26. The Moral Element in Mises’s Human Action

CHAPTER 26

The Moral Element in Mises’s Human Action*

SCIENCE AND VALUES

Israel Kirzner recently asked how Ludwig von Mises could claim to be pursuing value-free science while at the same time showing “enormous passion” to communicate its truths (Kirzner 1998, pp. 582—586). “Passion” in that context implies moral judgment, a concern for truth over falsehood and right over wrong. I will embroider a bit on how Kirzner answered his own question, which, by the way, recognizes the fact/value or is/ought distinction. Further, I will review Mises’s insights into the basis of morality.

As Kirzner argued, the passionate pursuit of value-free truths involves no contradiction. Mises wanted people to have the opportunity to pursue happiness successfully. That opportunity presupposes what he called “social cooperation,” meaning a secure and peaceful society in which people can interact to their mutual benefit while pursuing their own diverse specializations, projects, and kinds of excellence. Such a society presupposes policies that serve, rather than undercut, social cooperation; and they in turn presuppose that policymakers and the public have some understanding of economics—value-free science. It is too much to expect that most people should actively understand economics; perhaps it suffices if they have the humility to recognize their ignorance and refrain from destructively imposing its consequences.

Still, it is important that enough people do get economics straight and disseminate its teachings. That requires subtle insights and a perspective different from those of the layperson. Its conclusions are counterintuitive, and fallacies pervade public opinion. Most do not understand the law of unintended consequences. Economic ignorance is so widespread and its consequences so frightening that, as Kirzner said, reducing it “becomes a goal invested with independent moral worth.” Economic education serves a human goal of such importance that “passionate concern becomes ... a morally natural phenomenon.” Kirzner insists on “a fundamental difference between economic education” and promoting “‘libertarian’ ideology or rhetoric.” Passion need not and dare not “compromise the detachment and objectivity of the content of... economic education” (1998, pp. 582—586).

I will make one clarification. We cannot expect the whole of any science to be value-free and expect researchers to pursue their work with no heed to values. Values guide scientists toward questions that they find interesting and worth investigating. Values guide the application of scientific findings. What can be value-free is the content of scientific propositions. The distinction between value-free and value-loaded pertains not to whole fields of study or to professional careers but to propositions, to sentences. Some value-free propositions are that snow is white, that demand curves slope downward, that expanding the quantity of money beyond what people are willing to hold at existing prices causes price inflation, and that private property and genuine markets are necessary (as Mises and Hayek explained) for economic calculation.

Does insisting on a distinction between normative and positive propositions disparage ethics? No. Normative propositions can be argued for and against. All value judgments have descriptive as well as normative content, except only for fundamental value judgments. Examples of relatively specific judgments are that lying, cheating, and stealing are wrong. A fundamental judgment, in contrast and by definition, is one that one cannot argue for because one has reached the end of arguing and must appeal to direct observation or intuition instead. Probably the most familiar example is the judgment that misery is bad and happiness is good; scarcely anyone would try to demonstrate that judgment.

UTILITARIANISM

Utilitarianism rests on that one fundamental intuition or, in other words, on approval of human flourishing, of people’s success in making good lives for themselves, and disapproval of the opposite conditions. This is a tame value judgment, to be sure; but combined with positive knowledge of the world and human affairs, it goes a long way in ethics. What fundamental value judgment or criterion could be more plausible?

One great insight of Mises, following David Hume and elaborated by Henry Hazlitt (1964), is that direct appeal to the criterion of happiness over misery is seldom necessary. A surrogate criterion is more tractable. Actions, institutions, rules, principles, customs, ideals, dispositions, and character traits count as good or bad according to whether they support or undercut social cooperation, which is prerequisite to the happiness of a society’s members. Economics and the other social and natural sciences have much to say about what does support or undercut it.

Hazlitt gives powerful reasons for repudiating the variety of utilitarianism that calls for whatever action seems most likely, on each particular occasion, to contribute most to the sum total of happiness. That brand, called “act-utilitarianism,” has now sunk almost to the status of a mere strawman. Even so, it remains the favorite target of superficial critics. Hazlitt advocates “rules-utilitarianism” instead, which might better be named “indirect utilitarianism.” I won’t spell out his reasons for espousing this version of utilitarianism here. Suffice it to say that he rejects case-by-case expediency and calls for adherence, almost without exception, to traditional precepts of morality, ethical principles that do satisfy the utilitarian criterion. Utilitarian philosophers can give reasons, grounded in reality, for respecting cherished values.

