9. The Symposium on Relativism: A Critique

Prefatory Note

Before embarking on a critique of the various papers on relativism, I think it important to delineate briefly what relativism is and what the issues are on this important topic. Let us first consider the polar opposite of relativism: absolutism. The absolutist believes that man’s mind, employing reason (which according to some absolutists is divinely inspired, according to others is given by nature), is capable of discovering and knowing truth: including the truth about reality, and the truth about what is best for man and best for himself as an individual.

The relativist denies this, denies that man’s reason is capable of knowing truth, and does so by claiming that rather than being absolute, truth is relative to something else. This something else may be different things, and so there can be many kinds of relativist; some of these things have been the subject of psychology of each individual, the economic interests of the individual (or of the “class” to which he belongs), the “Spirit of the Age” in which the person happens to live, the social structure of the society in which he lives, his “culture,” his race, etc. Philosophically, I believe that libertarianism—and the wider creed of sound individualism of which libertarianism is a part—must rest on absolutism and deny relativism.

With these distinctions and definitions in mind, let us turn to the individual essays of the symposium.⁵³

Bruno Leoni
“Some Reflections on the ‘Relativistic’ Meaning of the Wertfreiheit in the Study of Man”⁵⁴

Paradoxically, this is a good paper even though I believe it fails in its ultimate purpose. For it is a good defense of Max Weber and his doctrine of Wertfreiheit. And in the course of this defense, Leoni shows that Weber did not attack scholars for having values or for advocating them, and that he was largely concerned, in his famous championing of a clear separation between fact and value, to be “confusion free,” so that both the writer and the reader know what is going on. It was to Weber’s eternal credit to point out that there is a place for value-free “social science” and for value-free analyses of the consequences of different policies, of different values even, without confusing matters by injecting the scholar’s own false judgments into that discussion. And Leoni does well in stressing this contribution, and in joining Weber in attacking those social scientists who, pretending to Wertfreiheit, smuggle unanalyzed ethical preconceptions into their wertfrei analyses, and thus give the former the strictly scientific tone of the latter (e.g., those economists who naturally assume that “equality” or “stability” or “full employment” are good things and require certain policies, without bothering even to point out that they are slipping in a personal, unanalyzed value judgment.)

When all this is said and conceded, however, I must add that, in the famous battle at this symposium between Leoni and Mises on the one side and Strauss on the other, Leoni and Mises are wrong and Strauss is right. (And this is true even though Leoni corrects some Straussian errors about Weber: e.g., that Weber couldn’t by his own doctrine make any selections or make any judgments about values—as Leoni indicates, and Mises shows elsewhere, making judgments of relevance or about values does not imply a value judgment on the part of the scholar.) For, in the final analysis, Leoni has to concede that ultimate ends—ultimate ethical values—are arbitrary and personal, and in fact, in an explicitly antirational section, he is scornful of the very idea that ethical values should be rationally demonstrated. To say, as Leoni does, that “if we need to ‘demonstrate’ the validity of our values to ourselves, this possibly means that we actually do not believe them enough to give up that ‘demonstration’ ...if we try to demonstrate our values to other people, this is by no means the surest way of convincing them to accept those values,” is sheer antirational obscurantism.⁵⁵ Values should be demonstrated because reason is the only sure, solid ground of conviction about values—far more solid than the emotional whims upon which Leoni would apparently base them. Strauss is right that the Weber position is, in the end, ethical relativism, because it holds that ethics are purely subjective and arbitrary, and not subject to rational demonstration; Strauss is right because he believes in the possibility and demonstrability of rational, objective ethics.

Leoni is also on shakier ground than Mises, because Mises’s main discussion is on keeping economics and praxeology apart from ethics—which is a perfectly sound position—whereas Leoni is trying to keep ethics out of “political science.” Now, while economics is a self-subsistent, wertfrei science, “political science” is not; modern political science is an empty, pretentious, quasi-mathematical set of “model building,” and when we peel away the pretension, we find that “political science” is divisible into two parts: current history of political institutions or political thought, and political philosophy. And the very essence of political philosophy is the carving out of an ethical system—strictly, a subset of ethics dealing with political ethics. Ethics is the one rational discipline that demands the establishment of a rational set of value judgments; political ethics is that subset applying to matters of State. Mises and Leoni both deny the existence of a rational, objective ethics; but Mises is at least left with praxeology and economics and valid sciences; Leoni is left with very little of “political science.”

Another point that might confuse the readers: Leoni wrongly claims that the Weber position is one of “ethical absolutism” but “epistemological relativism.” Mises, on the other hand, correctly describes their general position as one of “ethical relativism” and “epistemological absolutism.”

