Enjoy.
Pretty confused thinking, IMO. Rothbard’s approach isn’t much better, either. Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics also fail. I looked through Hazlitt’s Foundations of Morality and he’s much closer to the mark.
There are a couple problems with Galt’s quote here (yes, I know it’s Rand’s character but just for the sake of discussion). First, he denies that humans have instincts which is symptomatic of the tabula rasa view of human nature which was fashionable at the time but is in its death throes today. Even worse, he denies that humans have any innate knowledge of how to survive and worse yet that humans have no innate desire to live!! This to images of a man pouring gasoline over himself and lighting himself on fire. I don’t see how anyone can take seriously a view of human nature that is indifferent to survival. Human beings are no less acutely bent on their own survival than other animals. Your amygdala is sufficient proof of this.
Following from this error, Galt further blunders by completely ignoring the way that Nature motivates the human instinct to survival and that is through pleasure and pain. The pangs of hunger drive you into the forest in search of food. The flooding sensation of the pleasure of eating on a famished stomach is Nature’s carrot, conditioning you to never stop seeking the next meal. No one but a starving or embattled man walks around saying “My end is to survive” but the experience of pleasure and pain is the mechanism by which Nature mediates the criteria of survival to your conscious experience. Galt substitutes deliberate reasoning for all of this automatic, inbuilt, instinctive, hardwired circuitry to the severe detriment of his theory of morality.
Hazlitt brings morality down to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain (hedonism):
To repeat and to sum up: It is not true that “no amount of
is can make an ought.” The ought rests, in fact, and must rest,
either upon an is or upon a will be. The sequence is simple:
Every man, in his cool and rational moments, seeks his own
long-run happiness. This is a fact; this is an is. Mankind has
found, over the centuries, that certain rules of action best tend
to promote the long-run happiness of both the individual and
society. These rules of action have come to be called moral rules.
Therefore, assuming that one see!.s one’s long-run happiness,
these are the rules one ought to follow.
Certainly this is the whole basis of what is called prudential
ethics. In fact, wisdom, or the art of living wisely, is perhaps
only another name for prudential ethics.
Prudential ethics constitutes a very large part of all ethics.
But the whole of ethics rests upon the same foundation. For
men find that they best promote their own interests in the long
run not merely by refraining from injury to their fellows, but
by cooperating with them. Social cooperation is the foremost
means by which the majority of us attain most of our ends. It
is on the implicit if not the explicit recognition of this that our
codes of morals, our rules of conduct, are ultimately based.
“Justice” itself (as we shall later see more clearly) consists in.
observance of the rules or principles that do most, in the long
run, to preserve and promote social cooperation.
We shall find also, when we have explored the subject fur
ther, that there are no irreconcilable conflicts between egoism
and altruism, between selfishness and benevolence, between the
long-run interests of the individual and those of society. In most
cases in which such conflicts appear to exist, the appearance
exists because only short-run consequences, and not consequences
over the long run, are being taken into consideration.
Social cooperation is, of course, itself a means. It is a means
to the never completely attainable goal of maximizing the happiness
and well-being of mankind. But the great difficulty of
making the latter our direct goal is the lack of unanimity in the
tastes, ends, and value judgments of individuals. An activity
that gives one man pleasure may be a great bore to another.
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” But social cooperation
is the great means by which we all help each other to attain
our individual ends, and so to attain the ends of “society.”
Moreover, we do share a great number of basic ends in common;
and social cooperation is the principal means of attaining these
also.
In brief, the aim of each of us to satisfy his own desires, to
achieve as far as possible his own highest happiness and wellbeing,
is best forwarded by a common means, Social Cooperation,
and cannot be achieved without that means.
Here, then, is the foundation on which we may build a
rational system of ethics.
My only contention with Hazlitt is that he must beware of the very vice he had earlier identified of trying to attribute the gravitas of “science” to something which is not like physics by connecting “is” with “ought.” The purpose of noting the fact of the matter that every man pursues his own happiness is not to make the theory of morality more irrefutable but simply to ground the discipline of moral philosophy to analysis of the correct aspect of human nature - his happiness, not his reason or his superstitions (religious impulse). The degree of confusion on this most elementary point in all ages down to the present day is astounding and I’ve myself only recently escaped it.
There’s still some pieces missing from Hazlitt’s theory of morality but it’s the single best theory in moral philosophy which I’ve yet encountered.
Clayton -
Henry Hazlitt’s position fails.
I too can make an assertion and not back it up with any kind of argumentation. (Wait, can I?)
