So?

[I_Ryan]

This is disorganized. Try to bear with me.

@Andrew Cain

And why should people care about your ultimate ends without somehow adding in a sense of universal justice?

Assuming that, by “why should people care about your ultimate ends”, you mean “why should people care about” whether they achieve “your ultimate ends”, my answer is this, because they may either (a) hold the same ultimate ends that I do or (b) present the same manifestations that I do, of their ultimate ends, that is, hold the same ends less than ultimate that I do. We may, based on what ends that each of us hold, discover a thing or a process which, if initiated, strengthened, and then preserved, would be a means not only to the ends of one of us but also to those of the other of us, whether those ends are the same or not; which would allow us to establish a situation in which, in helping the other person employ those means to their ends, we help ourselves employ them to our ends, too, and vice versa. We make, on one hand, their gain our gain, making us want them to succeed, and, on the other hand, their loss our loss, making us not want them to fail. We call the common means of which I am talking “society”, “the social order”, “civilization”, or whatever; and we call the guidelines or rules evolved to push us to act to preserve society “morality”, “the moral code”, or whatever.

Of course, if such a situation were to not exist, people would have no incentive to enact society, and its corollaries, such as morality, compassion, et cetera; so they would not exist. (For an explanation of that, see especially this post.)

For support of all of my points here, see the following quotations, especially the boldfaced lines of it:

@Ludwig von Mises

Human effort exerted under the principle of the division of labor in social cooperation achieves, other things remaining equal, a greater output per unit of input than the isolated efforts of solitary individuals. Man’s reason is capable of recognizing this fact and of adapting his conduct accordingly. Thus social cooperation becomes for almost every man the great means for the attainment of all ends. An eminently human common interest, the preservation and intensification of social bonds, is substituted for pitiless biological competition, the significant mark of animal and plant life. Man becomes a social being. He is no longer forced by the inevitable laws of nature to look upon all other specimens of his animal species as deadly foes. Other people become his fellows. For animals the generation of every new member of the species means the appearance of a new rival in the struggle for life. For man, until the optimum size of population is reached, it means rather an improvement than a deterioration in his quest for material well-being.

[…]

As social cooperation is for acting man a means and not an end, no unanimity with regard to value judgments is required to make it work. It is a fact that almost all men agree in aiming at certain ends, at those pleasures which ivory-tower moralists disdain as base and shabby. But it is no less a fact that even the most sublime ends cannot be sought by people who have not first satisfied the wants of their animal body. The loftiest exploits of philosophy, art, and literature would never have been performed by men living outside of society.

@Ludwig von Mises

Society is the outcome of conscious and purposeful behavior. This does not mean that individuals have concluded contracts by virtue of which they have founded human society. The actions which have brought about social cooperation and daily bring it about anew do not aim at anything else than cooperation and coadjuvancy with others for the attainment of definite singular ends[, which, between people, may be different or not]. The total complex of the mutual relations created by such concerted actions is called society. It substitutes collaboration for the–at least conceivable–isolated life of individuals. Society is division of labor and combination of labor. In his capacity as an acting animal man becomes a social animal.

@Ludwig von Mises

Within the frame of social cooperation there can emerge between members of society feelings of sympathy and friendship and a sense of belonging together. These feelings are the source of man’s most delightful and most sublime experiences. They are the most precious adornment of life; they lift the animal species man to the heights of a really human existence. However, they are not, as some have asserted, the agents that have brought about social relationships. They are fruits of social cooperation, they thrive only within its frame; they did not precede the establishment of social relations and are not the seed from which they spring.

The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man’s reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.

So, whether each of us holds the same ends or not, the common means to those ends, whatever they are, is originating, strengthening, and then preserving society. What we now need to analyze are the few people whose ends not only threaten to disintegrate those means, that is, society, but whose ends also depend on it somehow, that is, people living in society but still threatening to mess it up. Usually, we call these people “criminals”. I showed how we manage to get along and care about each other without any reference to any sort of “objective” or “absolute” morality or justice. But what is left are the people whose ends are not only not served by society but also threaten to impair it. How do we get past this? Don’t we need to bring in a sort of “objective” morality here to show that we are “correct” but the people trying to destroy society, like murderers, thieves, rapists, or whatever are “incorrect”? How else would be feel justified in killing these people? Why are our ends more important than theirs? Why is the end of a person A, that is, to raise a family, more important than the end of a person B, to kill people, including people like person A? We feel so passionate about our hatred toward people like B; so, surely, there is a reason why the ends of the person A are more important than those of the person B!

