Ethics inasmuch as it is a quest for universal, absolute, and objective "ought"s, is only a science insofar as Plato’s Theory of the Forms and Ricardo’s Labor Theory of Value is part of science; if it is a science, it is a vain one. It is a hunt for a Chimera.
In seeking the Form of Justice, the Form of the Good, and the Form of Beauty, Plato was trying to discover universal, absolute, and objective values.
Ricardo was doing much the same when he tried to infer objective value from the intrinsic qualities of goods.
And Rothbardian ethicists do much the same when they try to infer universal, absolute, and objective values from the intrinsic qualities of man.
This whole strain of thought is known as conceptual realism. Just as Aristotle overthrew Platonic conceptual realism and Menger overthrew Ricardian conceptual realism, so should have Hume and Mises preempted the conceptual realism implicit in the Rothbardian insistence that justice has any kind of existence outside of the mind of the individual.
you quoting me is a strawman in association with your whole argument. and I don’t appreciate you’re false imposition of me associated with your post. so please take away my quote. it’s intellectually dishonest. I wait for this to be enacted in a timely manner.
Let me just “throw it out” that there is an objective value of some sort. If I remember (I might be incorrect), hume just explained where our sense of morality came from but he didn’t answer whether there was some objective value.
Perhaps this objective value is “improve yourself”?
Good post lilburne, but I fear that, just as platonic realism survives today among contemporary philosophers like Goldstein and Ricardian value theory survives among most non-economists, the search for the ‘one true ethic’ shall continue into the foreseeable future. It is the natural consequence of a cultural worldview that is insufficiently naturalistic and fears reductionism.
I think this is a consequence of many of the libertarian philosophers having a personal experience with Rothbard that they did not have with Mises, and Mises’ ideas, outside of their renaissance by Rothbard with MES, still not being explored outside the Rothbardian paradigm, and the few who do seem to pursue this (GMU crowd?) aren’t radical libertarians. I suspect the next generation may be more likely to challenge Rothbard, just as it is only the last generation who were finally comfortable challenging Rand and Reagan.
What is very interesting is how with technology, information is advancing faster than our own biases can adjust, even confirmation biases. I’ve accepted that what I know today could all be obsolete in a decade or two. The only way to avoid that is to unplug and become a hermit. It actually sounds tempting.
If all moral propositions were false then it would be impossible for some moral proposition to be true but then that would eliminate utilitarianism and every other ism in the history of the world. But, come on now, that’s just implausible moral questions come up everywhere and even small things like etiquette or any “ought to” ever would be illicit?!
what’s so hard about editing out my quote? Am I really asking too much of you to make a few clicks and erase - no - seeing that it’s not intellectually honest to associate my quote with your post. But seeing that you’ve been in and out of this thread without addressing this yet, then it only validates what I’ve known all along but only on a deeper level. It is quite unfortunate, but I’d like to think not all is lost.
If “utilitarianism” means “that which satisfies the largest group of people is best/good”, then yes, it’s false. It’s based on a premise that cannot be proven, namely that satisfying the largest group of people is somehow better than satisfying a smaller group. It’s an assertion, an expression of preference.
Subjectivist libertarians often seem to cling to utilitarian arguments because that’s what resonates with most people. Most people’s view of a “just” socio-economic system is utilitarian in some form. Thus, the utilitarian case for liberty is likely to have the greatest ROI. It’s not that we are necessarily utilitarians just because we like to argue that way.
Also, it’s not illicit for you to discuss the intricacies of etiquette and social mores. Just realize that you’re in a battle of preferences, and that ultimately not one single preferential premise can be proven to be “true” beyond doubt. Unfortunately, many thinkers that got involved in ethics, including Rothbard, came to different conclusions.
Respectable enough, but I still harbor suspicions. What if you get into a conversation about social mores, that would mean that you’re fighting over false things? And any moral justification for fighting over false things would also be false.
And again, if you argue logically about ethics (which are false) then you can have true premises with a false conclusion and be logical at the same time -which is absurd.
So there must be non moral reasons for arguing about morality or/and, any sound argument about “whether or not a is good” would be false. Which is contradictory.
Or maybe none of this matters since it is all based on an unproven premise?
Right, and the GMU non-Rothbardians tend to be more Hayekian than Misesian. As revered as Mises is, there seems to actually be very few Misesians, in the sense of Mises being their chief influence.
Rebecca Goldstein, earned her PHD from Princeton and has taught at Columbia and Rutgers. I had not heard of her until reading her biography of Kurt Godel where I learned of her self-professed platonic realism (and interprets Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems as evidence for mathematical realism).
This means that the statement “you ought to do something” doesn’t have a truth value. But it is a statement so it must have truth conditions. But truth conditions are possible truth values. So that statement has no truth conditions which is just weird…
That means the statement is non capable of being analyzed?
Or does it not have a truth value in that “unicorns have horns” doesn’t have a truth value but has truth conditions?