“In our century, widespread ignorance of and scorn for the very existence of the natural law has limited people’s advocacy of legal structures to (a) or (b), or some blend of the two. This even holds for those who try to hew to a policy of individual liberty. Thus, there are those libertarians who would simply and uncritically adopt the common law, despite its many anti-libertarian flaws. Others, like Henry Hazlitt, would scrap all constitutional limitations on government to rely solely on the majority will as expressed by the legislature. Neither group seems to understand the concept of a structure of rational natural law to be used as a guidepost for shaping and reshaping whatever positive law may be in existence [2].” ~ TEOL, pg 18.
- Hazlitt’s reaction to my own brief discussion of the legal norms essential to any freemarket economy [in Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Princeton N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 19621] was a curious one. While critical of blind adherence to common law in other writers, Hazlitt could only react in puzzlement to my approach; calling it “abstract doctrinaire logic” and “extreme a priorism,” he chided me for “trying to substitute his own instant jurisprudence for the common law principles built up through generations of human experience.” It is curious that Hazlitt feels common law to be inferior to arbitrary majority will, and yet to be superior to human reason! Henry Hazlitt, “The Economics of Freedom,” National Review (September 25, 1962): 232
I don’t see how your Rothbard quote even touches on Hazlitt’s discussion above.
Nevertheless, the passage you quote is precisely where I take violent exception to Rothbard… and Hazlitt has nailed it on the head, Rothbard has substituted his own “instant jurisprudence” for the market process of legal adjudication. If common law is faulty it is only faulty precisely to the extent that it has been tampered with by millenia of State corruption, buffaloing, star-chambering, kangaroo courting and the like. The similarity to the distorting effects of the State on the production of other goods than law should be readily apparent.
It appears that Rothbard had full faith in the market in everything but the production of law. For the production of law, the market cannot be trusted and only “reason”, that is, the central planning of academics such as Rothbard himself, will suffice. It was one of the few lapses in Rothbard’s otherwise rigorous scholarship (along with his supposed “objective ethics”).
Clayton -
Well said Clayton. It is necessary to tolerate all sorts of norms, the ultimate decision maker of what is appropriate legal recourse can only be determined by the parties involved in the dispute.
I am always wary of someone who adopts or implies any exception to a principle.
Regarding survival, Clayton, I think your interpretation is close but not quite correct. Survival doesn’t have to be the end-all-be-all as people who sacrifice their lives disproves that assumption. Nature has a way of trying to nudge your decisions towards reproduction, eating, and above all survival, but a conscious decision by the agent involved can override that. Just because we have a hunger faculty that nudges us to eat doesn’t mean that somebody like Ghandi can’t override it for a cause that he deems to be greater than temporary satisfaction. Maybe I’m strawmanning you; if so, sorry in advance
Or even the more mundane example of a prisoner under torture who commits suicide. He is making a rational choice (to end his suffering) which leads to a more satisfactory state of affairs from his point of view (absence of torture) than the satisfaction of the current state of affairs (torture). Note that it is Galt who makes the case that survival is the “ultimate value.” It just doesn’t make sense. Rothbard held a modified form of this view which I found shockingly out of character for his usual intellectual rigor.
Well, yes, and I think that’s what makes human nature so interesting, that there are “higher order” satisfactions that can involve the tolerance of significant carnal unease. For example, consider the person who goes on a diet and workout routine to lose weight. That person will knowingly suffer hunger pangs, dissatisfaction with the taste of foods and muscle pains all in the pursuit of some “higher order” satisfaction: weight loss. This is a uniquely human ability and precisely why Hazlitt and other preferred the word “satisfaction” to “pleasure” since the word “pleasure” implies a certain high-degree of time preference that may or may not actually obtain in a particular instance.
Clayton -
I think you’re absolutely right. Given this starting point, then, it is a mistake to jump right into asking “what should the law be?” or “what morals should society have?” because you’re implicitly short-circuiting the honest discovery process that can only be done through actual resolution of actual disputes in a manner acceptable to the actual parties to those disputes. We can no more solve these problems sitting in ivory towers than communist academics were able to solve the problems of supply and production in communist economies sitting in their ivory towers.
Clayton -
Okay, I guess I misinterpreted you a bit and I agree (for some reason, I misinterpreted your usage of the word “innate”). I think we do choose to survive, and the question only arises upon conscious reflection (so I think Rand was on to something at least). I guess you could call wanting to survive the default position. To use your example, we may eat to satisfy hunger, but we also satisfy hunger to make sure we can continue experiencing. And we want to continue experiencing because…Well, I don’t know, it’s just irreducibly valuable to me and to others. I’d probably say it’s the default position until circumstances take over and make it otherwise (in the case of your prisoner or a Ghandi figure). Galt would be incorrect then to say that there is no innate survival mechanism. Which isn’t to say that it can’t be overridden.