ETHICS IN HUMAN ACTION

Henry Hazlitt, and Mises before him, forthrightly and courageously avowed utilitarian ethics in a hostile intellectual atmosphere. Let us look more closely at what Mises wrote. He identifies ethical doctrines as normative disciplines concerned with what ought to be. Praxeology and economics, in contrast, recognize that ultimate ends are purely subjective. They judge means by whether or not they are suitable to attain the desired ends (Mises 1949/1966).

Does Mises say that a widely accepted ethical code is essential to a decently functioning economy? I do not find that he says so explicitly—perhaps because the point is almost too obvious to need saying. He says so implicitly, however, when he emphasizes that social cooperation, including market relations, is essential to prosperity and happiness and when he expounds the ethics of social cooperation.

Chapter VIII of Human Action explains that the moral rules necessary for social cooperation constitute an autonomous, rationalistic, and voluntaristic ethic. They stand in contrast with the heteronomous doctrines both of intuitionism and of revealed commandments (Mises 1949/1966, p. 833). Earlier we read, “Society and the state are... the primary means for all people to attain the ends that they aim at of their own accord.” Society is the great means for attainment of all the individual’s ends (pp. 148, 165). The division of labor and the exchange of people’s specialized outputs enhance productivity. The principle of comparative advantage, which Mises calls the Ricardian Law of Association, goes far toward explaining how. In a world without this enhancement of productivity, there would be no sentiments of benevolence and good will (pp. 144, 159—164).

The operation of the market coordinates individuals’ actions. No special orders or prohibitions are necessary. Noncooperation penalizes itself. The market economy does not ask anybody to deviate from those lines of conduct that best serve his own interests (pp. 734—736).

Beyond the sphere of private property and the market, organized society has built dams to protect private property and the market against violence, malice, and fraud (pp. 734—736). Such misbehavior does occur because some persons are too narrow-minded or too weak in moral strength and willpower to adjust themselves on their own to the conditions of social life. They yield to temptations; they seek fleeting advantage by actions harmful to the smooth functioning of the social system. Society could not exist if the majority were not ready to apply or threaten force to keep these others from destroying the social order. Although anarchists overlook this regrettable truth, the state is essential to crush the onslaughts of peace-breakers (p. 149). “[T]he only purpose of the laws and the social apparatus of coercion and compulsion is to safeguard the smooth functioning of social cooperation” (p. 722).

In some passages Mises is quite explicit about his utilitarianism. The theory of social cooperation elaborated by British political economy from Hume to Ricardo extended the Epicurean philosophy. “It substituted an autonomous rational morality for the heteronomous and intuitionist ethics of older days.” The only yardstick to be applied to law, the moral code, and social institutions is expediency with regard to human welfare. God endowed “his creatures with reason and the urge toward the pursuit of happiness” (p. 147).

Mises presents a utilitarian case for democracy and classical liberalism. Liberalism is not itself a theory, he says, but an application of economic and other theories to policy. It attaches a concrete—not purely formal—meaning to happiness and removal of uneasiness. It supposes that people prefer life, health, nourishment, and abundance to their opposites; and it teaches how to act in accordance with these valuations (pp. 149—150, 153—154).

If an economist states that a certain policy measure is bad, he is not pronouncing a value judgment; he is simply saying that it is inappropriate for the desired goal (p. 883).

Reformers want to replace what they call selfishness, acquisitiveness, and profit-seeking, Mises observes, with altruism, charity, and fear of God. But in urging people to substitute “considerations of public welfare for those of private profit, one does not create a working and satisfactory social order.... [H]ow should the ‘altruistic’ entrepreneur proceed?” (pp. 725–726).

Flexibility of prices and wages is the vehicle of adjustment, improvement, and progress. Those who condemn price and wage changes as unjust are working against endeavors to make economic conditions more satisfactory (p. 728).

Is profit to be morally condemned? “The marvelous economic improvements of the last two hundred years were an achievement of the capitalists who provided the capital goods required and of the elite of technologists and entrepreneurs. The masses of the manual workers were benefited by changes which they not only did not generate but which, more often than not, they tried to cut short” (p. 301).

Mises identifies connections between interventionism and the corruption of government officials. In administering many interventionist measures, for example, import licenses, favoritism simply cannot be avoided. Whether or not money changes hands does not matter; licenses can be awarded to people who supply campaign help. “Corruption is a regular effect of interventionism.” Mises also identifies the mindset of redistributionists. “They reject all traditional notions of law and legality in the name of a ‘higher and nobler’ idea of justice. Whatever they themselves do is always right because it hurts those who selfishly want to retain for themselves what, from the point of view of this higher concept of justice, ought to belong to others” (pp. 734—736).

