This is an important point that is often overlooked - we are the descendants of the people who got along. The trouble-makers and rabble-rousers either eliminated each other or got eliminated. Or founded States. But that’s a different topic. This - in combination with the existence of social norms and law which can change much more rapidly than innate dispositions to keep up with changes in the social environment - is why pursuing your satisfaction is inherently harmonious.
Clayton -
So I guess it all comes down to what one is willing to risk in order to pursue happiness correct?
Well, you have no choice in the matter - Time itself imposes upon you the fact of choice at every moment. Whether you take risks or not, you are still acting and the consequences to your happiness are, therefore, the result of your own action either way. This is what Mises was talking about in Human Action.
Clayton -
The problem with this is if you are keeping a strict individualist position on happiness or ataraxia, then the statement consistently lead or not lead to satisfaction is impermissble since it attempts to internalise other people’s level of happiness and as such brings about an interpretation of happiness beyond the individual. Hence there can be no meaningful distinction between self abnegation or seeking your own happiness since if you perform as an action, as Vive points out, it is optimal.
I understand why you are attempting to integrate human nature into play since the facts you state above are obvious however to make the claims of “good or evil” mankind requires not only a shared end, happiness, but also shared means again takes you outside your strictly individualist position otherwise it is pure prejudice as to whether an action does or does not lead to someone’s happiness.
Not necessarily. All action is undertaken in a condition of uncertainty. Thus what one thinks will lead to happiness may not in eventuality do so. There is, then, room for thought and discussion about what means will lead to a eudaimonic end.
Yes, but under Clayton’s position it can only be assessed by the individual for himself. Therefore any idea of shared means for happiness is necessarily invalidated by his strict individualism at this point.
Not quite - I’m not thinking of peers’ experiences as being normative so much as thinking of all prior human lives as a “grand science experiment”, the results of which are recorded within culture itself (some decoding required). In other words, Bob can’t come up to me and say “I’ve never been satisfied with Diet Coke. Therefore, Diet Coke is evil. You are drinking Diet Coke, therefore, you are doing evil.” That’s an attempt by Bob to make me internalize his happiness. There’s no reason to believe that just because something doesn’t make one person happy that, therefore, it can make no one happy.
But, according to biologists, there have been about 100 billion human lives before mine. These people have tried everything - things like jumping off cliffs without a parachute, cheating on their spouse, murderous rampages, and so on. Some of these things never brought the actor happiness. Of course, I do not mean that I can know this in the same way that I can know what makes me happy - I am merely looking at the external marks of happiness/unhappiness and that through the somewhat distorting lens of the cultural artifacts left behind by all these “scientific experiments”, so to speak. But this argument regarding happiness is much stronger - if a million people in thousands of different circumstances have tried a particular course of action and it never turned out the way they were apparently planning (never led to their happiness/satisfaction), then it’s a good bet it won’t work if you try it. In other words, these many experiments tell us something about the facts of the human constitution (human nature).
We are in the fortunate position of having a great deal of cultural information, some of which communicates to us the results of the “grand scientific experiment”. Social norms, law, cultural practices, the arts, they all communicate things about past attempts by people to find satisfaction in a variety of ways and whether they succeeded or failed in their chosen courses of action.
I think that vive’s note is a slightly hyperbolic description of the logic of evolution. Every organism on the planet is “optimal to its environment”… until it gets eaten - oops, apparently it wasn’t that optimal. Evolutionary arguments are always relative… organism X is more optimal relative to the alternatives that could have arisen instead. So, my behavior is more optimal to social harmony relative to the behavior of the hypothetical descendants of the rabble-rousers who were killed off long ago without producing offspring.
That is a nihilistic position regarding the relevance and usefulness of cultural and innate information regarding the conditions of happiness. The evolution of consciousness obviously played a role in getting the desired behavior out of organisms through the use of what is essentially Pavlovian conditioning occurring completely within the confines of your skull: you feel satisfied when you eat because you evovled to eat and not starve, and vice-versa. So, this covers the biological conditions of happiness, which are human universals because we all have human bodies and can be put down simply to the particulars of our physiology as they have evolved.
