Readers might be interested in my new Working Paper: “Two Philosophers Skeptical of Liberty”. I discuss the views of Sen and Nussbaum.
Also, from my new book (A Man Without a Hobby, Hamilton, 2004), I offer this passage that discusses Austrian Economics and the Mises Institute:
I do have reservations about some aspects of Austrianism. I do not think that praxeology is a strictly successful conception of human action, mainly because of what I take to be its debts to Immanuel Kant’s a priori method of reasoning about the world. More particularly, I am concerned about the idea, advanced by von Mises—one that does not jibe easily with his endorsement of entrepreneurship—that human action is driven by “uneasiness.”
Such an approach seems to imply a measure of determinism I cannot happily associate with human life. Still, I was able to make hay out of the view that action is motivated by felt dissatisfaction in a 1988 paper, “A Neglected Argument Against Theism,” for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.I am perhaps the only academic philosopher who has published in a journal of philosophy on the theological ideas of Ludwig von Mises. My article reported that, according to Mises, God could not have created the world since no perfect being would have any reason for acting, having no need to improve on itself at all. “An acting being is discontented and therefore not almighty,” Mises wrote. “If he were contented, he would not act, and if he were almighty, he would have long since radically removed his discontent. For an all-powerful being there is no pressure to choose between various states of uneasiness….The paradoxes are insoluble.”
Such was his praxeological disproof of the existence of God (an omnipotent God, anyway) as proffered in the early pages of Human Action. Perhaps not the most famous argument in this area but a notable one nonetheless.
Another sticking point pertains to the view held by both the neoclassicists and the Misesians that we always act rationally, a claim that doesn’t mesh well with my own philosophical conclusions. (Mises actually says this in one place but takes it back at another.) But perhaps my most important reservations have to do with the subjective theory of value. As I eventually came to understand it, this theory isn’t quite the same as ethical subjectivism in the field of philosophy, although students of Austrian economics often speak as if it were.
For example, in an issue of Austrian Economics Newsletter, Don Balente says that the Austrian approach “is most distinct from mainstream economics in its thorough emphasis on the individual decision maker as the focus of scientific analysis. Yet with the values and motives of individuals being entirely subjective it is impossible for an analyst to pass judgment on the optimality of the individual’s chosen actions.”
This is surely tantamount to ethical or moral subjectivism that if consistently applied would, in my view, thoroughly undermine the decidedly normative claims in favor of individual liberty, as well as any other moral judgments. My 1990 book, Capitalism and Individualism: Reframing the Argument for the Free Society, was an attempt to reconcile natural-law ethics and free-market economics. Following leads from Ayn Rand, Eric Mack and others, I conceived of a less confusing way to understand values than what seemed to be the Austrian one—a resolution that would work both for economists and for philosophers who believe in the possibility of objective value judgments.
My solution hinged on the nature of individual—what I learned was being called agent-relative—values. This position holds that when people try to figure out what is right for them (what to wear, what to aim for in life, how to deal with others, etc.), they can come up with correct or incorrect answers and many possibilities in between. Not just anything will do; i.e., it is not possible for a person, as subject, to create the right answer for himself ex nihilo. The answer must be discovered in relation to our human individuality and the world. So, yes, for different individuals, the right answers might vary greatly—but there are still right and wrong answers for any particular individual in a particular situation.
It is a bit like medicine: some general principles must be observed by everyone, but specific therapies and cures may vary in their utility from person to person, and sometimes drastically so. Values need to “fit” the person for whom they are of value. This is completely consistent with the fact that there are facts: objectively knowable aspects of reality that must be taken into account in each case.
I suspect that the subjective theory is motivated in part by the seemingly reasonable assumption that if what’s right for someone to do is entirely subjective, others cannot know what that right thing is—and therefore cannot pretend to be competent to force them to do that right thing. Subjectivism thus appears to be a bulwark against authoritarianism and tyranny.