ETHICS IN MISES’S OTHER WRITINGS

Beyond Human Action, Mises wrote on ethics elsewhere. In Theory and History (1979/1985, pp. 54—61) we read:

The ultimate yardstick of justice is conduciveness to the preservation of social cooperation.... [S]ocial cooperation is for man a means for the attainment of all his ends.... As social cooperation is ... a means and not an end, no unanimity with regard to value judgments is required to make it work. ... The characteristic feature of a free society is that it can function in spite of the fact that its members disagree in many judgments of value.

Utilitarianism “dispels the notion that society, the state, the nation, or any other social entity is an ultimate end and that individual men are the slaves of that entity. It rejects the philosophies of universalism, collectivism, and totalitarianism. In this sense it is meaningful to call utilitarianism a philosophy of individualism” (Mises 1979/1985, p. 28).

In an essay of 1950 Mises wrote:

Social cooperation under the division of labor is the ultimate and sole source of man’s success in his struggle for survival and his endeavors to improve as much as possible the material conditions of his well-being. But as human nature is, society cannot exist if there is no provision for preventing unruly people from actions incompatible with community life. In order to preserve peaceful cooperation, one must be ready to resort to violent suppression of those disturbing the peace. (1990, p. 303)

The following comes from an essay of 1945:

The sacrifice that a man or a group makes in renouncing some short-run gains, lest they endanger the peaceful operation of the apparatus of social cooperation, is merely temporary. It amounts to an abandonment of a small immediate profit for the sake of incomparably greater advantages in the long run.

Such is the core of the moral teachings of nineteenth-century utilitarianism. Observe the moral law for your own sake, neither out of fear of hell nor for the sake of other groups, but for your own benefit. Renounce economic nationalism and conquest, not for the sake of foreigners and aliens, but for the benefit of your own nation and state.

It was the partial victory of this philosophy that resulted in the marvelous economic and political achievements of modern capitalism....

The scientific basis of this utilitarian ethics was the teachings of economics. Utilitarian ethics stands and falls with economics.

[But our age witnesses a] revolt against rationalism, economics, and utilitarian social philosophy; it is at the same time a revolt against freedom, democracy, and representative government.

[The anti-liberals call their adversaries names.] Rationalism is called superficial and unhistoric. Utilitarianism is branded as a mean system of stockjobber ethics ... “peddler mentality,” “dollar philosophy” [Economics is scorned.] (1990, pp. 209—210)

Writing probably in 1949 or 1950, Mises recognizes that science does not have the duty to tell people what to seek as their chief good. In assessing a doctrine, we have to ask only whether it is logically coherent or self-contradictory and whether its practical application will help people attain their desired ends. We have to consider doctrines as recipes for action and apply no other standard than that of whether they will work (1990, pp. 300—301).

Utilitarianism has rejected all standards of a heteronomous moral law, which has to be accepted and obeyed regardless of the consequences arising therefrom. For [sic] the utilitarian point of view a deed is a crime because its results are detrimental to society and not because some people believe that they hear in their soul a mystical voice which calls it a crime. We do not talk about problems of ethics. (1990, p. 301)

In various writings Mises disavows hedonism in the narrow sense. Notwithstanding superficial critics, “happiness” does not mean mere material, bodily pleasures. Advanced utilitarians, he says, interpret pleasure and pain, utility and disutility in “purely formal” senses, referring to whatever individuals in fact try to achieve or avoid (1933/1960, pp. 52, 151; 1979/1985, pp. 12—13; and 1949/1966, p. 21).

Mises recognizes that many people, especially creative workers, are not driven by material desires or narrow self-interest alone. They may also be expressing competence and strength and even heroism (1919/1983, pp. 193, 213). Besides people concerned only with their own egos, there are “people with whom awareness of the troubles of their fellow men causes as much uneasiness as or even more uneasiness than their own wants” (1949/1966, p. 14).

Mises occasionally slipped into repeating slogans about “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” (1919/1983, p. 183). Such a formulation has no precise meaning, of course. All that Mises presumably meant by it is that the happiness to be furthered by morality and other social institutions and practices is the happiness of people in general—of the random member of society—rather than the differential happiness of specific persons or classes at the expense of others. Mises specifically repudiated any idea—such as critics enjoy attacking—of trying to maximize any numerical aggregate of measurable individual utilities (1949/1966, p. 242).