I just have reservations about the overly-rationalistic view of human nature - we are reasoning beings but 99% of what is going on inside our heads does not involve conscious thought or deliberation. The pangs of hunger are a simple matter of fact and it is easy to see that the purpose of hunger pangs is to motivate behavior that will continue one’s existence (eating). No rational deliberation is required. Yet it is possible to stage a hunger protest and override, as you say, the pangs of hunger by simply refusing to “listen” to them. This is something that no other animal can do, at least, not even close to the degree that a human being can. But in any case, we can confidently say that whether a person listens to their hunger pangs or ignores them, he must be so choosing because he believes that that choice will lead to a state of affairs more satisfactory to himself than the current state of affairs. To say otherwise is to equivocate on the meaning of choice and action.
The urge to survive for survival’s sake is certainly motivated by the expectation of future satisfaction and also by the immense dissatisfaction or displeasure at the contemplation of one’s death. To end one’s life, one must first contemplate the doing of it and go about the motions of it, both of which are immensely displeasurable, so that acts as a natural barrier to ending one’s own life. And the carrot on the end of the stick is the anticipation of future satisfactions - tasty meals, jovial social interactions, and so on. Nature’s purpose in keeping you alive is not so that you can enjoy life, rather, Nature’s purpose in making life enjoyable is to keep you alive so you can reproduce. From this rather clinical, Dawkinisian point of view, we are all puppets in the hands of our indifferent genes which arrange the puppet show of pleasure and pain such that we attain the goal of genetic replication.
But all this talk of survival is beside the point, IMO. The point is that human action has, by definition, one sole purpose which manifests itself in two ways: the increase of satisfaction and the decrease of dissatisfaction. In the words of Frederic Bastiat:
The soul (or, not to become involved in spiritual questions, man) is endowed with the faculty of sense perception. Whether sense perception resides in the body or in the soul, the fact remains that as a passive being he experiences sensations that are painful or pleasurable. As an active being he strives to banish the former and multiply the latter. The result, which affects him again as a passive being, can be called satisfaction.
Frederic Bastiat, Economic Harmonies, ch. 2 [Emphasis mine]
Hence, the pursuit of satisfaction and the avoidance of dissatisfaction - human action - is always the ultimate end of all human behavior. This is not a matter of opinion, either, it is a matter of fact. Even though values are subjective, it is never the case that a person might have some other end than his own satisfaction. In the case of an insane or mentally handicapped person, perhaps, but then we recognize such individuals as pathological - they are ill in a medical sense, they are not an example of a properly functioning human being.
Even though it has been well established since Hume that we cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”, it is not a mistake to say, “If you want to attain this end, then you ought to follow such and such means.” Such statements are ultimately a kind of predictive hypothesis either about the natural world or society and are, therefore, value-free.
This in itself does not give us a basis for morality, however, since morality is concerned with what are right ends, not only what is the right means to attain a given end. Following Hazlitt and Bastiat, we can make the value-free observation that the ultimate end of every human being is his own happiness or satisfaction, that is, every human is always seeking to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory state of affairs. Furthermore, we can note that there is a relationship between every end which a person has and this ultimate end of satisfaction, specifically, that all other ends are themselves a means to the ultimate end of attaining satisfaction.
This is a foundation for a complete theory of morality since, when considering the question of which ends are right ends, we may rephrase the question: which intermediate ends (also called “means-ends”) are the right means-ends to achieve the ultimate end of satisfaction? Since satisfaction is a subjective state of affairs, there is no necessary correlation between those means-ends which will lead one individual to the ultimate end of his own satisfaction and those means-ends which will lead another individual to the ultimate end of his own satisfaction. Hence, there are not necessarily any general rules of morality – any rule of morality which seems to be a general rule is the result of a coincidence of means-ends. This is where Rothbard was completely off track in saying that morality is “objective.” An objective morality entails objective valuation which is a simple contradiction of Rothbard’s own theory of economic man who values subjectively, not objectively. Explaining the coincidence of means-ends is, I believe, a matter of central importance and I think that evolutionary psychology goes a long ways in helping us with this.
I’m currently trying to refactor my own ideas regarding conflict with a theory of morality based on satisfaction as the ultimate end of all human action…
Clayton -
Excellent points. I’ve always personally had an issue with those who claim that they alone know the correct objective standards by which all of humanity must abide by and that all those who disagree with them are simply unworthy and ignorant (I might be exaggerating a bit here but I have seen this here and I honestly see no difference when this attitude is taken regardless of the system of thought being advanced). Good to see there are people that think beyond black & white and see beyond the reach of their nose.