Alas, if no one can judge what is right, no one can judge what is wrong, either! No one can say that it is wrong to push other people around without any justification! From a subjectivist stance nothing whatever can be said against it. All a person could say is, “Well, I subjectively find your brutalizing of that innocent person to be appalling, but of course, on your own subjective values it may be perfectly acceptable.” It’s the subject’s call, so to speak. I once debated this question with Milton Friedman, who said that if anyone could know what is right, that would authorize him to coerce others to follow suit. Some Popperian and existentialist classical liberals also claim this.
I believe the answer is that in order to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, one must do it voluntarily. No moral credit can come to someone who is coerced into doing the right thing, nor blame to someone who is coerced to do what is wrong. As Kant put it, “ ‘Ought’ implies ‘can.’ “ But even aside from the question of moral credit or blame, there is the question of whether values are even truly attainable when they are imposed from without by force. Rand argued that an “attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.”
If you force someone to marry the “right” woman, will he be as happy with that woman as he would have had he chosen her on his own? If you force someone to pursue the “right” career against his wishes, will he pursue it with the same gusto and dedication had he chosen it on his own? Such “best” outcomes are possible only if the original act of coercion is followed by volun-tary acceptance and choosing of the alleged good, as opposed to bitter and resentful submission. If the person is never free to choose “the good” at any point—good by his own judgment and choice—but has it constantly thrust upon him, his moral and reasoning capacity is essentially ripped away. Yet for human beings this capacity is the means of survival and flourishing.
It isn’t that what is good for another person cannot be known, at least sometimes. It’s that imposing it by force can easily cause harm to the person being forced—precisely because the actual re-quirements of human well-being are thereby treated as irrelevant. Coercion is destructive because it violates our ability to be moral, choosing, rational agents—the very ability that enables us to attain values to begin with.
Compelling others to do one’s bidding thus makes sense only when one is dealing with persons who have not yet achieved much capacity for moral choice—for example, very young children. And even in the case of children, it’s best to foster their independent decision-making as much as possible so that they may develop the moral skills needed to flourish as self-responsible adults.
On this view, it is certainly possible to justify freedom for individual decision-making even if an outsider might reasonably judge that such-and-such decision (e.g., being drunk all the time) is wrong, while another (e.g., showing up on time for a job interview at a company you want to work for) is right. An individualism grounded in a theory of objective values thus supplies us with most of what we need to fend of authoritarianism, whereas the theory of subjective values can all too easily pave the way for the bad guys.
Some might ask: What about those who kill or assault other persons? Are we supposed to refrain from stopping such things on the grounds that if we intrude, we are thwarting the free choice of the culprits? But opposing such conduct is justified not because the conduct is wrong (or not solely because it is wrong) but because it violates the rights of others, and because the victims or their agents are justified in putting up a defense.
Moreover, violations of rights are not wrong in the same way that failure to do the morally right thing is wrong. To violate rights is to undermine the preconditions of choosing to act morally at all within a human community. They are, to use the term of Doug Rasmussen and Doug Den Uyl, meta-normatively wrong. While all this seems reasonable enough to me, the writing of Capitalism and Individualism landed me in trouble with one of the Mises Institute’s favorite people, Professor Leland Yeager.
In a review for Liberty magazine he concluded that the book was, in fact, a threat to human liberty. Alas, one cannot please everyone, but that was a bit harsh—and fortunately, it is an assessment that seems to be unique among libertarians who have considered my work. (The same work elicited a very favorable review from David Gordon, not known for critical charity, in the Mises Review.)
That blip aside, my reflections have often been welcome among scholars of the Institute; and so I find myself returning again and again to the Scholars Conferences to present and test the ideas I have found intellectually compelling. These conferences have been the setting of some of my most fruitful encounters with people also interested in topics of concern to me, and I am forever thankful to the Mises Institute for making it possible…..
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I have a piece, “Praxeology: Who Needs It,” forthcoming in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies that addresses a number of these worries (apriorism, uneasiness, determinism, ethical subjectivism).
Several of these topics, along with the divine-action question, I also discuss in my forthcoming book, an early draft of which is online here:
http://mises.org/journals/scholar/long.pdf
I think the author quoted in the blockquote is confused about many things, most notably subjectivism. The subjective theory of value has nothing to do with ethics, other than how we subjectively value ethics. To adhere to the subjective theory of value is not to say that you can’t condemn any behaviour as right or wrong, nor even that you can’t criticize.