But, clearly, there is something more to human happiness than just eating. And this is where culture enters the picture. Just like the particulars of human physiology tell us something about the conditions of human happiness, so the particulars of human culture tell us more about the conditions of human happiness than can be learnt merely from studying human physiology. This has nothing to do with saying “because Bob doesn’t like Diet Coke, you cannot possibly like Diet Coke”, it’s a much stronger argument that human culture represents empirical knowledge about the facts of human happiness as a result of the discovery of these facts through trial and error with many real human lives that have gone before us.
Clayton -
I want to note that my views on this have changed a bit since I wrote this - morality does enter the picture even when Crusoe is alone on his island, just not in the sense we normally think of morality. In this sense, Crusoe’s “ends” should really be thought of as “means” as I described above and the problem is no longer one of morality but one of praxeology - will Crusoe’s chosen means lead to his happiness?
To illustrate the point, let’s go back to Rothbard’s illustration of Crusoe eating the poisonous mushroom (somewhere in EoL, I’m too lazy to look up the cite right now). Why did Crusoe decide to eat the mushroom? Well, let’s say he was hungry. In this case, he ate the mushroom to ease his hunger pangs. And he wants to ease his hunger pangs because he wants to be satisfied, that is, untroubled, pain-free and filled with an effortless sense of well-being. So, the mushroom was not the final end. Satisfying his hunger was not the final end. Satisfaction/happiness remains the only final end. Thus, on this account, the eating of a poisonous mushroom is not immoral so much as the technically incorrect means to the attainment of the final end: satisfaction.
But Rothbard points out that it is possible for Crusoe to eat the mushroom even if he knew it was poisonous - perhaps from very high time-preference or just for kicks. But I think when you analyze this more carefully, you see that there are only three possibilities:
This is rather less important than the question of social order, however, precisely because we’re not Crusoes. Almost all the conditions of our satisfaction reside within the social order. This is why we use the word “morality” almost synonymously with how we are expected to treat other people. Therefore, the bulk of inquiry into the question of morality has to focus on the facts of the social order.
Clayton -
How can we be sure that cheating on one’s spouse has never been the technically correct means to the attainment of someone’s satisfaction?
It seems more like you’re setting morality up as an issue of trade-offs and risks rather than an either or question to me. If that’s the case then I totally agree with you. But since I highly doubt that you and I have the same perception of morality I assume I’m just reading this wrong.
See what Aristippus said above about uncertainty. The fact is that a state of affairs either does or does not bring you satisfaction. In the final analysis, morality is black and white - you either succeeded or failed in your chosen course of action. But because we have uncertainty about the conditions which will give rise to satisfaction and the course of action which will bring about those conditions, the process of decision-making can be characterized as “trade-offs and risks”.
But I think that we often become myopic in discussing the issue because we’re ruling out vast swathes of possible decisions that we could make with the unstated knowledge that of course they will lead to unhappiness. And it’s that very “of course” judgment that I’m trying to call attention to as the “absolute” or “universal” aspect of human morality. It’s not just kind of or maybe the case that drinking a quart of sulphuric acid will lead to unhappines, it is definitely the case. But many other less absurd behaviors are just as certain to bring about unhappiness - going on a murderous rampage, openly cheating on your spouse, and so on. And I’m further asserting that it’s no accident that these things will lead to unhappiness - the social order has developed into what it is precisely so that inharmonious courses of action result in a state of unhappiness. That’s the function of the social order.
Clayton -
So it’s not just the cheating on the spouse it’s getting caught doing so that matters right? So there’s a risk vs reward dynamic.
Moreover, doesn’t the context of murder change how it will be viewed within the social order?
I was reading a mises daily last week I think that referenced this Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle. I looked him up out of curiosity. Kyle has 160 confirmed kills and claims to have 255 altogether. He apparently got a book deal out of it and now currently resides in Texas.
Ted Bundy, the infamous serial killer from the 70’s, confessed at the time of his execution in Florida to the murders of 30 women. Some people seem to think the real number was higher.
Even if Bundy killed 50 women it would still be less than a third of the total number of Kyle’s confirmed kills.
