RogerM

RogerM” I don’t think the quote you provided above shows that Mises was trying to create a moral system. He plainly wants to avoid moral questions and address the practical question of whether certain economic plans will achieve their goals or not. I don’t see that Mises rejected natural law, but that he avoided getting bogged down in the quagmire of moral debates”.

Björn “It is very obvious that Mises was not trying to create a moral system. He was a supporter of “value-free economics”, but at the same time his “value-free economics” was based on utilitarianism and that is not a value free notion. That is a contradiction in terms.

Mises and Natural Law

I will quote Mises again:

Human Action:

“But the teachings of utilitarian philosophy and classical economics have nothing at all to do with the doctrine of natural right. With them the only point that matters is social utility. They recommend popular government, private property, tolerance, and freedom not because they are natural and just, but because they are beneficial. The core of Ricardo’s philosophy is the demonstration that social cooperation and division of labor between men who are in every regard superior and more efficient and men who are in every regard inferior and less efficient is beneficial to both groups. Bentham, the radical, shouted: “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense.” [10] With him “the sole object of government ought to be the greatest happiness of the greatest possible number of the community.” [11] Accordingly, in investigating what ought to be right he does not care about preconceived ideas concerning God’s or nature’s plans and intentions, forever hidden to mortal men; he is intent upon discovering what best serves the promotion of human welfare and happiness. Malthus showed that nature in limiting the means of subsistence does not accord to any living being a right of existence, and that by indulging heedlessly in the natural impulse of proliferation man would never have risen above the verge of starvation. He contended that human civilization and well-being could develop only to the extent that man learned to rein his sexual appetites by moral restraint. The Utilitarians do not combat arbitrary government and privileges because they are against natural law but because they are detrimental to prosperity. They recommend equality under the civil law not because men are equal but because such a policy is beneficial to the commonweal. In rejecting the illusory notions of natural law and human equality modern biology only repeated what the utilitarian champions of liberalism and democracy long before had taught in a much more persuasive way. It is obvious that no biological doctrine can ever invalidate what utilitarian philosophy says about the social utility of democratic government, private property, freedom, and equality under the law.”

http://mises.org/humanaction/chap8sec8.asp#p175

For example, please notice: “In rejecting the illusory notions of natural law.”

Further:

“Eighteenth-century liberalism and likewise present-day egalitarianism start from the “self-evident truth” that “all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” However, say the advocates of a biological philosophy of society, natural science has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that men are different. There is no room left in the framework of an experimental observation of natural phenomena for such a concept as natural rights. Nature is unfeeling and insensible with regard to any being’s life and happiness. Nature is iron necessity and regularity. It is metaphysical nonsense to link together the “slippery” and vague notion of liberty and the unchangeable absolute laws of cosmic order. Thus the fundamental idea of liberalism is unmasked as a fallacy.”

http://mises.org/humanaction/chap8sec8.asp#p174

RogerM “You’re right. They start with self-ownership, which suggests the right to property. But it also suggests many other thing, such as the right to survival, the right/need for sociability, things that natural law considers and Hoppe/Rothbard don’t. The choice to limit the discussion just to property and make property the absolute was an arbitrary one.”

Björn All those good things that you mention presupposes self-ownership. Without self-ownership man cannot achieve anything. Not even the possibility to debate and this fact alone is enough to make it an objective starting point. From this rational axiom, Hoppe defines objective property rights. Without mentioned property rights, self-ownership cannot be sustained, or in other words, the objective starting point can not be sustained. This is not some sort of “suggestion”, but a derived fact. That is why the whole concept is an objective ethic.

Rothbard “To make such a case, one must go beyond economics and utilitarianism to establish an objective ethics which affirms the overriding value of liberty, and morally condemns all forms of statism, from egalitarianism to “the murder of redheads,” as well as such goals as the lust for power and the satisfaction of envy.”

RogerM “This is where Rothbard goes wrong. Morality/ethics, like natural law, cannot be created by mankind, it must be discovered. Otherwise, like positive law, it becomes just another opinion.”

Björn Who said that an objective ethics can be created? Not Rothbard. The word “establish” is not the same as the word “create”. Don’t you think that Rothbard was very aware of the fact that an objective ethics must be discovered and not created?

Well, I will post Rothbard´s quote again:

The Ethics of Liberty:

“IF, THEN, THE NATURAL law is discovered by reason from “the basic inclinations of human nature . . . absolute, immutable, and of universal validity for all times and places,” it follows that the natural law provides an objective set of ethical norms by which to gauge human actions at any time or place”.

