In relation to this, I found it interesting that in Horowitz’s Rothbard piece the other day (answered by Block), Horowitz implies that as opposed to a Rothbardian connection to Mises, one might choose a Kirznerian connection to Mises.
What seems to come out of Horowitz’s piece—and this is reinforced by Block’s reply—is the idea of choosing between students of Mises, with no explicit reason given why one couldn’t simply consider oneself a direct student of Mises. LvMi advocates being Rothbardian, while GMU apparently advocates being Hayekian or Kirznerian, both sides with Mises as common denominator. Why the interposition of an “intermediary” scholar between themselves and Mises?
My answer: because the scientific method Mises represents is theoretically restrictive. To subscribe explicitly to the paradigm Mises advances is to accept that one can be scientific but value-free on the one hand, or, express one’s values but with no scientific basis on the other hand. This explains why libertarian scholars want to maintain an intellectual distance between themselves and Mises. They do this by interposing another scholar between themselves and Mises–a scholar who does not subscribe to as clear a distinction between value-free science and value advocacy as does Mises.
Mises writes in Socialism: “It must be emphasized again: there is no such thing as a scientific ought.”
After a lifetime of study under Mises, Rothbard, chafing under the constraints of Wertfreiheit, complains in The Ethics of Liberty that Mises is an “opponent of any sort of objective ethics.”
People want to express their concrete desires in scientific form. They don’t want to explicitly say “my desire for concrete thing X has no scientific basis.”
They don’t want to explicitly confine themselves within a scientific paradigm which includes as one of its fundamental insights, as AJ has referred to:
“We orginally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it; and we do this because our sensuous or supesensuous nature so requires. There is, thus, no basis for recognizing what is good and worth wishing for outside the faculty of desiring–i.e., the original desire and wish themselves.” (Epistemological Problems, p.151)
Mises’s system is inconveniently inhospitable to one who would attempt to express one’s personal desires as scientifically “justified.” And thus the need for an intellectual buffer between the scholar attempting to scientifically ground his/her concrete values, and Mises who argues that one’s concrete values can have no scientific grounding.
From an arm’s length distance, we gain the credibility of Mises’s scientific conclusions regarding inescapable market processes. By staying at arm’s length distance, we may ignore the methodological grounding by which Mises reaches his scientific conclusions, and substitute our own methodology more suitable for reaching the moral and ethical conclusions we want to reach.
In Mises’s system, desire is “formalized” in the scientific conceptual framework. Desire is stripped of content and considered in its purely formal nature…desire “as such.”
Concrete desires then are the accidental, environmental, particular, individual, etc… They have no scientific basis. They are the particular or concrete desires or values that people happen to have, but which they do not necessarily have to have.
This binary system of thought is theoretically confining. It is self-disciplining. Scholars who want to provide a scientific basis for their preferences know intuitively if not consciously that they have no friend in Mises or Hume (e.g., the fact-value or is-ought gap). And thus, as I have argued (and I suppose it is no secret), libertarian normative ethics begins with a critique of utilitarianism (in its egoistic, formalistic, “if-then” sense), and this means a critique of Mises and Hume.
This will also mean a critique of Misesian praxeology (as the search for exact laws of human action)—though not necessarily a critique of the Rothbardian conception of praxeology (conceived merely as a form of supposition/counter-supposition reasoninig).
As Lilburne’s original post implies, the divide in libertarian ethics theory seems to be between those who consider Hume and Mises as foundational thinkers whose systems of thought can be built upon, and those who consider Hume and Mises as adversarial obstacles whose propositions must be overcome and proven wrong for the discipline of libertarian ethics to succeed.
And thus, there is a Methodenstreit occurring in libertarian ethics theory:
http://mises.org/journals/scholar/knott.pdf
I believe it is important to add that this debate is not, as many probably believe, between those who believe that there is a rational basis for ethics, and those who deny that any rational basis for ethics exists. The debate in my opinion will inevitably reduce to the question of whether a rational framework or theory of ethical phenomena (ethical actions) can be constructed on the basis of an objectively conceived reality, independent of the subjective desires (desires of the subject) of individual actors, or, whether a science of ethical actions must be constructed, as Mises asserts, based on the formal conception of human action as striving for ends.