Some passages from his Nation, State, and Economy document Mises’s rejection of slogans and intuitions as a basis for policy and his focus on likely consequences.

Rationalist utilitarianism rules out neither socialism nor imperialism on principle. Accepting it provides only a standpoint from which one can compare and evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the various possibilities of social order; one could conceivably become a socialist or even an imperialist from the utilitarian standpoint. But whoever has once adopted this standpoint is compelled to present his program rationally. (1919/1983, p. 211)

Utilitarianism has been reproached for aiming only to satisfy material interests and for neglecting higher human goals. It is true that liberalism and utilitarianism aim at the highest possible productivity of labor. But they know “that human existence does not exhaust itself in material pleasures. They strive for welfare and for wealth not because they see the highest value in them but because they know that all higher and inner culture presupposes outward welfare.... Utilitarian policy is indeed policy for this earth. But that is true of all policy” (1919/1983, pp. 214—215).

It is an absurd confusion of values and positive knowledge, Mises wrote, when insistence on the economics relevant to some policy issue is criticized as “insensitive.” If dispelling economic fallacies “is inhuman, then so is every expression of truth. If to say this is inhuman, then the physicians who exploded the myth of the healing power of mandrake were inhuman, too, because they hurt the people employed in gathering mandrake” (1990, p. 234).

Mises used to say that various interventionist measures could be rejected on the basis of economic analysis and the value judgments of their advocates.

[A]ll the methods of interventionism are doomed to failure. This means: the interventionist measures must needs result in conditions which from the point of view of their own advocates are more unsatisfactory than the previous state of affairs they were designed to alter. These policies are therefore contrary to purpose. (1922/1981, p. 486)

CRITICISM OF MISES’S POSITION

For many decades, utilitarian ethics has had a bad press, not least in libertarian circles. It draws scorn as the mindset of crass, grasping, unprincipled people. It supposedly invites government hyperactivity aimed at maximizing some misconceived aggregate welfare. Ethics and policy must be grounded instead in noble and intuitively obvious principles such as unswerving respect for human dignity and human rights.

Mises the utilitarian has drawn his share of criticism, even from some of his own disciples. I do not maintain that Mises expounded the subtlest version of the doctrine, distinguishing between act utilitarianism and rules or indirect utilitarianism. He wrote mostly before detailed philosophical treatments of these subtleties were published, and, anyway, they were not central to his main concerns. Still, his basic philosophical stance is worth defending. Confronting it with the arguments of critics and would-be reinterpretes helps clarify it and, I think, strengthen its appeal.

Murray Rothbard called Mises “an opponent of objective ethics” (1976, p. 105). This charge is scarcely fair. Certainly Mises was not an ethical relativist or nihilist, scorning all judgments of right and wrong and complacent even when some individuals violate others’ rights in pursuit of narrow and short-run self-interest. On the contrary, he was concerned with whether behavior and precepts and character traits tend to serve or subvert social cooperation and people’s happiness.

According to Rothbard, Mises made one fundamental value judgment: He hoped that the bulk of the population would get whatever it wanted or thought it wanted. But what if the great majority wants to murder redheads or wants to see innocent persons suffer for its own amusement? A utilitarian such as Mises would include such preferences “fully as much as the most innocuous or altruistic preferences, ... in the quantitative reckoning” (1976, pp. 105, 108, 182, 210, 213). Instead of citing specific statements by Mises, Rothbard criticizes what he supposes Mises, as a utilitarian, must believe.

Murray Rothbard has called Mises “an opponent of objective ethics” and has even trotted out his own standard remark about possibly murdering all the redheads to gratify a majority. Instead of citing specific statements by Mises, however, Rothbard criticizes what he thinks a utilitarian must believe. Also, like Karen Vaughn, he criticizes Mises on the grounds that he could not be trusted to hew to the libertarian line in absolutely all cases. Actually, it seems backward to criticize ethical systems according to whether they unswervingly support preconceived policy positions. It is more sensible to appraise policies according to how they accord with a well-grounded ethics. (On these criticisms, recall the preceding chapter, number 25).

