So you’re just asking why all humans have internal moral codes? Ask a psychologist.
It seems you’re switching between ethical valuation and valuation in general. Let’s recap [my comments in brackets and bold]:
In summary, I think zefreak is saying men may have a code of ethical values because it facilitates trade and cooperation. They in turn value (in the general, non-ethical sense) being able to trade and cooperate.
Sounds pretty reasonable.
Why not “valued because he is loved”?
That’s probably going to be a problem [:O]
I don’t see why he would hold his life as his standard of value (whatever you mean by “hold as a standard of value”). I also don’t see what you mean by “furthers his life” - again, are we talking about length of survival or enjoyment of life?
Would be quite interesting. I will keep this thought experiment in mind.
OK, but this is all predicated on objective ethics…which I don’t even think is a meaningful concept - at least as usually conceived.
It is a psychological question, but I think the answer is necessary before any morality can be prescribed (although, of course, you’ll disagree with me that it should).
But valuing “in the general, non-ethical sense” still leads to the question: value for what? I think that it still ultimately reduces to an ethical question, something along the lines of, “Is cooperation good or evil?”
Because emotions are a response to ethical values. If you love someone, you love their virtues (virtues which you evaluate according to your standard of value). If you hate someone, you despise their vices, or some form of transgression that they perpetrated upon you.
A standard of value meaning that by which one evaluates what is good and what is evil.
Well, they’re related in a way that I seem to be incapable of elucidating. Fundamentally, it’s “length of survival.” The good is that which works toward “life” in the purely existential sense. But in order for man to survive longer than just the immediate future, he needs a code of values directing his actions. Emotions being predicated on one’s values, what he receives enjoyment from will be that which is in concordance with his values.
No, because if you assert that ethics is subjective, that means that the actions of different actors all have equal ethical validity, so long as the actor is acting in accordance with his conception of the good. A sociopath who thinks that murder is good and his victim, who thinks otherwise, are both right “in their own way.” You cannot pronounce a judgment upon the situation beyond, “The killer did something to the victim which the victim did not like.” This, however, is useless for a concept of justice, law, etc., because one can equally say, “In terminating the voluntary employment contract with his worker, the factory owner did something that the worker did not like,” and it holds just as much (or rather, as little) meaning as the preceding statement. Chaos ensues, with every man able to proclaim that all of his actions were as morally “right” as his neighbor’s, when this is not true. A murderer is not “just as right” as his victim. Also (just for the sake of clarity), the fact that a norm exists says nothing about its ethical validity one way or the other.
I think the psychological explanation is something like, “People have moral codes because they were useful in evolution.” If we go for “extending life” as a value, this would work for your argument.
So generally, the contention seems to be coalescing around two issues: the life-based notion of value, and the meaning of subjective and objective ethics. I address both below.
The path may vary, but ultimately for their utility at bringing happiness.
OK, so the life-based value idea.
Have you never loved someone who was doing you more harm than good? I wouldn’t say that emotions are rational. It seems that values (even ethical values) are a response to emotions, only sometimes aided (or obfuscated) by reasoning.
I guess the obvious question is, what if someone wants to commit suicide? How can we call that “evil,” and if the answer is that the act works against life, isn’t this merely tantamount to defining evil as that which works against life? This is the problem I see in the idea of life-based value. Either what is conducive to life is defined as good/valuable, or it seems to collapse down to the fairly mundane observation that “just about everyone wants to live as long and as well as possible.”
Before you said you don’t mean a “code of conduct,” so I can only assume you mean a scale of values, i.e., “Prefer apples to grapes, etc.” But again I’d say we value a thing because we want it, not the other way around.
Seems like a tautology to me. His values are defined by why he enjoys.