The debate is not about the assertion of ethics versus the denial of ethics. The debate is about the objective versus the subjective conceptual foundations of a theory of human ethical actions.
I would like to add one last insight in closing.
In the debate over objective ethics versus value-free science, certain patterns repeat. One of them is the tendency among some to quickly resort to terms of opprobrium when their views are challenged. I think I can shed some light on this so that there is a better understanding of why this pattern repeats.
In his 2003/2004 article which appeared in “The Free Radical,” and was entitled “Reconciling Austrian and Objectivist Value Theories,” Dr. Edward Younkins provides the following insights into Ayn Rand’s objective ethics theory:
“For Rand, all human values are moral values that are essential to the ethical standard of human nature in general and the particular human life of who the agent is.”
and:
“From Ayn Rand’s perspective, every human value is a moral value (including economic value) that is important to the ethical standard of man’s life qua man. Rand viewed every human choice as a moral choice involving moral values.”
I don’t think we all realize how profound this aspect of objective ethics theory is. In moral theorizing, the two primary categories are good and evil (moral/immoral, etc…). In Randian ethics, as a comprehensive theory of human action and human behavior, all values are moral values. And this means that every object of human action, every object of discussion and analysis, every object of debate, including all participants in the debate, must eventually be categorized as either good or evil or some sub-class belonging to one of these primary moral classes. E.g., honest/dishonest, etc…
Some of us may be arguing or debating under an implicit belief that in a debate over objective ethics, some of the “values” of discussion (some parts of the discussion) are in some sense “neutral,” carrying no particular moral connotation or aspect.
But I believe it is important to realize that in the Randian system, all values are ultimately moral values. And this means that in the Randian system, and in systems of the same general character, the moral theorizer ultimately makes a moral judgment about every value—every object of action.
If this is the case, if every object of action is ultimately moral or immoral, honest or dishonest, good or evil, then what moral judgment must be applied to any theory or any theorist who contradicts the objective ethics theory or any of its primary assertions?
I trust that we are all intelligent enough to grasp the full implications of this situation. If this kind of objective ethics theoretical system is a type of closed system of concepts that characterizes all values as moral values—each value (object) under consideration is either moral or immoral, good or evil—then what moral category do we expect this theoretical system to assign to any object, value, person, or action that contradicts that system?
I believe this explains the constant and repetitive use of opprobrious terms and constant and repetitive resort to character assault, mainly by individuals on the objective ethics side of the debate.
To some extent, this is the unavoidable consequence of adopting a theory of human action wherein the two fundamental categories of action are those of good and evil.
Whereas in Misesian praxeology, actors are conceived as each striving after their ends with more or less appropriate means, in Randian and related moral theories, actors are conceived each as either good or evil, pursuing good or evil ends, with good or evil means.
Under these theoretical conditions, it is at least understandable, if not praiseworthy, that those discussants and any of their notions that contradict objective ethics tend to be characterized by an adjective chosen from the less flattering category of the objective ethics theoretical construct.
It may even be the case that this is considered virtuous by the moral ethicist concerned !
A wonderful passage by Mises helps illuminate the current situation:
“The discovery of the inescapable interdependence of market phenomena overthrew this opinion. Bewildered, people had to face a new view of society. They learned with stupefaction that there is another aspect from which human action might be viewed than that of good and bad, of fair and unfair, of just and unjust. In the course of social events there prevails a regularity of phenomena to which man must adjust his actions if he wished to succeed. It is futile to approach social facts with the attitude of a censor who approves or disapproves from the point of view of quite arbitrary standards and judgments of value. One must study the laws of human action and social cooperation as the physicist studies the laws of nature. Human action and social cooperation seen as the object of a science of given relations, no longer a normative discipline of things that ought to be—this was a revolution of tremendous consequences for knowledge and philosophy as well as for social action.” (Human Action, 3rd. rev. p.2)
Indeed ! The revolution continues…