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Swimming Against the Tide in Contemporary
Philosophy. By Henry B. Veatch.

Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of
America Press, 1990.

George Mason University have claimed to find an affinity be-

tween Austrian economics and certain types of Continental phi-
losophy. Their views have not gone uncontested: Murray Rothbard
and Hans Hoppe have assailed the “hermeneuticists” with charac-
teristic vigor. I fear I am no unbiased witness, as I have played a
minor part in the controversy.

Henry Veatch, a distinguished Aristotelian philosopher, advances
in this excellent book an interpretation of modern philosophy which
illuminates the controversy over hermeneutics. In addition, he pre-
sents a carefully conceived defense of Aristotelian ethics. Economists
interested in welfare economics will find Veatch’s discussion of ethics
of substantial albeit indirect help to them. Often welfare economics
conceals utilitarian premises, and Veatch subjects this ethical system
to penetrating scrutiny. Although the book is a collection of separate
essays, it is remarkably unified.

Like his master Aristotle, Veatch proceeds by a dialectical
method. He means by this an analysis of the insights and errors of
non-Aristotelian philosophers in order to “remove the obstacles” to
what he deems the correct position (p. 6). It soon transpires that
the rival philosophies contain much more error than insight.

Since Descartes, modern philosophy has refused to use as its
starting point commonsense knowledge of the world. Descartes’s
methodic doubt changed the criterion of truth and had the effect of
“transforming the everyday world . . . into a world that is largely
unrecognizable by the commonsense and common experience of man-
kind” (p. 38).

) n the past several years a number of economists centered at

The Review of Austrian Economics Vol.6, No. 2 (1993): 153-58
ISSN 0889-3047

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154 The Review of Austrian Economics Vol. 6, No. 2

Descartes and his rationalist successors failed in their quest to
prove the existence of the external world and discover its nature
through the use of deduction. Their empiricist counterparts were
equally unable to show how one can gain knowledge of the real world
if one is restricted solely to ideas or sensations.

Philosophy faced an impasse. Immanuel Kant claimed to have
found an escape that would end the stagnation of philosophy and
permit it to progress as a science. Veatch believes that the transcen-
dental turn, as he calls Kant’s proposal, was a disastrous mistake.
Nevertheless, it has dominated subsequent philosophy.

In brief, Kant thought that we cannot know things as they are in
themselves. Instead, the mind imposes a grid consisting of the cate-
gories and the intuitions of space and time upon reality. Although we
cannot know the real world, we can know appearances, since our
minds have created them.

Veatch finds in this turn to the subject the basis of relativism and
irrationalism. Kant thought that everyone used the same categories.
He claimed to derive them by a “transcendental deduction”; if he was
right, people have no choice in their application of concepts to expe-
rience.

Kant’s successors made the categories changeable and relative.
This more radical form of the transcendental turn has an unbreak-
able hold on modern philosophy. Veatch uses the turn to explain
Quine’s philosophy and, more generally, contemporary philosophy of
science. A “theory or hypothesis in science is accepted, ultimately, for
scarcely any other reason than that it enables us to introduce at least
some sort of order and intelligibility into what otherwise would be a
sheer welter of experience” (p. 53).

The culmination of the turn lies in the utter irrationalism of the
Deconstructionists. He sees this movement not as a mere Continental
fad. It carries to an extreme tendencies present in modern philosophy
from its inception. Deconstruction totally rejects external control
over textual interpretation. The transcendental turn can at last go
no farther.

Veatch argues that this movement has malign ethical conse-
quences. Both Deconstruction and the pragmatism of Richard Rorty
lead to “that total permissiveness that Nietzsche talked about so
confidently and so brashly” (p. 92; question mark omitted).

Veatch’s probing account of modern philosophy will seem familiar
to readers influenced by Ayn Rand, who gives a similar account of the
errors of modern thought. Although so far as I am aware the two did
not know or influence each other, a number of Randian philosophers
esteem Veatch highly.