Please, notice the word “discovered”.

Further:

“In fact, the legal principles of any society can be established in three alternate ways: (a) by following the traditional custom of the tribe or community; (b) by obeying the arbitrary, ad hoc will of those who rule the State apparatus; or (c) by the use of man’s reason in discovering the natural law—in short, by slavish conformity to custom, by arbitrary whim, or by use of man’s reason. These are essentially the only possible ways for establishing positive law. Here we may simply affirm that the latter method is at once the most appropriate for man at his most nobly and fully human, and the most potentially “revolutionary” vis-à-vis any given status quo.”

http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/three.asp

Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden

All right, you’ve convinced me that Mises was utilitarian and didn’t agree with natural law. But this statement is interesting:

“Accordingly, in investigating what ought to be right he does not care about preconceived ideas concerning God’s or nature’s plans and intentions, forever hidden to mortal men; he is intent upon discovering what best serves the promotion of human welfare and happiness.”

The goal of Mises’ utilitarianism and natural law are the same–what best serves the promotion of human welfare and happiness. I think the difference between the two may be that natural law tried to explain why some things contribute to human welfare, whereas utilitarians didn’t care why; they were focused on what and how. That may be why I thought Mises followed natural law.

But that doesn’t make me respect Rothbard and Hoppe more, just respect Mises less.

“This is not some sort of “suggestion”, but a derived fact. That is why the whole concept is an objective ethic.”

No, it’s not a derived fact. Hoppe states that self-ownership “implies” the right to property. I’ve always thought it a very weak foundation for the most important institution in Western civilization.

Rothbard uses the term “natural law” in a sense that is very different from what people traditionally have meant by it, and what I mean by it. Historically, natural law referred to that body of work beginning with Thomas Aquinas and extending as as late as Adam Smith, some claim. Traditional natural law began with God and had as its goal the welfare of mankind. Because it began with God, it carried authority and very specific assumptions on which to build. Rothbard uses the term to refer to nothing more than the process of reasoning about ethics. As I wrote before, using reason is not the key; every ethical system uses reason; even the Mongols used reason. Reason is an attribute of all mankind.

What distinguishes moral systems is the starting points, the premises and assumptions. Both Rothbard/Hoppe arrive at many of the conclusions already reached by natural law because natural law emphasized property. But natural law didn’t make property an absolute; it made the welfare of mankind the absolute, so it had room for the formation of governments.

Rothbard/Hoppe can only arrive at their conclusions about the illegitimacy of the state by making property absolute inviolate. But that is an arbitrary absolute and a choice that Rothbard and Hoppe have no right or authority to make.

“Intellectually the principle lets the door stand wide open for the use of physical violence and theft against people which happens to belong to the lesser number.”

Remember the goal of utilitarianism–human welfare. Mises shows that physical violence and theft work toward the opposite of human welfare, so utilitarianism could never reach that conclusion. However, one problem with utilitarianism, and there are many, is the question “Why care about human welfare?” Why not care just about my personal welfare? In a way, utilitarianism erects an aritrary absolute as its idol in the same way the Rothbard/Hoppe do. Only traditional natural law provides an answer.

RogerM

RogerM “What distinguishes moral systems is the starting points, the premises and assumptions. Both Rothbard/Hoppe arrive at many of the conclusions already reached by natural law because natural law emphasized property. But natural law didn’t make property an absolute; it made the welfare of mankind the absolute, so it had room for the formation of governments.”

“It made the welfare of mankind the absolute, so it had room for the formation of governments.”

Björn Above statement is not a premise and an assumption because it doesn’t really say much. Anything can be derived from this “premise” and “assumption.” It is extremely vague and subjective and it cannot, therefore, be used to prove anything. Anything could be “concluded” as it is not derived from a fact.

My above example of Hitler’s murdering of Jews or Rothbard’s example of murdering of redheads could be justified in the name that “it promoted the welfare of the people.”

Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden

I will post this again since I do believe that my comment regarding none existence of any property rights is here presented more clearly and logically than in my above post.

Life and self-ownership

Mark Humphrey “I don’t want to precipitate trench warfare with devoted Rothbardians, but I strongly suspect that Rothbard owed his insight about “life as the standard of moral value” to Ayn Rand. I can’t prove this, of course. Sadly, in “The Ethics of Liberty”, (published in the early Eighties) Rothbard chose to, in a sense, blacklist Rand by claiming that NO ONE, other than himself, in the libertarian movement was working to develope a system of rationally defensible ethics. (Maybe Rothbard meant “at the moment I am writing this statement”.)”