Despite what I consider the ultimate failure of this paper, it is a good presentation of the Weber side of the dispute, and rehabilitates Weber from many superficial or excessive criticisms.

Ludwig von Mises,
“Epistemological Relativism in the Sciences of Human Action”⁵⁶

The bulk of this essay by Mises, the preeminent economist and praxeologist of our time, deals in his profound and unique way with a defense of economics against such relativist opponents as the historicists, who claimed that economic laws must be relative to each historical epoch. There are many excellent points made: an exposition of the Windelband-Rickert⁵⁷ refutation of positivist methods in the sciences of human action; a critique of the deficiencies of the classical economists in confining themselves to a study of wealth and production, and therefore in fragmenting action into the “economic” and “noneconomic” spheres; critiques of the radical empiricists such as the intuitionalists, of Max Weber, and of the nature of historical events. In short, Mises attacks the various schools of epistemological relativism in the sciences of human action, and defends the absolute and eternal truths arrived at by the science of praxeology. As a result, this paper, as is almost any by Mises, is excellent and worth reading by every scholar. (I would consider the fundamental axioms of praxeology as based empirically on the nature of man rather than on “the logical structure of the human mind” as Mises does, but this is not important here.)

Having said this, and never being able to express how much of an enormous intellectual debt I owe to Mises, I must record two important defects in the paper, which stem from what I consider basic weaknesses in the Mises worldview. One is Mises’s attempt to deny anyone the use of the concept “irrational.” Mises categorically denies that anyone can ever act irrationally, either in the means he undertakes or in the ends for which he strives. I think this is flatly wrong, especially since Mises wishes to retain the concept of rational and apply it to all of man’s actions. I cannot see how we can retain the term rational while denying anyone the use of its opposite: “irrational.” If Mises maintains that no one can ever act irrationally, then he is simply using “rational” as a synonym for “purposive,” and this means that he is using the term rational in a sense that no one else uses and is therefore illegitimate. Instead of denying that anyone could act irrationally, Mises should simply not use rational or irrational at all, and leave the term to psychology and ethics.

Thus, Mises asserts that we cannot say that the tribe using medicine men or a person in the Middle Ages using magic to attain their ends was irrational; after all, says Mises, they believed that their means were helping them to attain their ends (say, rainmaking or cure of disease), and a hundred years from now a doctor could just as well say that present-day doctors are “irrational” for using such a quaint method of cure as penicillin. The belief of the people using magic, however, is irrelevant to the issues; nobody denies that they thought they were accomplishing something.

Furthermore, magic is not in the same category as penicillin; for the use of penicillin rests on a scientific method, on an epistemology that can discover, by reason and by sense experimentation analyzed by reason, that penicillin can be used as a cure for disease. The fact that, fifty years from now, the advance of science will discover better cures does not make the present use of penicillin irrational—although, by the way, it would make the use of penicillin a hundred years from now irrational. But magic is in a completely different category; magic, by its very methodology is totally irrational and incapable of arriving at what it is supposed to achieve; and we can be assured that no “advance” a hundred years from now in the ritual of magic could ever improve its performance. The use of magic is therefore irrational, whether in the past, present, or future.

Moreover, not only can we say with absolute assurance that certain methods and means are irrational, but we can also go on to say that certain ends are irrational. Suppose that A’s end is to torture B, because A enjoys it. Even if it lies within A’s power to do so, and even if A need not fear retaliation by the police or by B or B’s friends, I think it can be demonstrated that such torture and love of torture is contrary to the nature of man and to what is required by that nature for man’s true happiness; I think it can be demonstrated that such perversions of man’s nature are profoundly irrational. Yet Mises would insist on adding “from my personal point of view.” It is not just my or your subjective “point of view” that decrees this; it is our objective, absolute insight into the discoverable nature of man.

What has happened here, and elsewhere, is that Mises has strayed off his great stomping ground, praxeology, on to a field, ethics, where he is, I believe, tragically wrong. For irrationality or rationality of ends involves an ethical judgment, and Mises’s subjectivity that we have just noted means simply this: that Mises, while a praxeological or epistemological absolutist, is, unfortunately, an ethical relativist. To Mises, there is no such a thing as absolute ethics; man, by the use of his mind, cannot discover a true, “scientific” ethics by insight into what is best for man’s nature. Ultimate ends, values, ethics, are simply subjective, personal, and purely arbitrary. If they are arbitrary, Mises never explains where they come from, how any individual arrives at them. I can’t see how he could arrive at any answer except the subjective, relative emotions of each individual.