Praxeology, as Mises saw it, did not allow one to criticize ends. He sees ends as simply a given to any actor. Praxeology, according to Mises, does allow one to criticize the means: whether or not the means are appropriate to achieve the stated ends. Subjective value, as Mises sees it, does not preclude making judgements about the morality of means and ends. In his view, that is simply not qua subjective value.
Rothbard has argued that economics is value-free, and thus that economists cannot pretend to be value-free when making recommendations or criticisms. They need a separate, external, ethical framework. However, he later conceded this argument to Hoppe’s argumentation ethics.
Hoppe has integrated praxeology into a value-free theory of ethics via argumentation ethics. This may ease some concerns by the Randians.
I’m not convinced by Hoppe’s argumentation ethics, and the notion of a value-free theory of ethics seems to me to be a contradiction in terms. But that aside, I think it is important to point out the difference between Mises and Rothbard on ethics. Mises was a utilitarian, while Rothbard sought to develop an objective natural law theory of property rights upon which to ground libertarianism.
Having encountered Rand before Mises and Rothbard, I have always interpreted Austrian subjective value theory as being, if not synonymous, then very similar and compatible with Rand’s treatment of the agent-relative nature of values. While some Austrian’s may mistakenly interpret the Austrian subjective value theory in ways that border on or fall into ethical subjectivism, this need not be the case.
Moreover, I am not entirely convinced that economics, or any science for that matter, can be entirely value-free. It might be more accurate to say that economics is value-neutral with respect to ends pursued. The making of value-judgments while practising economic science is unavoidable. Value-judgments are made all the time when determining what makes a good theory, when a theory meets these criteria, when applying a theory, etc. To be sure, the economist qua economist cannot make value-judgments about ends, but the economist is also a father, a brother, a husband, a citizen, etc. An objective ethical system is needed beyond economics.
Rand said that a value is something one acts to gain and/or keep; that the concept of value presupposes the questions: of value to whom and for what? Sounds awfully Austrian to me.
What the rest of the world calls “objective value” Rand called “instrinsic value”–which is rejected both by Objectivists and Austrians. I see no conflict aside from terminological.
Rand said that a value is something one acts to gain and/or keep; that the concept of value presupposes the questions: of value to whom and for what? Sounds awfully Austrian to me.
What the rest of the world calls “objective value” Rand called “instrinsic value”–which is rejected both by Objectivists and Austrians. I see no conflict aside from terminological.
I’m a little fuzzy over the definitions in the quoted passage:
1) Subjective values: If everything were subjective how could any Austrian economist defend private property?
2) We always act rationally: If I had to work for one month to make $4,000 or hit Joe Smith over the head with Karl Marx’s three-volume Das Kapital and take his $4,000 in one minute, wouldn’t the rational course of action be the latter? If yes, most people I know act irrationally.
Well, I haven’t read any Rand for twenty years because I found her writing to be of poor quality.
However, in response to CHL’s point #2 above: I figure Austrians and Randians (and most others) would agree that cold-cocking someone with a book is a serious invalidation of that person’s private property (i.e. their head), and thus quite irrational as a money-making strategy.
From the paper:
“The classical liberals tend to embrace the notion
of negative rights whereas welfare statists and socialists are more sympathetic to the positive rights position.”
Classical liberals indeed tend to embrace the notion of negative rights, but there are a variety of cases in which they embrace the notion of positive rights as well: Roads, national defense, police protection, parks and even education.
I would also like to point out that many of these welfare statists do not believe in rights to private property at all. They wish that private property could be done away with entirely and everyone could just “share” at the point of a gun, if necessary. However, what they have discovered is that this scheme produces poor results and does not help them attain their ends. What they have discovered throughout the 20th century is that if they allow the productive members of society to have a certain degree of right to property, those productive members will churn out much more wealth which can be re-distributed. Hence, they really despise all private property and only wish to allow it in order to maximize the amount of wealth which can be expropriated for the welfare state. For this reason I wonder why people have hailed the worldwide shift towards mixed economies as being a monumental step towards freedom.