Related to the topic at hand, this article by Patrick O’Neil takes Rand and other objective ethics proponents to task. I highly recommend. Whats most interesting though, is that O’Neil has a footnote towards the end that says he follows natural law by conviction (I’m presuming he’s a Thomist).
What if the best means-ends to achieve the ultimate end are a belief in objective ethics? Rothbard knew value was subjective, yet he dedicated significant efforts to say otherwise with regards to morality. O’Neil demonstrates logically that objective values are incoherent, yet he lives his life as if he were wrong in his essay. If the pursuit of or adherence to an incorrect theory of morality brought these individuals more satisfaction, then by subjective moral standards, they were actually right, right?
For some people, only the truth brings happiness (satisfaction). For others, whatever brings happiness (satisfaction) is true.
Which are you? I am the former.
I think I am the former, as well. But then, I get stuck: Why else (if not for some form of satisfaction) would I be valuing truth? And if the truth is a mere means toward an end (satisfaction), how is that superior to simply defining as truth whatever brings most satisfaction (ignorance is bliss; preferring to be led and lied to; simply believing, etc)? How would you answer this?
One could posit a qualitative distinction between these two types of satisfaction – one being more “real, genuine” vs. the other being “fake”, but that would imply abandoning the realm of subjective valuation.
Because you know that satisfaction cannot be found following irrational means to achieve your ends of contentment.
It is the difference between fantasy and reality. It is the difference between wanting to accept the world as it is, or pretending it is something it is not. I don’t judge people who accept the latter, but that is not for me. I am incredibly dissatisfied when reality intrudes on my fantasy, and so I have to deal with reality, one way or another.
As I get older, think and act more in what I perceive to be an austro-libertarian direction, I have to face reality and be fearless in the face of truths which make me uncomfortable because I know that I cannot genuinely be satisfied pretending they do not exist. In other words, I always take the red pill, and no medicine is too bitter. Or so is the standard I am trying to set for myself. I am not YET nearly as fearless as I desire to be.
Presumably, seeking reality is superior to living in fantasy because the former brings more satisfaction to us. What if it didn’t? Would you then change, and choose satisfaction over truth? If not, why not?
So it is ultimately a matter of subjective preference for a certain quality of satisfaction. Not all satisfaction is created equal.
Me too. I recently used the exact same analogy in a discussion. I am amazed by the preponderance of highly intelligent people who have told me, in my face, that they would rather be left unaware of any truth (interpretation of reality) that would bring them less satisfaction (or disappointment). Actually, I believe that most people are like that. What would be the evolutionary repercussions of such a fact (if true)? Why are (most of the surviving) humans the way they are? That’d be quite the rabbit hole to slide down into.
The point is that it is not possible for me to achieve satisfaction unless it is based in reality. I know the limits of my mind. Just because I want something to be so, doesn’t mean it is.
Rather, satisfaction is a specific thing. Are you really satisfied if you like cheeseburger, and you call what you eat cheeseburger, but it really isn’t cheeseburger?
Been there. Was going to post something about it last week but got busy with life and work. We’re largely a species that exists on accident and ignorance, but we convince ourselves we’re Gods of all creation. The arrogance of many humans is astounding, and yet a good number of them would call me arrogant for wanting to know better.
The best we can do is be our own judges.
Your limited mind ensures that any reality you could ever know is not the reality that actually is. Given this, could the reality one knows be chosen so that it maximizes one’s saitisfaction and happiness? Some (most?) people simpy create (choose) whatever reality makes them happier, more satisfied.
The issue is not merely about whether or not to call something a cheesburger, satisfaction, or happiness. It’s about fully experiencing a cheeseburger, satisfaction, or happiness within the reality one knows – just like in the Matrix. What if the reality that is (redpill) is less satisfactory than the reality that you know (bluepill)? Given a choice, would you still choose the former over the latter, and why? Is getting ever closer to the truth (reality that is) always preferable to holding on to the reality you know, regardless of what that does to your satisfaction?
What if fallibility (inconsistency, irrationality, blind belief, biased/controlled/consciously limited perception of reality) was actually fundamental to humanity’s existence/sustainability? What if a humanity of uncompromising truth-seekers (redpill poppers) is doomed at the outset? Evolution, and the humanity as observed today, seem to be supportive of this. It’s quite the rabbit hole, this.
Good luck.