That could be a form of either subjective or objective ethics: the judgment that “all ethical conceptions are equal.” This is not what I mean by subjective ethics, nor what Mises means by it. I’m glad you mentioned this because I can see now why there is all this confusion about subjective ethics. Ethical language that we are forced to use (out of convenience) often obscures or leaves out who is doing the judging, because such words were surely coined in the objective ethical context. For example in the context of a village where everyone thinks roughly alike, so they can omit who is doing the judging, and even subtly influence people to “get with the program” through this linguistic trick of speaking as if opinions are objective.
So allow me to clarify by example. You can take all my responses below as definitive statements of what I (and I think Mises) mean by “subjective ethics.”
Neither are “right” at all from the objective point of view that you’re speaking from. Until we specify who is making the judgment of “right” or “wrong” there is no meaning in such words for me, and once we do specify who is making the judgment, we understand “right” and “wrong” to mean precisely “morally agreeable from that person’s perspective” and “morally disagreeable from that person’s perspective,” respectively.
If it is me making the judgment, right (wrong) means “morally (dis)agreeable from my perspective.” All it is saying is that my perspective is not objective; it is “only” my perspective - nothing more. And likewise, other people’s perspectives are “nothing more” than their own perspectives. I put quotes around “only” and “nothing more” because a subjective ethicist does not recognize that there can be “anything more” than one’s own perspective. Yet one can still judge and take action on those judgments just like all others can.
So my answer to this is that the murderer is most emphatically wrong (i.e., most emphatically morally disagreeable from my perspective), and I may take action against the sociopath based on this judgment. The difference with objective ethics is that I don’t claim my perspective has objectivity - given that it’s plain to see everyone has their own perspective.
Alternatively, if my goal is to persuade, I could make my claim based on how I conceive of morality internally and see if my statements resonate with others, and since we are all human and share much DNA and experience in common that may take me far, but it’s still just a matter of whether other people agree, or how persuasive I can be.
If I were an adjudicator - say I worked for a private court - I would find in favor of the factory owner, because his action was not morally disagreeable from my perspective (and also because I think it would produce good consequences to uphold the libertarian notion of justice).
They can proclaim - everyone already does - but ultimately their fate is decided by others based on their own subjective moral judgments, and rarely if ever on those of the defendants or litigants.
No, not from my point of view. From the murderer’s point of view perhaps, but he will have no more influence over his own legal fate than I do. Justice will be served: not necessarily in my eyes, but in the eyes of whoever’s in charge. (Even in an anarchy some people are going to be more involved in adjudication than others, if only by virtue of some people not having enough free time.) If I’m intimately involved in the case, I’ll be serving up a decidedly libertarian sentence for the murderer.
Wait, so by norm you don’t mean an ethical norm? Usually in libertarian circles it seems that normative = ethical.
Where in the above did I say anything about justice?
You asked me to define property. I did. What does “refuting self ownership” have to do with that?
Is your argument, “Hoppe talks about political ethics, therefore ethics (as described in the OP) is a valid science.”?
You dropped the “completely”. Big difference.
I don’t mean “universal” in terms of “an all encompassing science”. I mean “universal” in terms of values that are true for everyone/everything.
Not in the OP, no. There I only present its essential similarity to past exploded, chimeric doctrines: a similarity that, at least prima facie, bodes ill for Rothbardian meta-ethics. It is in many other posts over the past months that I believe zefreak, AJ, Adam Knott, liberty student, and I have shown the incoherency of Rothbardian meta-ethical theories.
Because you can say nothing about justice. Oh wait. You have the Mises-Hume socialist definition of ‘justice’ of course. Whatever promotes ‘social cooperation’ is ‘just’.
No such thing. Libertarianism is a system of morality and was certainly not created by Rothbard. It’s funny how you deride natural rights because they are too ‘intellectual’ and yet you try to refute the concept using sophisms, which are a perversion of the use of the intellect.
No, it demonstrates how it is NOT the economist who makes “wily-nily” judgments. It is the “advisee” who has subjective ends. The economist as advisor only analyzes the suitability of means.