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Book Reviews 155

Though Veatch’s analysis is impressive in its scope and unity, a
few doubts—not I hasten to add, Cartesian ones—come to mind.
First, one gets the impression from Veatch’s discussion that Descartes
arbitrarily rejected commonsense beliefs. But would not Descartes
respond that the skeptical issue he addressed is a genuine problem?
How do we know that our experience gives us knowledge of the real
world? Veatch I think would reply that all attempts to justify knowl-
edge which start from doubt of commonsense have failed. Either we
take as given that we perceive real things or we wind up in skepti-
cism. Tertium non datur.

The effectiveness of this response depends on Veatch’s suc-
cess in showing that once skepticism is allowed in the door, it
cannot be expelled. His criticism of Kant’s transcendental turn is
especially vital, since he sees the turn as basic to contemporary
philosophy.

Veatch’s evaluation of Kant, however, strikes me as disputable.
He takes Kant to be saying, in effect: “We do not know reality: all that
we know are appearances.” Veatch rightly takes this view to lead to
relativism and skepticism.

But this interpretation of Kant depends crucially on the equation
of reality with things-in-themselves. Since the phenomenal world
includes everything governed by the categories, it might be argued
that the phenomenal world just is the commonsense world. If so, Kant
did not then deny realism but affirmed it. I do not mean to endorse
this view of Kant: there is a great deal to be said for Veatch’s
interpretation. But if the realistic view of Kant is right, Veatch needs
to show that Kant’s deduction of the categories fails. Otherwise, his
indictment of the transcendental turn collapses.

In “Is Quine a Metaphysician?”, Veatch attempts to use one of
Quine’s own arguments against him. The theme of the piece is that
Quine has made Kant’s transcendental turn. He imagines a Quinean
objector who protests against his translation of “Quinese” into “Kan-
tese” on the grounds of the radical indeterminacy of translation, a
famous thesis of Quine’s. Veatch replies by citing another Quinean
view, the inscrutability of reference.

Veatch has misread the passage he quotes from Ontological Rela-
tivity. He thinks Quine claims that because “it makes sense to say
even of oneself that one is referring to rabbits and formulas and not
to rabbit stages and Godel numbers, then it should make sense to say
it of someone else” (p. 79, citing Quine, Ontological Relativity). But
Quine’s point is just the opposite. He thinks that because it does not
make sense to say of someone else what he refers to, it does not make
sense for someone to say it of himself.


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156 The Review of Austrian Economics Vol. 6, No. 2

Veatch also finds contemporary moral philosophy radically unsat-
isfactory. He draws the customary distinction between teleological
and deontological theories. The latter fail utterly; the former require
revision along Aristotelian lines.

Veatch approaches ethics with a fundamental assumption. No
ethical judgments are self-evident. Claims that people have rights or
obligations require justification: they cannot be simply taken as
obvious. I wonder whether this is correct. Are there no particular
judgments, e.g., “Torturing small children for fun is wrong” that are
more clearly true than the premises of any theory supposed to justify
them? Veatch is no doubt right that the judgment just given is not
self-evident, if by that he means that no logical contradiction results
from the statement’s negation.

But self-evidence in this sense, and “obvious” truth, are two quite
different things. Veatch moves too quickly from one to the other. If
we can take our ordinary commonsense judgments to be true in
epistemology, why may we not do the same in ethics?

But even if Veatch has insufficiently justified the need for justi-
fication, he raises penetrating objections to the particular theories he
discusses. Utilitarianism fails because of a flaw in its starting point.
Its advocates tell us to maximize happiness, understanding happi-
ness as the satisfaction of desire. But why is it good to satisfy desire?
Unless a utilitarian can first establish this, he cannot arrive at an
ethic. Appeal to the Principle of Universalizability avails nothing. If
someone argues “I want to satisfy my desire; but if it is good to satisfy
my desire, it is good to satisfy anyone else’s,” he has begged the
© question. Is it good to satisfy desire?

Deontological theories fare no better. “[TThere is no basis what-
ever for the rights claims that are the very basis and starting point
of modern teleological ethics” (p. 111). Kant’s categorical imperative
lends no help, because it is a purely formal principle. Gewirth’s
principle of generic consistency suffers from a failing like that of
utilitarianism. Even if Gewirth is right that the nature of action
compels us to claim certain rights, we cannot generate an ethics by
universalizing the claims. The rightness of the original claims has
not been shown: without an “ought” from which to begin, nothing is
available to universalize.