Rothbard implies that utilitarians hold preferences and attitudes and character traits immune from appraisal. But Mises, to my knowledge, never said any such thing. A rules or indirect utilitarianism is indeed concerned with how attitudes and character traits, so far as they are open to influence, tend to affect the health of a society and the happiness of its individual members. For fear of adverse side effects and for other reasons, a utilitarian does not want to enlist the state’s coercive powers in suppressing all unfortunate preferences and attitudes and traits; but this in no way means that he considers all of them equally worthy of respect and of influence on policy.

Other criticism is policy-oriented. Rothbard objected that the utilitarian will rarely apply an absolute principle to real-world situations. The utilitarian regards principle as no more than a vague and overridable guideline. He “cannot be ‘trusted’ to maintain libertarian principle in every specific application” (1973, p. 24). Karen Vaughn regretted that Mises accepted the collectivists’ and authoritarians’ terms of debate by stressing how efficiently the free market provides well-being. Such a defense of freedom is doubly dangerous. “First, it is open to empirical refutation.” Second, the utilitarian calculus might tip in favor of a nonliberal system if it counted the bureaucrats’ enjoyment from controlling and regulating. A less risky course simply postulates freedom as supremely “desirable for its own sake” and as “a moral value that, as a bonus, also happen[s] to lead to the well-being of society” (1976, pp. 108—109).

But it seems backward to criticize ethical systems according to whether they unswervingly support preconceived policy positions. It is more sensible to appraise policies according to how they accord with a well-grounded ethics. Furthermore, such criticisms distinguish sharply, if sometimes only implicitly, between ethically principled and utilitarian approaches to policy. They interpret the latter as unprincipled, case-by-case direct calculation of gains and losses of utility. Actually, far from rejecting principles, utilitarianism seeks their sound basis.

On the charge that utilitarians cannot be trusted to hew to the libertarian line in absolutely all cases, compare Mises’s remark:

It may be that socialism represents a better form of organization of human labor. Let whoever asserts this try to prove it rationally. If the proof should succeed, then the world, democratically united by liberalism, will not hesitate to implement the communist community. In a democratic state, who could oppose a reform that would be bound to bring the greatest gain to by far the overwhelming majority? Political rationalism does not reject socialism on principle. But it does reject in advance the socialism that hinges not on cool understanding but rather on unclear feelings, that works not with logic but rather with the mysticism of a gospel of salvation, the socialism that does not proceed from the free will of the majority of the people but rather from the terrorism of wild fanatics. (1919/1983, p. 221)

Mises means that rationalism does reject socialism, yes, but from the scientific comparison of alternative systems.

NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL RIGHTS

One widely admired doctrine in supposed rivalry with utilitarianism insists on adherence to natural law and natural rights. Rothbard tries to derive many detailed propositions about ethics and law from his conception of rights, purportedly derived in turn from John Locke’s axioms of self-ownership and homesteading (1973; 1982). (Yet even for these he offers utilitarian arguments, without acknowledging the label.) John J. Piderit (1993), a Georgetown University economist, argues for what he calls a natural-law approach: correct reason ascertains what actions are “natural” and therefore ethically acceptable by reflecting on the nature of human beings, their shared aspirations and fundamental values, and their interactions in community. Yet Piderit can scarcely mean that whatever is natural is right and good. Civilization is largely an exercise in taming natural behavior. Of course, any acceptable doctrine must conform to nature in the sense of not requiring impossible actions or behavior enforceable only at excessive cost. Respecting the facts of nature and human interaction does not distinguish the natural-law approach from utilitarianism.

Natural-law doctrine does make sense if it means merely that all sorts of behavior and precepts, notably including laws made by legislatures and judges, are open to appraisal on moral grounds. Nothing becomes ethically acceptable merely by enactment into positive law. That interpretation of natural law does not rule out a utilitarian grounding of morality. But if the doctrine says that whatever is morally right (or wrong) has all (or none) of the force of positive law, it fatuously denies a live distinction.

As for natural (or human or individual) rights, the meaning that seems to fit the typical context is this: A right is a person’s entitlement to others’ treatment of him that is binding on those others with compelling moral force. Some rights are positive entitlements, like a child’s right to support by his parents or each party’s right to performance by the other party to a contract. The rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence are negative rights, rights to forbearances, rights not to be coerced or victimized by other persons, notably including agents of the state. One reason why negative rights are especially stringent is that they are relatively easy to honor—simply by not interfering.