This, Mises’s ethical relativism, is his second great defect in this paper, and we have seen how it is intimately tied up with the first. As a result, Mises, excellent when he criticizes governments for opposing economics because economic science shows that governments cannot accomplish their objectives, falters when he tries to refute the ethical contentions of the statists.

Thus, Mises says, in his final section, that the enemies of economics and of capitalism blame private enterprise as immoral and materialistic, and praise Soviet Russia as well as equality of incomes as more ethical. What can Mises reply to this? Only that it is all “emotional talk,” that praxeology and economics are neutral to ethics (true, but irrelevant), and that these statists should try to refute economic teachings by “discursive reasoning, not by... appeal to arbitrary allegedly ethical standards.”⁵⁸

We can surely agree that it is illegitimate for anyone, leftist or libertarian, to ignore and not fully consider the value-free laws of economics. But precisely because economics is neutral to ethics, this is hardly an answer. For to Mises, all ethics is “arbitrary,” and yet, even Mises must admit that no one can decide any policy unless he does make an ethical judgment. The man who understands economics and then chooses liberty is, or should be, considered by Mises to be just as “arbitrary” as the man who chooses egalitarianism, after accepting, say, the economic consequences of lessened productivity. And since either decision, according to Mises, is ultimately arbitrary, he cannot finally refute the interventionists in this way. And as for the opposition being “emotional,” this may well be, but we have seen that emotion is the only groundwork that Mises can find for ultimate values anyway.

How has Mises been able to be an ethical relativist and still be the great champion that he has been of economic liberty? By what I consider an illegitimate assumption. Thus:

Economics pointed out that many cherished (interventionist) policies... bring about... effects which—from the point of view of those who advocated and applied them—were even more unsatisfactory than the conditions which they were designed to alter.⁵⁹

It is this assumption—that even the advocates really are worse off—that permits Mises to say that they are “bad.” But how can Mises know what motivates the statists? Suppose, for example, the price controller wants power and doesn’t care if it creates shortages; he has power and the perquisites of a soft job in the bureaucracy; suppose that he is a Communist, and wants to create shortages (or is a nihilist and hates everyone, and wants to create shortages); suppose that someone who wants to confiscate from the rich has a very high time preference and doesn’t care if the economy will be wrecked in twenty years. What then?

In short, it is illegitimate for Mises to assume that, knowing all the consequences shown by economics, everyone will consider himself worse off from the statist measure. When Mises says that repeal of such measures “would benefit the rightly understood or long-run interests of all the people,” and are championed by vested “short-run interests,” suppose, as we have just indicated, the time preferences of the latter are high; or suppose, even aside from the time preference, that the amount X can mulct from everyone by some interventionist measure is greater than the amount he will lose as a consumer.⁶⁰

What I have been trying to say is that Mises’s utilitarian, relativist approach to ethics is not nearly enough to establish a full case for liberty. It must be supplemented by an absolutist ethics—an ethics of liberty, as well as of other values needed for the health and development of the individual—grounded on natural law, i.e., discovery of the laws of man’s nature. Failure to recognize this is the greatest flaw in Mises’s philosophical worldview.

In his final section, Mises says that “there are authors who combine praxeological relativism with ethical relativism. But there are also authors who display ethical absolutism while rejecting the concept of universally valid praxeological laws.”⁶¹ Yes, and there is also a third category of writers: those who accept both praxeological and ethical absolutism, and recognize that both are vitally necessary for a complete philosophical view, as well as for the achievement of liberty.

I hope it is clear that this extended discussion is not intended to deny the great overall merits of Mises’s paper and its importance for all scholars of human action.

Leo Strauss, “Relativism”⁶²

I should make clear why I, a vehement critic of the books of Strauss’s that I have read, consider this paper to be an excellent one. Strauss has one good point, and one alone: that there exists an absolute ethics for man, discoverable by reason, in accordance with the natural law of human nature. This is his good point, even though whenever he discusses the content of the ethics that he upholds, he becomes poor and questionable. But it is precisely this one good point to which he devotes his entire paper on relativism.

I have said in discussing Leoni’s paper, that Strauss is right, and Mises and Leoni are wrong, and I say this even though in the content of their political positions, I am enormously more in agreement with Mises than with Strauss. Strauss’s paper is devoted to a critique of ethical relativism (upheld by Mises, and particularly Leoni), and an argument on behalf of the existence of an objective, rational ethics.