Before we try to answer that question, we should distinguish between two interrelated, but nevertheless separate, senses of the term “morality”, (a) the one referring to our ‘moral sentiments’, that is, what we ‘feel’ about specific interactions between people, and (b) the one referring to our ‘moral thoughts’, that is, what we ‘think’ about such interactions. We not only experience feelings, such as compassion, sadness, or whatever, regarding the fate of other people, even of strangers, pushing us to act in ways to better the situation. But we also think about those situations; for example, we might decide, based on economic theory, which is conscious thought, to fight to halt the massive, impersonal packages of foreign aid given by governments, to ‘third world’ countries, not because we are too ‘selfish’ to give up that money, but because we think that, contrary to the moral sentiments of most people unmolested by thought, and, in fact, even contrary to the moral thoughts of some people, including those of some economists, doing so is hurting those people, whether the people of those countries know it or not.

Our moral sentiments are shorthands; they are the advisements of our subconsciousness, regarding how we should treat other people to serve our own interests, that is, those of what replicators underlie us. But that is not special, odd, or anything; we experience many sorts of advisements from our subconsciousness; for example, our tastes of things advise us to either continue eating or not what we are tasting, through ‘good’ tastes and ‘bad’ tastes, and our fears, or lack of them, in situations, advises us to remain or not in the situation in which we are. (In fact, the categorization of our sentiments is based on (a) what the sentiment advises us to do and (b) what the ‘severity’ or ‘urgentness’ of that advisement is.)

But our moral thoughts are the opposite, they are longhands; they are the conclusions of our consciousness, what we directly control, regarding how to treat other people to serve our own interests, whether, in colloquial speech, we call them ‘selfish’ or not. With our moral thoughts, we make all of the calculations, whether they are the naive, unsystematic thought of a dullard or are the informed, systematic thought of an economist.

Most of us use both of those processes to decide what to do. We weigh the conclusions of our moral thoughts with the advisements of our moral sentiments. What marks psychopaths, in the formal sense of the term, is that they do not experience moral sentiments. They have to rely only on conscious thought to decide how to treat other people. What they do, whether they commit crimes, lie, or not, or whether they are normal, nice, productive citizens, is up only to their moral thought; they are not able to rely on their sentiments to tell them what to do.

Now what do you consider to be objective, universal, or whatever? The first one regards choosing what to do based on what our ends are and what we believe are means to those ends, that is, it regard the nexus of means and ends; and the second one regards what our subconscious advises us to do, also basing its advice on the nexus of means and ends. Why else would either of them evolve? Again, for more information, see especially this post.

@Andrew Cain

Because you are failing to see that if ethics is just a matter of personal preference then implicitly there is no right/wrong ethical system.

But one does exist. What is different from what you are thinking of, though, is that it depends on the perspectives of the people in question. To quote Liberte, although I probably could easily find a quotation of Mises saying the same thing, “[t]here is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ except with regards to actual perceived means to actually felt desires of specific individuals”. What you are saying, which is just a restatement of your position, is that, “if ethics is just a matter of personal preference”, “no [objective] right/wrong ethical system” exists, that is, “no right/wrong ethical system” divorced from the nexus of means and ends, unrelated to the perspectives of the people of which you are talking, exists. But, when it is put that way, it is not ‘scary’ anymore; it is pretty commonsensical. Either way, I will try to substantiate why is makes no sense to talk of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ outside of the nexus of means and ends, mostly just by quoting one of my other posts:

@I. Ryan

From where does truth originate? Well, if you were to walk into a room where a person were drawing a bunch of stuff on a chalkboard that looked like he were trying to solve a problem in physics and you were to notice that he made a “mistake”, you decide to try to explain that to him, but then he says that he is just drawing aimlessly to pass the time, he would, at once, silence your “criticism”. For your point that his work is “incorrect” depended entirely on the assumption that he was desiring to conform his markings to a certain system. Also, in the same way, it makes no sense to say that the orbit of a planet is “incorrect”. For the planet has no desires at all. What it does is just what it does, nothing more. Therefore, the foundation of truth is desire, intention, or whatever you want to call it.

(So in that sense, of course, truth is subjective. But that does not have any sorts of radical implications for science. For what unites the members of a certain science as scientists in that science is that they define certain terms in certain ways and desire to make their use of those terms conform to the real world. If one of them did not desire that, they would be a “counterfeit” or a liar in that science, nothing more. [By the way, I think that this is the only way to even account for the fact that it is possible to lie to each other.])

