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Praxeology is the science of means not ends. It is indifferent to the ultimate goal of action. If intent can be shown to be an end (let us say murder is the means), than intent is irrevalent to action and may be argued that intent is irrelavant to restitution as well as punishment
Hm. It goes along with what Hazlitt said: in the market, production is the end result while employment is the means of getting there, and not the other way around. If your intent is full employment while using production as the means of getting there, it means nothing. In that sense, intent would only work in the real world as an end.
I can understand why one might argue that ‘intent’ may be irrelevant in some tort cases say … but intent surely is not entirely irrelevant to action, for what action would be performed if no candidates agents ever had any intentions.?
I can understand why one might argue that ‘intent’ may be irrelevant in some tort cases say … but intent surely is not entirely irrelevant to action, for what action would be performed if no candidates agents ever had any intentions.?
Noted point. Yet, it’s not so much that intent is irrelevant to the actor, after all it is on of the three fundamental means for action that Mises points out in HA
- uneasiness. 2. Belief that such a higher stat exists and 3. Belief that such action will remove such uneasiness. The point is that intent is irrelevant to the study of human action and thus irrelevant to the study and ruling of arbitration. This, is in essence, is what i’ve argued in print elsewhere but haven’t made much headway.
Why do you imply that the study and ruling of arbitration depends entirely on human action? I’d say that, while human action is a necessary factor in arbitration, it’s not sufficient.
Maybe a good way to put it is that, while actions are means for other ends, intentions are means for actions? Anticipation of, or desire for, a higher state isn’t the same as actually attaining that higher state.
Autolykos wrote
Why do you imply that the study and ruling of arbitration depends entirely on human action? I’d say that, while human action is a necessary factor in arbitration, it’s not sufficient.
Maybe a good way to put it is that, while actions are means for other ends, intentions are means for actions? Anticipation of, or desire for, a higher state isn’t the same as actually attaining that higher state.
I thought the same thing after I posted this forum. It seems that means and ends can be interchanged whenever the frame of reference is changed and seems to muddle the argument. It might not be a good strategy to speak of means and ends in praxeology.
Intent would surely be the prerequisite for any purposeful action, but, an “end” may be reached via purposeful action or behavior (i.e. impulse or what Rothbard denotes “general conditions”). But, in the process of arbitration we are not worried about the subtle differences between purposeful behavior and general conditions, since such differences is not the study of praxeology but that of psychoanalysis, as much as we are worried about restitution (or punishment) of an “end”. Theft may be a means or an end. Or, maybe you could say that since the state of contentment is an ultimate, but unreachable goal, there are no ends…only means. To speak of ends would only make sense when speaking about choices.