The paper is rather oddly organized, being a series of criticisms of various relativists. Strauss begins with the almost incredibly confused and overrated Isaiah Berlin, and has no trouble demolishing Berlin and exposing his confusions—Berlin trying to be at the same time an exponent of “positive freedom,” “negative freedom,” absolutism, and relativism. He then proceeds to a very keen critique of the relativism of the famous Arnold Brecht.⁶³ Strauss shows, for example, that in denying the possibility of rational ends, rational means are on not a very secure basis either:

Reason [according to Brecht and the relativists] cannot even tell us that we ought to choose attainable ends; if someone “loves him who desires the impossible,” reason may tell him that he acts irrationally but it cannot tell him that he ought to act rationally or that acting irrationally is acting badly or basely.⁶⁴

From Brecht, Strauss proceeds to a fine critique of the positivist destruction of the principle of causality, a principle that is essential to rational absolutism. Strauss concludes here that “positivistic science in general and therefore positivistic social science in particular is characterized by the abandonment of reason or the flight from reason.”⁶⁵

Strauss then goes on to an interesting critique of the Marxist theoretician Georg Lukacs, showing that Lukacs, trying to escape from relativism, winds up as a relativist (Marxist-historicist variety) anyway. He also has some keen words of criticism about the Marxist vision of the change from “necessity” to “freedom” in the ultimate communist utopia.

After finishing with Lukacs, Strauss returns to logical positivism with a blistering critique of the weaknesses of positivism as a pure analysis of science, and an interesting comparison of the positivists with their grandfather Hume, to the detriment of the former. Finally, Strauss delivers a very interesting and good critique of the “pessimistic” relativism of the existentialists.

I know that there were some emotional disagreements between Mises, Leoni, and Strauss at the symposium, but despite the fact that my personal sympathies are with the former, I must conclude that this is a very fine paper by Strauss, making many excellent points, and on the one topic where he can do a good job.

Eliseo Vivas,
“Reiterations and Second Thoughts on Cultural Relativism”⁶⁶

This is a fine paper, making some very keen criticisms of the cultural relativism engaged in by fashionable cultural anthropology, as well as a philosophic attack on cultural determinism: the idea that one’s culture necessarily determines one’s values. This concept is linked with cultural relativism, and receives a fine flailing from Vivas.

Vivas maintains that civilization is better, morally superior, to the cultures of primitive tribes, and bases his views on the position that knowledge of the nature of man permit one to say this. There are many sub-arguments, and all are worth reading. Adding to the merit of the article is Vivas’s lucid style, which graces most of his writings.

While a gracefully stylistic paper, it is also a scholarly one, and Vivas provides reference leads to many recent works that appear to be promising: e.g., McGilvary, Macbeath, etc. There are also many pithy comments in passing about how the ancient Greeks knew all about the “cultural relativism” of numerous barbarian cultures, of how professional relativism has been used to weaken sexual morals, and entertaining bits of humor that highlight Vivas’s points. And yet the logic is keen and clear, and we have such expositions as the paradoxes of relativism, and many other subtle arguments. And there is a refutation of the common idea that “relative” means “according to certain specific methods,” which really serves as a refutation of Casserley’s confusion of relativism with existing in actual space and time.⁶⁷

The chief defect of Vivas’s paper, which does not, however, offset the many merits of the piece, is Vivas’s agnosticism about what ethics we really do know. He upholds the possibility of an objective, rationally arrivable ethics, but when it comes to specific content, he virtually denies that such ethics have been found yet (aside from a very few generalities such as: civilization is better than savagery, and Ilse Koch was bad). His belief that almost all objective knowledge lies ahead of us weakens his ultimate position against the relativists; it is surely an entirely unnecessary view. Several thousand years of life among men, and of perfection upon it, have built up a pretty rigorous, and extensive body of objective knowledge of the nature of man, and what is best for him. Of course, it can and should be added to, and the more specific sciences such as economics or biology or psychology are developed, the more it is added to, but the basic structure and contents remain, and these contents are very broad.

In the whole, however, Vivas’s paper is very worthwhile, and a fine contribution to the symposium.

Leonard Carmichael,
“Absolutes, Relativism, and the Scientific Psychology of Human Nature”⁶⁸

I am extremely impressed with Mr. Carmichael’s paper. This is a highly important and pioneering effort to ground a set of natural-law ethics and values on the biological nature of man and what is best for man. I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the “sciences of human action” is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation. Carmichael is here undertaking this from his vantage point as a biologist. This provides a truly absolutist, and yet “scientific,” grounding for ethics.