Again…
This is an important truth Rothbard here states which some of his followers don’t accept. Rothbard himself regards natural rights philosophy as non-praxeological.
See the first thing I write in this post above.
I do disagree with Mises’ depiction of morality as merely a matter of convention, and not of conscience. But that’s a matter for another thread.
No, but the number of people who would really benefit more from interventionism than from capitalism is so vanishingly small, that as a practical matter, it makes sense to make utilitarian (in the Misesian sense) arguments.
That is not a meaningful distinction. Since you assert that there is no truth in relation as to what constitutes morality you agree with the nihilist that there can be no veracity to any claim about a certain action being moral or immoral.
Better to avoid labels, because few people seem to fit cleanly into any of the myriad ethical positions that have recognized titles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_nihilism
I would certainly prefer not to. And I would support enforcement against those who do. But I don’t claim to be on the side of universal truth for doing so.
Rothbard : Since, then, praxeology provides no ethics whatsoever
Lilburne : This is an important truth Rothbard here states which some of his followers don’t accept.
Praxeology is just a fancy name for economics. And if economics says nothing about ethics, so what. Libertarianism is still a moral system.
Mises was an economist, not a political philosopher at all. As an economist he can talk about economics. But when politics enters the scene he has nothing to offer except statism.
Since the future is uncertain and I can’t predict all the circumstances that I will ever find myself in, I can’t give you an apodictic answer. All I can tell you is that I have a strong preference against violence and aggression.
Now you can go off about my “moral relativism” and “ethical flip-flop”, but at least I’m honest. If you ever find yourself starving and desperate, who knows what means you’ll choose to survive, regardless of the universal ethical truth you claim to have adopted.
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:
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)
What I propose, though, and what you disagree with, is that happiness, sadness, etc. proceed from one’s values, not determine them.
Well, I do think it’s possible to love someone “who [does] you more harm than good,” but precisely because you love them for their virtues. It may be that they continually frustrate you romantically, or are inconsiderate in some ways, etc. (without getting into too much empirical analysis), but I’d still say that the person is loved because of their value to the actor—they aren’t valued because they are loved.
Yes, it precisely is. Because you and I are conscious beings, we have to choose between the fundamental alternative of “live” and “death” at any given moment. Because we are living beings, electing to continue to pursue life is the morally right action.
I try to avoid quoting Rand in debates, but I really like this: “The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do.”
I think Adam Knott’s very impressive contribution to this thread highlights the disconnect we have here. “All human values are moral values,” and “every human choice is a moral choice involving moral values.”
The immediate issue that I find with such individualized ethics, though, is that it’s similar to a Nietzschean “transvaluation of all values.” Yet even Nietzsche ultimately found “life” (rather more vaguely defined) to be the highest value—and then just kind of stopped and said that all other values are subjective. If we accept such a premise, though, what makes life a value at all?
If we assume a society where everyone believes that ethics is subjective, it’s possible that the sociopathic members of such a society could end up outnumbering the sane ones. Does this mean that murder will and should be condoned? If all the members of such a society adhered to self-destructive values, does that mean that self-destruction of oneself, of society, etc. is an end that we cannot pronounce judgment upon? I, for one, disagree. It is our existence as an end in itself that provides us the standard by which to determine other ends and determine morality—or those actions which are proper to a living being.
Sorry, I was trying to refer to cultural norms, in the sense of Western cultural norms, Middle Eastern cultural norms, Far East cultural norms, and so on. I guess they are “ethical norms” in the sense that the adherents view them as part of their morality, but my point is that the number of adherents doesn’t determine whether such an ethical/cultural norm is actually right.
The moral sentiment that arises from a given state of affairs will require or presuppose the “placement” in spatio-temporality of a secondary consciousness separate from the primary consciousness currently experiencing the feeling you refer to. Whereas, in breaking a computer, no such “placement” of a secondary consciousness is required or presupposed.
In this limited sense, there is a necessary distinction between moral sentiment and sentiment.