Rights, being moral entitlements, presuppose an ethical system or tradition and cannot provide its very grounding. On what principles or intuitions provide the basis of rights, “the rhetoric of rights sheds no light whatever” (Hare 1989, chaps. 7—9, p. 194). Richard Epstein finds a utilitarian grounding for natural law and natural rights, sensibly interpreted, and even for the Lockean axioms of self-ownership or personal autonomy and homesteading or first possession (1989, pp. 713—751, 769—773; and 1995, pp. 30, 55, 68, 311—313, and passim).

Making natural rights the very foundation of ethics substitutes intuition for factual research and reasoning. Furthermore, some strands of “rights talk” debase political discussion, making absolutistic and moralistic demands, and subverting a creative search for mutually beneficial accommodations.

In the words of Donald Livingston, interpreting David Hume, corrupt modes of philosophizing are undercutting whatever fragments of sensus communis could discipline radical self-determination. Philosophical resentment spawns

an endless stream of self-created victims. Someone’s self determination is met with the violent protest that someone else’s rights have been violated. Ever more numerous rights are generated to protect ever more numerous desires.... “I want”... has become an argument of practical reason.... Thus a form of the Hobbesian state of nature is renewed in the most advanced civilization, and society is held together not by the enjoyment and cultivation of an inherited sensus communis but by legalism enforced by an increasingly consolidated and bureaucratic modern state. Consolidation must occur as power is transferred from dismantled, independent social authorities to the center in order to service an ever-increasing number of antinomic individual rights. (1998, pp. 398—399)

As Mises says, declarations about disagreements hinging on irreconcilably and unnegotiably different worldviews

describe the antagonism as more pointed than it really is. In fact, for all parties committed to pursuit of the people’s earthly welfare and thus approving social cooperation, questions of social organization and the conduct of social action are not problems of ultimate principles and of world views, but ideological issues. They are technical problems with regard to which some arrangement is always possible. No party would wittingly prefer social disintegration, anarchy, and a return to primitive barbarism to a solution which must be bought at the price of the sacrifice of some ideological points. (1949/1966, p. 181)

MISES AND NATURAL RIGHTS

Mises’s own position on natural law and rights is an embarrassment for some of his disciples. Nature is alien to the idea of right and wrong, he observes, questioning the notion of an eternally established standard. Right and wrong are utilitarian judgments. As for natural law, people deduce clashing implications from their arbitrary notions of it. “De lege ferenda there is no such a thing as justice. The notion of justice can logically only be resorted to de lege lata.” In enacting or changing laws, the issue is not justice but social expediency and social welfare. “There is neither right nor wrong outside the social nexus... The idea of justice always refers to social cooperation” (Mises 1949/1966, pp. 720—721).

Utilitarian philosophy and classical economics have nothing to do with the doctrine of natural rights, says Mises. All that matters for them is social utility. Mises even quotes Bentham on the “nonsense” of natural rights. Utilitarians recommend democratic government, private property, freedom, and equality under the law not on illusory grounds of natural law and human equality but because they are beneficial (1949/1966, p. 475).

Elsewhere,¹ Mises insisted, “Utilitarian Liberalism had nothing to do with these natural rights fictions. The Utilitarians themselves must be credited with the merit of having once and for all refuted them” (1990, p. 228).

To quote Henry Hazlitt, who wrote largely under Mises’s inspiration, the inviolability of rights rests “not... on some mystical yet self-evident ‘law of nature’... [but] ultimately (though it will shock many to hear this) on utilitarian considerations” (1964, p. 264).

Some of the formulations quoted above are sharper than I myself would have expressed them, but Mises was nothing if not forthright. Precisely because human rights and human dignity are important values, they deserve a more solid grounding than mere intuitions reported in noble-sounding language. Mises of course did not reject natural law in the scientific sense; and he did not reject natural law and human rights as ethical precepts if they are interpreted in the tame sense that I sketched out earlier, the sense compatible with utilitarianism. What Mises rejected was the exaggerated, foundationalist, almost mystical status that some writers have accorded to them.²

HOPPE’S SUPPOSEDLY VALUE-FREE APPROACH TO LIBERTARIANISM

Hans-Hermann Hoppe presents a curious supposed alternative to utilitarian ethics (1988a, pp. 56—76; 1988b, pp. 20—22; and contribution to a symposium, “Hoppe’s Rights Theory” 1988, pp. 4—53, 53—54). He purportedly dispenses with any appeal to value judgments at all, even such a tame one as wishing people happy rather than miserable lives. He does not have to try to get an “ought” from an “is” because the libertarian policy position rests entirely on logic and facts and not at all on value judgments.