It seems like in the context of war, murder is rewarded by the social order rather than punished.
In the case of cheating, what is more interesting to me than the question “but what happens if you don’t get caught” is why do so many people get caught despite their best efforts to the contrary and why are the consequences to themselves typically so dire? These facts are telling us something important about the human condition.
Intuitively, I think most people just translate this into “don’t cheat, it’s immoral” which I think is a good first-order approximation of the problem. Clearly, there is a lot more to it than just that but the fact that this is what most people come away with upon cursory reflection matters. To state it anthropomorphically, the social order itself wants us to come away with that lesson. And the interesting question to me is why?
I think the juxtaposition of the sniper versus Bundy shows us a couple things:
This is why I keep saying that we have to heal the social order and individuals together because the health of each is dependent on the other. Without a spiritually* healthy social order, you cannot have spiritually healthy individuals, and vice-versa. A necessary precondition to not killing hundreds of foreigners - many of whom were likely “innocent” by any reasonable measure right and wrong - is not having a State that is recruiting and paying people - decent and otherwise normal people - to do precisely this. Maybe we can’t get rid of the State en toto, but at least we can point out the absurdity of assassinating hundreds of foreigners with skilled snipers.
Clayton -
*Again, I’m using this term advisedly, I am not asserting the existence of the intangible
I do not know how to answer this question because I lack any meaningful data about how many people cheat on their spouses, what percentage get caught and what the varying consequences are, dire or not. I can only think of my personal experience with the issue which is not extensive at all. For all I know it could be happening far more or less than I think.
Wouldn’t you necessarily “heal” the social order if you “healed” every individual? Moreover, what is the name of this pathology our social order suffers from? The moral double standard? The dual law?
You know, I have given a fair amount of thought to this and I’ve come up with two distinct paradigms for thinking about this. One is that an act can be wrong in and of itself regardless of context, regardless of its purpose, regardless of intent and regardless of consequence. This is objective morality as I understand it. In this paradigm Kyle and Bundy are…not so different they’re just being judged on a double standard.
The other is that actions cannot be judged without a reference point to judge them on. Context is key. In this paradigm, the righteousness of an act depends on its context, its purpose, intent and its consequence. This is relative morality as I understand it. In this paradigm Kyle and Bundy are very different because while both men killed people, they each did so under very different circumstances with very different intentions and for very different purposes. In this light, the double standard starts to make sense. It’s not that Bundy killed people, it’s that he killed the wrong people in the context of his time and thus was seen as a threat to society whereas Kyle killed the right people in the context of his time and thus is not seen as a threat to society.
Perhaps the social order isn’t sickened by the dual law of the state, perhaps the dual law of the state reflects the shifting, malleable nature of morality, the social order and man. What do you think?
The State is only one manifestation of dual-law/hypocrisy. I don’t think that hypocrisy per se is a social pathology - I just don’t think that makes any sense.
In a post in another thread, I’ve pointed out that I think we have to distinguish between two facets of government - there is clearly some kind of “natural” form of government that arises from clan/tribal order and there is dual-law in this system as in ours. But then there is the more frankly imperialistic form of government which we have today. I think the difference between the two is that the former is clearly symbiotic - the led benefit from being led and the leaders benefit from leading - where I think the imperial orders - Rome, London, Washington, DC, etc. - are one-way relationships. The rulers benefit at the expense of those they rule. And that’s all there is to it.
While it’s a mistake to describe this as “immoral” because the facts of reality are neither immoral nor moral, we can note that such situations do not last long anywhere in nature. The predators may find easy hunting for a time but soon their prey will adapt and equilibrium will be restored, perhaps even a golden age of relative scarcity of predators may emerge. So, I think that the present social order is doomed precisely because it is so absolutely unilateral. I haven’t thought about in sufficient depth but I think we can describe this condition as pathological - it is an illness of society.
I agree that the specific character of culture is largely determined by the type and nature of its dual-law, however, I think that it’s a mistake in Conventional Wisdom to treat the social order as infinitely malleable, as if human nature is a blank slate (see any Steven Pinker lecture on this topic for more detail). Human nature has particular features that are essentially unchangeable from the point-of-view of social order. So, things change and dual-law can be expressed in different ways in different cultures (different societies tolerate different kinds of hypocriscy) but not everything changes and not everything can be re-arranged.