Now to build a system of praxeology, we need to assume that people have desires. But from where do these desires originate? When we try to explain the desires of a person, we generally invoke their other desires. For example, we might say that a person wants X because he believes that X produces Y and he wants Y. But if that were the only thing that we were to do, we would encounter an infinite regression. For if we were to want to explain every desire in that way, we would need an infinitely long chain. So how do we stifle this infinite regression? We assume that an “ultimate given” exists: that new information completely independent to the rest of the information enters our minds in the form of “primary” or “ultimate” desires, which, incidentally, Mises refers to as “judgements of value”. By the way, this “new information” is basically what people are referring to when they talk of “free will”, “free choice”, or whatever.

Now to call these ultimate desires either correct or incorrect from the perspective of the person having the desire, we have to point to a more fundamental desire. But because of the fact that we defined that desire as an ultimate desire, that more fundamental one does not exist. So it makes no sense to say that, from the perspective of the person having the ultimate desire, it is either “correct” or “incorrect”.

So in conclusion, ultimate desires, “judgements of value” are neither “correct” nor “incorrect”, they are just given. Our only other option is to drop the notion of desire and see “actors” as a compilation of interrelated parts entirely dependent on each other. But I am sure that no person here who understands what I mean when I say that will want to do that. For that would go against the Austrian School by trying to reduce people to simultaneous equations like those found in physics. (See Robert Murphy in his talk “Austrian vs. Neoclassical Analytics” for some talk about how Milton Friedman conceived economics in that way.)

(See also my clarification of that post.)

But, despite all of that, I think that you are talking of something else. I think that you are talking about this, in which I answer “no” to all of those questions in my fourth paragraph:

@I. Ryan

Now considering that “correctness” depends on the perspectives of individuals, not a natural, external, “objective” thing, if we encounter two perspectives which each have ultimate desires conflicting with the other, ultimate desires that, if one were satisfied, would preclude that the other were satisfied, is it possible to say whose perspective is more “correct”? Of course not. For I already established that ultimate desires are neither true nor false, they are just given. So this implies that people whose ultimate desires respect life, like most of us here, are not any more “correct” than people whose ultimate desires do not do so, like some psychopaths; they are just different. We are able to justify jailing them or killing them only by reference to our own self-interest. Incidentally, the only reason that society is able to exist is that most people are like us and therefore have the power to selfishly vanquish the people with conflicting desires.

@I. Ryan

I will now turn to a lengthy quotation of a discussion that happened a few months ago[, that is, this one, which I already linked to,] and that engages your very criticism and substantiates my skepticism of the possibility of what you called “an ethics that is at the same time both universal and eternal, holding true for all times and in all places”. It does not end well, though. It implies that we do not occupy a higher ground than those people who we consider to be the scum of the earth, the murderers, bandits, rapists, and whatever. It implies merely that, as the majority, we beat such characters into submission. It could not, though, unless we are prepared to acquiesce to the poverty of the “lower” animals, unless we are prepared to forgo the “advantages” of the division of labor, the very institution, after all, that explains the origination of morality, benevolence, and the values of your religion, be any other way!

Far from failing to see that, I wrote it out explicitly. Just because something is uncomfortable, though, does not make it false.

@Andrew Cain

It becomes normative, in the sense that all is equal.

No, I am claiming that, outside the nexus of means and ends, no magnitudes of rightness or wrongness exist; and, if two things are equal, their magnitudes are equal. It makes no sense to say that, because a quality does not exist, that quality applies equally to two different things. Instead, it just does not apply at all.

@Andrew Cain

Let us say you happen upon a thief. He prefers to steal your wallet, you prefer to keep it. You cannot lay claim that his preference are wrong. How could you praxeologically resist his actions without establish a normative statement of values which center around a universal sense of justice in which you are no longer being praxeological?

I do not want to get robbed. So I try to avoid things like that. You are begging the question by asking what my objective, universal “justification” is. I am arguing that no such thing exists.

@Andrew Cain

I’m not saying there is such a thing as ‘perfect justice.’

I never said that you did; you are trying to extend my analogy past its relevance.

@Andrew Cain

It has a goalpoint which would indicate positives like property property, non-violence, voluntarism.

Which individuals drive; which does not contradict what I am saying. Are you saying that markets move independently to the means and ends of individuals?

@Andrew Cain

I’m not expecting justice to catch every criminal or right every wrong but there is a sense of what justice should always be irrespective of what it is now.

I am not sure what the last part of that means; but I was not saying that you were expecting that.