Quoting:
An eminent economist writes: ‘The spheres of rational action and economic action are… coincident. All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action.’ And what is the end of economic activity? One’s own pleasure. ‘Action based on reason,’ goes on Professor von Mises, ‘action therefore which is only to be understood by reason, knows only one end, the greatest pleasure of the acting individual.’
Blanshard adds in a footnote:
Von Mises adds, to be sure, that ‘pleasure’ covers all human ends, ‘noble and ignoble, altruistic and egotistical’. But he presumably means that it is the pleasure involved in beauty, knowledge, and the rest, that is actually sought; to identify pleasure with knowledge, e.g., would hardly be possible. And how the end of ‘the greatest pleasure of the acting individual’ could be described as ‘altruistic’ I do not understand. (Reason and Analysis, 53)
1. I’ve tried to get our resident pragmatist in the philosophy department to admit that there is speculative knowledge in addition to practical knowledge, and consequently the intellectual virtues (knowledge, understanding, wisdom) in addition to the moral virtues (prudence, etc.). But I think to no avail. So, Blanshard scores a point here. Where he is wrong is in holding that prudence is identical with foxlike craftiness, selfish cunning, and “scheming sagacity.” Prudence is a great virtue, but it has vices opposed to it, like guile, fraud, “prudence of the flesh,” and so on.
2. There is no need to identify pleasure with beauty and knowledge. Aquinas distinguishes between 3 goods not merely 2 (means and ends): the useful good (means), the virtuous good desired for its own sake (the end), and the pleasant good (the will’s rest or repose in the end attained). Neither Mises nor Blanshard recognize this distinction.
3. How can one’s pleasure be described as altruistic? When the good sought for another person is also your own good; when the beloved whose happiness you seek is another self or half of your soul, as Augustine put it. On the other hand, self-interest is not to be identified with charity (as in, the primal force and the theological virtue of). So, Mises got it half right.
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“How can one’s pleasure be described as altruistic? When the good sought for another person is also your own good…”
Someone once sent me a link to the story of “The Happy Prince.”
http://www.readprint.com/work-1512/Oscar-Wilde“
I’m curious as to how people will respond to it.
It always amuses me that it is philosophers that tend to value Mises most, other than Austrian and their fellow traveler economists. Few mainstream economists are even aware of a man who achieved far more than most of them ever will.
One can almost hear Ayn Rand’s shade adding Oscar Wilde to her Reds List.
LOL
Oscar was indeed a bit of a red, though this story is unbelievably touching. Really, Oscar was always in the process of searching for truth and when a story occurred to him that might shed light on a human issue, he offered it. That’s all. For a counter example of a story that illustrates the dangers of self sacrifice, see “The Devoted Friend”
The virtue of prudence as immortalized in The Mikado:
My brain it teams
With endless schemes
Both good and new
For Titipu,
For Titipu;
But if I flit,
The benefit
That I’d diffuse
The town would lose!
Now every man
To aid his clan
Should plot and plan
As best he can.
If the word “pleasure” is too confusing, another terms can be used to explain, what is the end of all action – contentment, or satisfaction for instance. To quote:
“Acting man is eager to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory.”
In other words, it is the striving to achieve (or at least approach) the “best” state of affairs, whatever that means to a given person – and that can be described as noble, ignoble, or egotistical – or even altruistic:
“There are people whose only aim is to improve the condition of their own ego. There are other people with whom awareness of the troubles of their fellow men causes as much uneasiness as or even more uneasiness than their own wants.”
Slightly more philosophically:
“Praxeology is indifferent to the ultimate goals of action. Its findings are valid for all kinds of action irrespective of the ends aimed at. It is a science of means, not of ends. It applies the term happiness in a purely formal sense. In the praxeological terminology the proposition: man’s unique aim is to attain happiness, is tautological. It does not imply any statement about the state of affairs from which man expects happiness.”
To sum it up:
a) the end of ‘the greatest pleasure of the acting individual’ can be described as ‘altruistic’ and
b) charity can be identified as self-interest
In both cases the common-day meanings of words are somewhat different from their praxeological equivalents, and that is what causes the confusion, I think.
(All quotes are from Human Action, Chapter I.)
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