As for positive rights, those are patently absurd. I really wonder how Nussbaum and these other left wing philosophers go from theories of morals to theories of law. No doubt it is done with a lot of semantic hocus pocus. Another insurmountable obstacle that positive rights theorists must overcome is how they are going to enforce their positive rights from a legitimate authority. It is one thing to claim that people have a right to education, but without providing how this will be provided in a just manner in a legitimate political system it is just about meaningless, because if anyone can go around enforcing this “right,” in any manner they choose, then chaos will ensue. Most of these theorists would probably claim that a totalitarian or monarchical state lacks the criteria necessary for legitimate authority to enforce this positive right, however, what they do not realize is that democracy and every other political system lacks the criteria necessary as well. Positive rights can only legitimately be enforced through pure private property contractualism, but when this is realized the coercive nature of positive rights which caused them to be so attractive to the leftists in the first place, is gone.
This may not be 100% to the point of the original post, but I recently posted on my blog an argument that pertains to Mises’s praxeological refutation of God:
“Philosopher Barry Smith has argued in several places (see “The Question of Apriorism,” for an example), contra the Austrian economists, that the action axiom is not irrefutable. He points out that an extra-terrestrial could deny that human beings act. I think that he is correct here if the action axiom is defined as the fact that human beings act. But even so, any attempt by a human being to refute the action axiom would still be self-defeating. In any case, I would argue (as I believe notable Austrian economists have) that the action axiom is universalizable to all volitional beings, in which case a denial by an extra-terrestrial that human beings act would hinge upon an empirical-contingent claim, viz. the denial that human beings are volitional beings. The truth of the action axiom is thus never in question, and it remains irrefutable.”
Smith is under the impression that the action axiom only pertains to human beings, but as Dr. Machan points out in his post, Mises applied it universally to all volitional beings, including God.
Vanmind,
Certainly it is an invasion of property rights, but why irrational? Do you mean that because the existence of property rights is the most rational form for making money that the act of robbery is irrational? If yes, then not all people act rationally.
If all people acted with rational composure, there would be no need for the study of economics (or law) because such a prevailing rational nature would provide automatic nurturing for our species & structure for our civilization.
Mind you, by then we would have become some other species entirely…
CHL, to quote you ‘We always act rationally: If I had to work for one month to make $4,000 or hit Joe Smith over the head with Karl Marx’s three-volume Das Kapital and take his $4,000 in one minute, wouldn’t the rational course of action be the latter?’
Why ? It is a judgement call from the individual making the choice, it may be different than yours but most people would obviously feel rotten hitting someone no matter how much money they got from it. For others, they wouldn’t. I am not sure what you define as rational?
About the paper:
You can even accept (for the sake of argument) Comte’s position that we are totally indebted to “society” from the minute we are born. The next question is how do we know exactly what to to to repay our debt? Submit to a bunch of guys who pretend to act in the name of “society”? or rather seek the approval of as many as possible of the present members of society through the device of the market?
And how shall I be penalized if I refuse to pay my debt? by some decree of that same bunch of guys or by my fellow humans withholding their repayments from me through the same market mechanisms?
It seems to me that Comte and his followers are beside the point on that issue
I too have always had problems with Mises’ statement that “action is always rational”.
However, reading on, I have come to the conclusion that a better wording of what he actually meant is “action is always deliberate”. Action does involves a rational decision based on some perception of a means-ends relationship, but there is no guarantée that that particular perception will be confirmed by the effective results of action. In other words, we must not confuse, as we most often do,”rational” with “infallible”.
Jonathan:
Just to be clear, I was referring to what Tibor Machan wrote -
Another sticking point pertains to the view held by both the neoclassicists and the Misesians that we always act rationally, a claim that doesn’t mesh well with my own philosophical conclusions
- and was wondering in what way he understood the neoclassicists and the Misesians to view us as always acting rationally and what were the parameters in which rationality could be defined.