Björn That life is an axiomatic value and functions “as the standard of moral value” in an ethical system, Rothbard could, alternatively for example, have gotten this insight from Mises himself through analyzing his statement in his book, “Human Action”, page 11:

“We may say that action is the manifestation of a man’s will.”

http://mises.org/humanaction/chap1sec1.asp

I am not saying that Rothbard did get his insight from Mises; I am only saying that it was possible. Surely, many other possibilities exist which we do not know anything about.

Mark Humphrey “It has been awhile since I’ve read Hoppe, and Rothbard; but I suspect Hoppe’s reasoning goes: either we all own ourselves, or everyone owns everyone else. Since the first proposition is clearly more defensible than the latter absurd proposition, one can affirm self ownership as valid. But if this is the argument, it fails. For that argument assumes that which it sets out to prove, namely that an ethical concept, “ownership”, exists. But on this basis, ownership remains unproven, so that one could just as well assert: “no one owns anything, and anything goes.””

Björn Self-ownership is a natural fact, since a man in his very nature controls his own mind and body (natural disposition), that is, he is a natural self-owner of his own will and person (having a free will) and if this was not true, neither could he effectively control any property and, therefore, not own it. In other words; “nothing could control and own something”.

Naturally, praxeology the science of human action, by itself logically confirms the natural fact of self-ownership, since praxeology is based upon “the acting man consciously intending to improve his own satisfaction” and I quote from answers.com:

“From praxeology Mises derived the idea that every conscious action is intended to improve a person’s satisfaction. He was careful to stress that praxeology is not concerned with the individual’s definition of end satisfaction, just the way he sought that satisfaction. The way in which a person will increase his satisfaction is by removing a source of dissatisfaction. As the future is uncertain so every action is speculative.

An acting man is defined as one capable of logical thought — to be otherwise would be to make one a mere creature who simply reacts to stimuli by instinct. Similarly an acting man must have a source of dissatisfaction which he believes capable of removing, otherwise he cannot act.
Another conclusion that Mises reached was that decisions are made on an ordinal basis. That is, it is impossible to carry out more than one action at once, the conscious mind being only capable of one decision at a time — even if those decisions can be made in rapid order. Thus man will act to remove the most pressing source of dissatisfaction first and then move to the next most pressing source of dissatisfaction.

As a person satisfies his first most important goal and after that his second most important goal then his second most important goal is always less important than his first most important goal. Thus, for every further goal reached, his satisfaction, or utility, is lessened from the preceding goal. This is the rule of diminishing marginal utility.

In human society many actions will be trading activities where one person regards a possession of another person as more desirable than one of his own possessions, and the other person has a similar higher regard for his colleague’s possession than he does for his own. This subject of praxeology is known as catallactics, and is the more commonly accepted realm of economics.”

http://www.answers.com/Praxeology?gwp=11&ver=2.0.1.458&method=3

Further:

The Ethics of Liberty, page 45:

Footnote:

“[1]Professor George Mavrodes, of the department of philosophy of the University of Michigan, objects that there is another logical alternative: namely, “that no one owns anybody, either himself or anyone else, nor any share of anybody.” However, since ownership signifies range of control, this would mean that no one would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly vanish.”

http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/eight.asp

Or in my own words:

Why must anybody own anything?

In accordance with our objective test to find out if something is a condition for something else, we grasp a state of things where the following principle is none existent anywhere and at all:

“The existence of property rights”:

In a world without any property rights nobody would be able to do anything, since nobody has the right to control anything. Not even themselves (see below about property rights in your own person).

This question is not only a contradiction it is also silly. You ask a question which means that you control yourselves (natural disposition), that is owning yourself (see below the excellent writing of Hans-Hermann Hoppe). The other contradiction is that if nobody would own anything, nobody would be able to hinder anyone to own anything either since they would otherwise have an invalid control (having the disposition to) of everyone else, that is having an invalid ownership to everybody else (see below about valid property rights in your own person).

Ownership itself is, therefore, an objective condition for the preservation of human life.

Please read some of Hans-Hermann Hoppe´s excellent writing from the book “The Ethics and Economics of Private Property”:

http://mises.org/etexts/hoppe5.pdf

And to:

ON THE ULTIMATE JUSTIFICATION OF THE ETHICS OF PRIVATE PROPERTY:

http://www.hanshoppe.com/publications/econ-ethics-10.pdf

Björn Lundahl