Reason, Hoppe says, can prove moral laws valid a priori. It makes explicit what the sheer fact of discussion already implies. The libertarian private-property ethic can be justified morally and by argumentation and without invoking any value judgments. Proposing any alternative ethic contradicts what inheres in the very act of engaging in argumentation; nonlibertarian proposals are falsified by the very act of making them.

Argumentation—discussion—requires employing scarce means, privately owned. Argumentation presupposes that the participants recognize each one’s exclusive control over one’s own body. Furthermore, argumentation could not be sustained for any length of time without private property in things beyond one’s own body, property ultimately tracing to Lockean homesteading. Without private property defined in objective, physical terms, life, acting, and proposition-making would be impossible. “By being alive and formulating any proposition, then, one demonstrates that any ethic except the libertarian ethic is invalid.” Hoppe further says he has proved “that it is impossible to propositionally justify nonlibertarian property principles without falling into contradictions. Empirical evidence has absolutely no bearing on it.” He explicitly rejects utilitarianism; his approach is an alternative (“Hoppe’s Rights Theory” 1988).

Murray Rothbard had been preaching for over thirty years that economists cannot arrive at any policy conclusion in a strictly value-free way; they have to come up with some kind of ethical system. Then Rothbard said that Hoppe had proven him wrong. “[H]e has deduced an anarcho-Lockean rights ethic from self-evident axioms.... Hoppe has managed to establish the case for anarcho-capitalist-Lockean rights in an unprecedentedly hard-core manner, one that makes my own natural law/natural rights position seem almost wimpy in comparison.... [I]t is impossible to disagree with the anarcho-Lockean rights ethic without falling immediately into self-contradiction and self-refutation.” Hoppe appeals to the concept of the “ethics of argumentation.” “[A]ny argument whatsoever ... must imply self-ownership of the body of both the arguer and the listeners, as well as a homesteading of property right so that the arguers and listeners will be alive to listen to the argument and carry it on” (contribution to the symposium on “Hoppe’s Rights Theory,” 1988).

Hoppe seems to say that espousing nonlibertarian policy positions commits self-refutation in the same sense that I would be refuting myself if I wrote a letter saying that it is impossible to write a letter or made an oral statement saying it is impossible for anybody to speak. The self-contradiction of a nonlibertarian ethic may be more complicated and require more attention to expose, but it still is a self-contradiction, and of the same general type. The exposure of self-contradiction is a neat kind of argument and has great appeal—when it works.

In the present case, it just does not work. Hoppe simply asserts, but does not demonstrate, a logical contradiction. Being emphatic and repetitious is not enough. A slaveowner and his slave might conceivably engage in an intellectual discussion, even about the moral status of slavery itself, without either necessarily falling into self-contradiction.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RIVAL DOCTRINES

One reason for mentioning Hoppe’s and other alternatives to Mises’s utilitarianism (and, more broadly, to the indirect utilitarianism of David Hume, Mises, and Henry Hazlitt) is to show that utilitarianism is not so plastic and all-encompassing as to be vacuous. The existence of rival positions defuses that charge. One envisages a just society in the sense of John Rawls (1971), who rejects viewing justice as a mere means to happiness. Other rival doctrines center on duty or religion. Still others posit conformity to traditional ethical precepts, even if only intuition, rather than analysis of consequences, has tested the precepts; or respect for individual rights that have simply been postulated rather than argued for; or conduciveness to the special flourishing of the few highest and noblest specimens of the human race. One might also conceivably make the criterion the happiness not of people in general but of oneself discriminatorily or of some other specific person or class.

Some of these ostensibly rival doctrines, and perhaps others that do not now come to mind, may turn out, on examination, not to be truly rival doctrines. The criteria they appeal to either may not be as ultimate as happiness or may be equivalent to it after all. (In putting forth his axioms of self-ownership and Lockean homesteading, even Rothbard introduces utilitarian considerations.) Some of these doctrines, on the other hand, really are different. Their very existence shows that utilitarianism is not vacuous. If they are too unattractive to be realistic contenders, that fact further supports utilitarianism.