I take rationality to mean the ability to be logical, to reason and, if we want to use it in a financial sense, to take the route that offers the most reward at the least cost. With the example I offered, it would certainly be rational for me (or anyone else) to hit someone over the head with a book if I wanted $4,000 now versus having to work for a month to get $4,000. Immoral, unethical? Yes. Irrational? No.
What Gérard Dréan said sounds about right, in terms of what Mises and Tibor Machan were referring to in terms of rationality and clears up some confusion for me, this confusion having prompted me to pose the question. I didn’t intend to imply that neoclassicists and Misesians would think that all people do rob rather than earn money, however the way I see the term “rational” defined would see the robbery example I posed included under it.
Doesn’t Mises, or at least Rothbard, elsewhere argue that praxeology doesn’t make any assumptions on rationality?
Here’s what Mises said on rationality:
Economics, it is said, in its rationalistic prepossessions assumes that men aim only or first of all at material well-being. But in reality men prefer irrational objectives to rational ones. They are guided more by the urge to realize myths and ideals than by the urge to enjoy a higher standard of living.
What economics has to answer is this:
1. Economics does not assume or postulate that men aim only or first of all at what is called material well-being. Economics, as a branch of the more general theory of human action, deals with all human action, i.e., with man’s purposive aiming at the attainment of ends chosen, whatever these ends may be. To apply the concept rational or irrational to the ultimate ends chosen is nonsensical. We may call irrational the ultimate given, viz., those things that our thinking can neither analyze nor reduce to other ultimately given things. Then every ultimate end chosen by any man is irrational. It is neither more nor less rational to aim at riches like Croesus than to aim at poverty like a Buddhist monk.
2. What these critics have in mind when employing the term rational ends is the desire for material well-being and a higher standard of living. It is a question of fact whether or not their statement is true that men in general and our contemporaries especially are driven more by the wish to realize myths and dreams than by the wish to improve their material well-being. Although no intelligent being could fail to give the correct answer, we may disregard the issue. For economics does not say anything either in favor of or against myths. It is perfectly neutral with regard to the labor-union doctrine, the credit-expansion doctrine and all such doctrines as far as these may present themselves as myths and are supported as myths by their partisans. It deals with these doctrines only as far as they are considered doctrines about the means fit for the attainment of definite ends. Economics does not say labor unionism is a bad myth. It merely says it is an inappropriate means of raising wage rates for all those eager to earn wages. It leaves it to every man to decide whether the realization of the labor-union myth is more important than the avoidance of the inevitable consequences of labor-union policies.
In this sense we may say that economics is apolitical or nonpolitical, [p. 885] although it is the foundation of politics and of every kind of political action. We may furthermore say that it is perfectly neutral with regard to all judgments of value, as it refers always to means and never to the choice of ultimate ends.
http://mises.org/humanaction/chap39sec2.asp
Mises is even more to the point, and crystal-clear, in chapter 1 of Human Action.
The opening sentences in that chapter define action: “Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.”
That is confirmed later in section 4 of the same chapter:
“The opposite of action is not irrational behavior, but a reactive response to stimuli on the part of the bodily organs and instincts which cannot be controlled by the volition of the person concerned.”
Action is thus defined as that part of human behaviour which makes use of reason.
Then comes the (in)famous sentence in section 4 of the same chapter: “Human action is necessarily always rational.”
But continue reading: “The term “rational action” is therefore pleonastic and must be rejected as such. When
applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless.”
And five paragraphs later:
“When applied to the means chosen for the attainment of ends, the terms rational and irrational imply a judgment about the expediency and adequacy of the procedure employed. The critic approves or disapproves of the method from the point of view of whether or not it is best suited to attain the end in question. It is a fact that human reason is not infallible and that man very often errs in selecting and applying means. An action unsuited to the end sought falls short of expectation. It is contrary to purpose, but it is rational, i.e., the outcome of a reasonable–although faulty–deliberation and an attempt–although an ineffectual attempt–to attain a definite goal.”
So, in my view, the often-quoted sentence “Human action is necessarily always rational.” is totally unproblematic unless one takes it out of context and assigns words different meanings from what Mises meant and explicitly wrote.
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