Some theories are in even worse shape, since their advocates
advance no arguments at all in their defense. He includes Robert
Nozick among this group.

What then is the answer? Veatch locates it in “obligatory ends”
(p. 101). These are desires that an individual ought to have. They
qualify as ethical by passing the “Euthyphro test”: one desires


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Book Reviews 157

them because they are good. They are not good because they are
desired.

Now the question of course becomes: how are obligatory ends
established? Veatch once more returns to Aristotle. Human beings
have a nature, and what perfects that nature is an obligatory end.
Once one obtains, “I ought to perfect my nature,” the Principle of
Universalizability does the rest. Everyone ought to perfect his or her
nature. Thus ethics has been established on a rational basis.

Veatch’s relentlessly pressed case arouses both admiration and
doubt. As with epistemology, the form of his argument is this: ap-
proaches A, B, — etc. will not work. If, then, we want an objective
ethics we must proceed in the way Veatch specifies.

But to argue that unless one adopts his view, one will end up on
an unwanted position begs the question. If one accepts Veatch’s
contention that ethical judgments are not self-evident, why take for

granted that an objective ethics can be derived?

Veatch might deny that he has argued solely by elimination of
alternatives. On the contrary, he has argued directly for the truth of
his view. But the system of natural ends he favors depends on a
controversial principle: a human being ought to fulfill his natural
end. Though 1 cannot now argue the point, I think the principle
requires more defense than Veatch gives it here or in his earlier
books.

Veatch also is open to objection for not being Aristotelian enough.
Why does he combine his natural-end ethics with the Principle of
Universalizability, a Kantian device? It is not obvious that a moral
system must use this principle, nor is it a truth of logic. Veatch
recognizes that some libertarians have challenged the principle, but
he discusses only those who abandon morality altogether along with
universalizability. He never considers genuine moralities lacking this
feature (pp. 183, 186-87).

With characteristic independence of mind, Veatch maintains that
all rights are negative. There is “no warrant for supposing that as
human beings we have any positive rights at all” (p. 326). This is well
said, but, unfortunately, Veatch’s argument for negative rights fails.
He then is left with no justified rights at all.

His defense of rights is that if “I ought to do something then I
have a right not to be interfered with” (p. 325). How can this be
justified on Veatch’s own ethics? He argues that each person ought to
pursue his natural end. But nothing in this principle forbids someone
from interfering with someone else’s pursuit of his end.

The principle also fails without reference to Veatch’s ethics.
Suppose one has a duty to make the best use of his talents. Someone


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158 The Review of Austrian Economics Vol. 6, No. 2

correctly decides that obtaining a job as a bouncer at the W. D. Ross
Bar will be a major step forward. Does this prevent others from
competing for the job?

He makes one or two other dubious claims about moral theory. He
argues that amoralism is self-referentially inconsistent if the amor-
alist tries to give reasons for his refusal to pay attention to morality.
If the amoralist says he ignores morality because there is no such
thing, is he not claiming justification for his conduct (p. 189)?

He is indeed, but he need not claim moral justification. To assume
that justification must be moral begs the question. The amoralist can
view his ignoring morality as analogous to the denial unicorns exist.
He is an amoralist, not an arationalist.

Also, Veatch’s account of Philippa Foot is inaccurate. She claims
that certain terms, e.g., “courageous” or “rude,” can be applied only
in particular circumstances. Avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk
while walking could not be courageous, if this is all there is to the
story. Veatch agrees with her but thinks her argument rests on “mere
linguistic rules” instead of a genuine connection with reality (p. 147).
This imputes to her a conventionalist view of language she takes
pains to argue against. Also, he wrongly supposes that she accepts
universalizability.

As will be apparent, I do not invariably agree with Professor
Veatch. But he is sometimes profound, usually first-rate, and always
provocative.

David Gordon
Ludwig von Mises Institute