INTUITIONISM

The most urged alternatives to utilitarianism turn out to be varieties of intuitionism, which Mises quite properly spoke out against. Let me quote and paraphrase from his Socialism. (First I should explain a term that Mises uses. Eudaemonistic ethics is, loosely speaking, a system that applies the criterion of happiness.) Philosophers had been arguing about the ultimate Good for a long time, Mises wrote, before modern investigation settled it. All the arguments used in favor of an anti-eudaemonistic ethics were unable to dissociate the concept of Morality from that of Happiness. The vain efforts of these philosophers

were necessary to expose the problem in all its wide ramifications and so enable a conclusive solution to be reached.... [T]he tenets of intuitionist ethics ... are irreconcilable with scientific method [and] have been deprived of their very foundations.... [E]udaemonistic ideas lie concealed in every train of aprioristic-intuitive ethical thought... Every ethical system built upon the idea of duty ... is finally obliged to yield so much to Eudaemonism that its principles can no longer be maintained. In the same way every single requirement of aprioristic-intuitive ethics displays ultimately an eudaemonistic character. (1922/1981, p. 360)

CONCLUSION

The fact/value or is/ought distinction, which I introduced at the beginning, is indeed a sound one. Nevertheless, “ought” judgments can be discussed and soundly made (except only for fundamental value judgments, and even for them, considerations can be adduced that incline people to accept them; Mill 1863/1968, chap. 1). The soundest, most appealing approach to value judgments and to their use, as in policy recommendations, has been shown by Hume, Mises, Hazlitt, and other writers in their tradition (or in parallel, as by R.M. Hare). This approach is indirect utilitarianism.

Mises was forthright, even courageous, in espousing utilitarianism and repudiating intuitionist alternatives. For this his reputation continues to suffer even among disciples who otherwise are carrying on his work. I urge them to reconsider. I am not saying that Mises developed the distinction between the act version and the rules or indirect version of utilitarianism and fully articulated the latter. I am not saying that he anticipated and demolished in advance the axiomatic or intuitionist rights approach that some of his disciples would urge. Doing all that was not possible in his time and was not necessary for his work in economics. However, a sophisticated utilitarianism does fit in with and extend his philosophical framework. Henry Hazlitt, for one, extended it. Mises was on the right track.

REFERENCES

Epstein, Richard A. “The Utilitarian Foundations of Natural Law” and “Postscript: Subjective Utilitarianism.” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 12 (1989): 713—751, 769—773.

———. Simple Rules for a Complex World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Hare, R.M. Essays on Political Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Hazlitt, Henry. The Foundations of Morality. Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1964.

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. “From the Economics of Laissez Faire to the Ethics of Libertarianism.” In Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, edited by Walter Block and Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., 56—76. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1988a.

———. “The Ultimate Justification of the Private Property Ethic.” Liberty 2 (September 1988b): 20—22.

“Hoppe’s Rights Theory: Breakthrough or Buncombe?” A symposium by various authors, with a response by Hoppe. Liberty 2 (November 1988): 4—53, 53—54.

Kirzner, Israel. “The Nature and Significance of Economic Education.” The Freeman 48 (October 1998): 582—586.

Livingston, Donald W. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. 1863. Reprinted in Selected Writings, edited by Maurice Cowling, 243—304. New York: New American Library, 1968.

Mises, Ludwig von. Nation, State, and Economy. 1919. Translated by Leland B. Yeager. New York: New York University Press, 1983.

———. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. 1922. Translated by J. Kahane. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981.

———. Epistemological Problems of Economics. 1933. Translated by George Reisman. Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1960.

———. Human Action. 1949. 3^rd ed. Chicago: Regnery, 1966.

———. The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science. 1962. 2^nd ed. Kansas City, Kans.: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977.

———. Theory and History. 1979. Reprinted Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1985.

———. Money, Method, and the Market Process. Essays selected by Margit von Mises. Edited and with an introduction by Richard M. Ebeling. Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer, 1990.

Piderit, John J. The Ethical Foundations of Economics. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1993.

Rawls, John. A Theory of justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

Rothbard, Murray N. For a New Liberty. New York: Macmillan, 1973.

———. “Praxeology, Value Judgments, and Public Policy.” In The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, edited by E.G. Dolan. Kansas City, Kans.: Sheed and Ward, 1976.

———. The Ethics of Liberty. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982.

Vaughn, Karen. “Critical Discussion of the Four Papers.” In The Economics of Ludwig von Mises, edited by L.S. Moss, 101—110. Kansas City, Kans.: Sheed and Ward, 1976.

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*This lecture was presented as one in a series at Hillsdale College and published in Human Action: A 50-Year Tribute, ed. Richard M. Ebeling (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2000).

¹A 1945 essay commenting on ideas not only of natural law, but also of government by social contract.

²A section is omitted below because it confronts a reinterpretation of Mises too strained to be worth the space needed to refute it. For the omitted material, see the original version of this chapter.