Clayton -
I will think on this. I want to research some things before I try to respond. Thanks for your responses.
So Clayton,
If I understand you correctly you are saying that there are agent neutral norms (applicable for all agents) which are means, though not exhaustive ones, to an individuals happiness. If an individual does not adopt these means he will not be happy.
I actually agree with the above however I don’t think your arguments can justify it. You need to raise your ideas of human nature on a par with your individualist ataraxia to be consistent but to do so invalidates your fundemental position that the individual is the measure of all things and to attempt to go beyond him is hubris. This is, I think, the fundemental point of disagreement. If we can go beyond the individual the first paragraph can be justified otherwise it cannot. I argued thus in your Action and the Soul article.
However on the general idea of creating a “Church of Mises” with a broader cultural agenda is a good one.
What do you mean by “go beyond the individual” and who is “we”?
Clayton -
Also, I looked through the Action and the Soul thread and didn’t see any replies by you to that thread.
What the hell is up with that beehive, anyway??
The (kept) beehive is a symbol of the State: a managed society, which is farmed.**
It’s also an allusion to Oppenheimer’s metaphor for the genesis of the State. First the bear hunts for honey and destroys the beehive in the process (looters, raiders, etc), but eventually he realizes it’s in his own interest to settle down and become a beekeeper (the State, the tax-farmer as opposed to the periodic looter). My signature states: the beekeeper must be destroyed (the State must be abolished), but the hungry bear must be restrained (but the criminals cannot be allowed to run loose).
**Sheep is to shepherd as beehive is to beekeeper. Fact of the day: in the earliest written records from Mesopotamia (e.g. Gilgamesh) the kings frequently refer to themselves as the shepherds of the people. Uruk was known also as the “sheepfold.” It’s actually a very common epithet for a king throughout ancient near eastern history (we all know this through Judaism, which says some interesting things about the Jewish and then Christian God…but I digress). I think it speaks a lot to the mindset of the ruling class. Plato referred to his ideal society (which we might call oligarchical collectivism) as a beehive, and that metaphor has stuck (it was used previously in archaic Greek art to represent power, order, etc). The masons adopted it for that reason I think (the ideal society, the Great Work)…and I’m rambling.
Absolutely - and I think this is where a lot of people get lost. They equate statelessness with lawlessness - if that’s true, then we are stuck with the State. Fortunately, it’s not true.
I think that this threat from the State - “If you destroy us, you will be overrun with criminals” - is a lot like the threat that the banks made to the Congress during the 2008 financial collapse: “Bail us out or the entire economy will be destroyed.” It’s a kind of extortion. First, they monopolize the production of law and security, thereby destroying the ability of the market to produce solutions in these areas while doing the most half-hearted job in providing the minimum they can possibly get away with in order to prevent a revolution. Then they have the nerve to say “You can’t get rid of us because there will be chaos if you do.” Well, yeah, of course there will be chaos, you’ve made damn well sure there will be chaos. How about we just end the monopoly and force you to compete on the open market and see where customers willingly go?
This is particularly obvious in countries outside the US/UK/EU/Japan-complex. That “places that don’t exist” documentary covers quite a few countries where it is clear that the authorities don’t give a rat’s ass about the keeping the people safe but neither will they allow the people to organize their own protection, thus leaving them vulnerable to all sorts of private predation on top of the regular public predation they must endure. It isn’t any wonder that such places are so economically backward.
So, we need to see through this charade and realize that the State is the very thing that is preventing people from properly securing their property from private theft, while itself engaging in theft that far exceeds any losses that would have been borne as a result of private thievery (what private thief could ever steal 50% of your entire life’s productivity?) Let’s abolish the beekeeper. Or, at least, let’s abolish the biggest, nastiest beekeepers, the globe-sprawling ones like the UN, the EU, the US Federal government, and so on. Then, maybe later, we can work our way on down to the local level.
Clayton -