely are philosophical complications in the attempt to directly derive a value from a fact, but I would also say that there are philosophical complications in the attempt to portray “the facts” as completely disconnected from values. In fact, that oddly seems to imply a “view from nowhere” or a claim of transcendance that itself is not “scientific”.
The way that the fact/value dichotomy is often used, primacy is assumed on the behalf of “the facts”. I believe this heirarchical binary doesn’t necessarily hold and that a strict is-ought bridge isn’t necessary to validate ethics. I don’t think a big problem arises if we don’t stick to the possible options given to us by the dominant western metaphysical tradition, a tradition that tends to create unecessary problems or dillemas that we are forced to pick sides in by the terms set.
How so?