Carmichael begins, in happy omen, by resurrecting Herbert Spencer, and showing that Spencer must be modified to eliminate his bias for an evolutionary ethics, since man has already fully “evolved,” since he has not physically changed in all historic time. Carmichael then goes on to look for those stable absolutes in human nature that could be used to base an absolute ethic. First, Carmichael shows that biological organisms tend to remain with constant qualities—biological “conservatism.”⁶⁹ While human individuals are variable within each generation, the average man doesn’t change basically from one century to the next. (The tools built by Bronze Age men would fit the men of today, etc.) Carmichael goes on to point, keenly, to such other human psychological and physiological constants as symmetry (e.g., cave drawings), rhythm, texture, perception through human sense organs, etc. From this, Carmichael hints brilliantly at the derivation of an absolute natural law esthetics. Thus

the great arts, such as architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and the dance, are built upon these fixed relationships between the unchanging character of the physics of radiant energy (light) and of material vibrations (sound) and the organism. Hence each art acquires its canons that determine the relationships which are and which are not evaluated as good or bad by human sight and hearing. Once such values are established, only a changing romantic whimsy or caprice can pretend that they are not fixed and immutable so long as human brains comprehend and senses remain fixed.⁷⁰

I am enthused over this type of approach because I believe that work along such paths could bear a great deal of fruit in working out a viable system of absolute ethics, esthetics, and values in general.

The fact that an eighteenth-century nobleman and a primitive Indian had different table manners, avers Carmichael, does not prove relativism, for the important point is that both the nobleman and the savage needed and ate food. There is variation, but there is also a nexus of fixed norms. Monogamy may be demonstrable as absolutely the best form of marriage for developing the emotional characteristics of the human personality and also for child rearing. Then, Carmichael goes on to criticize the “Gallup Poll” moralists for trying to prove that the very fact that some practices exist makes them moral or normal. He maintains that the civilized human race has, over the centuries, found ethical norms and practices that are absolutely better than others; but they must be inculcated in each generation of the young.

Carmichael also has good criticisms of the view that growing up in a New Guinea hut is just as good as going to Harvard, or that the latest nonobjective-art nonsense is as good as Titian. The latter alternatives are absolutely better. While friendly to religion, Carmichael also sees that the rational discovery of natural law is just as viable as the absolute alternative to relativism:

The question as to whether a code of social living is revealed and established as fixed as a series of Divine Commandments given to men or discovered as absolutes of social law by human trial and error may turn out to be different ways of viewing the same set of rules. ...Both the ideas of the revelation and of the discovery of social and esthetic values are opposed to the notion that all such concepts are merely relativistic and changeable and have no fixed sanction of any kind.

Very well put.

Applying this approach to law, Carmichael sees that new technology does not render legal principles obsolete. On the contrary, absolute and eternal legal principles are applied by judges to the problems of new technology.

The relativist, says Carmichael perceptively, is essentially a romantic who judges everything by his own subjective emotions and whimsy; for the romantic, all the rules of life are simply arbitrary, man-made conventions that he defies at the behest of his emotions. The absolutist, on the other hand, is a classicist, who discovers and then adheres to fixed truths, and is guided, presumably, by reason. Education, then, becomes vitally the inclination, the passing on, of these truths in the various fields of ethics, esthetics, etc. Literature of the past is valuable in discovering how the great men of the past dealt with eternally human problems and the rules that they arrived at.

Especially in the latter part of the paper, Carmichael shows an unfortunate tendency to accept various mystical rather than rational procedures for arriving at these fixed truths, but this hardly offsets what I consider to be the great value of this paper and the general approach that it embodies.

Final Comments

On the whole, I think this can be set down as another successful Volker Fund symposium. There were many first-rate papers, even if they were not always correct. Profound and basic controversies, such as those between Leoni and Mises against Strauss on relativism and relativist ethics, help rather than hurt the symposium as a whole, for the reader has a chance to read and weigh excellent presentations of both sides of this critical issue. Of the twelve papers, I consider six as first rate: those of Carmichael, Leoni, Mises, Pei, Strauss, and Vivas.⁷¹ ...Three could be considered fair, or moderately good: Casserley, Tietz, and Weaver. Only three I would rate as downright poor: Schoeck, Malin, and Zirkle, especially the latter two—Schoeck for his lengthy diatribe against individual liberty, Malin for his wallowing in a confused mysticism and his worship of primitive man, Zirkle for his extreme (and relativist) espousal of a social Darwinist, evolutionist ethic. I think this is a good record for an interdisciplinary gathering of such varied individuals from such diverse disciplines.