WEBVTT NOTE The Missing Link or: Developing Austrian Economics into Austrian Ethics 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:30.000 Ladies and Gentlemen, since strict and unabugest use of terms does more for communication than good intentions do and since, as far as I see, the biological structure itself of Austrian philosophy has never been exposed as a stringent set of axioms, deductions and definitions in a concise, though perhaps simplifying style, I first have to state my use of terms drawn from my understanding of the Austrian, of the structure of Austrian economics and Austrian ethics. 2 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:46.000 And then from that bare structure of two axioms, twelve deductions and ten definitions, I will develop a concept which is a material issue of this presentation. A rationale may be a theoretical revision of the notion of equality. 3 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:57.000 To start with, a definition here is just a proposition providing a short formula for a denoted complex set of facts. 4 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:03.000 It does not disclose certain content matter of a term and thus provides no additional insight. 5 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:10.000 An axiom is an if-proposition that fulfills the following, to some extent overlapping, five requirements. 6 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:19.000 First, it is self-evident in a reflective way. Second, an axiom is a priori valid. It does not depend on historical evidence. 7 00:01:19.000 --> 00:01:24.000 Third, it is irreducible, meaning it does not follow from another proposition. 8 00:01:24.000 --> 00:01:31.000 Fourth, it is universally applicable. And fifth, it cannot be refuted without committing a performative contradiction. 9 00:01:31.000 --> 00:01:44.000 I will disregard the experimental and playful concepts of an axiom as a randomly or arbitrarily chosen starting point for a formal construct, as well as the meaning of an axiom just as a basic assumption. 10 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:50.000 Instead, I will follow von Mises, who distinguished from these concepts by talking of the category. 11 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:54.000 For him, human action is the ultimate given. 12 00:01:54.000 --> 00:02:02.000 A deduction is a proposition drawn from the logical inference gained from applying one or more axioms on a particular situation. 13 00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:15.000 Ethics is concerned with interpersonal interaction. It poses and answers the question of legitimacy and establishes norms that are without alternative. 14 00:02:15.000 --> 00:02:23.000 These norms arise from the rational nature of human beings and from the affirmation of the right to life. 15 00:02:23.000 --> 00:02:31.000 The method and form of ethics is cognition, its statements are is statements, and is concerned with objective matters. 16 00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:40.000 Morals, on the other hand, are concerned primarily with intrapersonal value hierarchies, but also with those conveyed within society. 17 00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:49.000 Their subjective role, they are subjective, arbitrary, conventional, and not necessarily ethical at all. 18 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:52.000 Their statements are odd statements. 19 00:02:53.000 --> 00:03:03.000 Economics is the interpersonal relationship of people striving to overcome scarcity of any material or immaterial goods at any level. 20 00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:10.000 Methodologically individualistic and rationalistic, economics answers the question of how gold can be attained. 21 00:03:10.000 --> 00:03:20.000 In the process of doing this, it finds that only what is ethically legitimate is also economically effective, meaning aggression doesn't pay. 22 00:03:20.000 --> 00:03:35.000 Applying these definitions, a possible and intrinsically logical linear path through the multi-relational thus quasi-spatial structure of the body of thought is the following. 23 00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:49.000 The first axiom, of course, is, as Rothbard has it, the nub of praxeology, the fundamental axiom of rational human action of choice, the term for rationing scarce means to the attainment of chosen ends. 24 00:03:49.000 --> 00:04:05.000 The first deduction is that the actor must own himself because with his body he constitutes a separate unit that he can command absolute control over his body's resources and thus carry out his freely chosen actions. 25 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:14.000 Self-ownership precludes control from outside. Assigning this right to control to anyone else, be it in part or in full, is illegitimate. 26 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:30.000 This holds true due to the non-universalizability of the master-slave division in case of full right of control or with partial right of control because it leads to a performative contradiction while attempting to justify the primacy of a multitude. 27 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:36.000 From the axiom of action therefore follows by exclusion unrestricted self-ownership. 28 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:42.000 As this is not irreducible, it is not self an axiom as we often read, for example in Rothbard, 29 00:04:42.000 --> 00:04:48.000 who even speaks of self ownership as a fundamental axiom of libertarian theory, it is ethics of liberty, 30 00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:57.000 whereas earlier in Man Economy and State, he infers self ownership from the separate units of body and mind that each individual forms. 31 00:04:57.000 --> 00:05:04.000 Because Rothbard also describes the non-aggression principle as an axiom, which clearly is an odd proposition, 32 00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:08.000 We are obviously dealing with different concepts of axioms. 33 00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:14.000 Instead of wanting to establish what the essence and necessary conditions of freedom are, 34 00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:22.000 the Yadai simply postulates that the preliminary assumption of freedom is to do anything achievable with one's own resources. 35 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:28.000 Such action is legitimate as long as the utilized resources are legally obtained, 36 00:05:28.000 --> 00:05:36.000 and as long as the action does not either violate other people's rights nor stop me from performing my duties. 37 00:05:36.000 --> 00:05:48.000 Then freedom as a first definition can be negatively described as the absence of arbitrary coercion or even more to the point, liberty is a state of non-aggression. 38 00:05:48.000 --> 00:06:00.000 Further definitions are aggression as infringement of property without contractual consent and contract of the voluntarily reached agreement on the transfer of rights and duties. 39 00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:14.000 They are followed by the second deduction which is the existence of free will being shown by a choice available only to humans to act rationally or irrationally according to the human or animal aspect of their nature. 40 00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:19.680 The next right is defined as the status of ownership that the individual has with regard 41 00:06:19.680 --> 00:06:27.240 to his body and the products he has himself homesteaded, produced or exchanged. 42 00:06:27.240 --> 00:06:32.720 Emphasis is given to the fact that every right is a property right. 43 00:06:32.720 --> 00:06:36.160 Duty as a definition is labor owed under contract. 44 00:06:36.160 --> 00:06:41.560 Thus, a contract containing duties has an effect on the future, as the world cannot 45 00:06:41.560 --> 00:07:04.560 In order to withdraw from a contractual duty must be possible, therefore any contract of that kind explicitly or implicitly entails an alternative way of fulfilling an assumed duty which goes beyond simply annulling and reversing the transaction of the contract. 46 00:07:04.560 --> 00:07:10.560 Labor as a definition is just a specific so typical case of freely chosen action. 47 00:07:10.560 --> 00:07:17.560 The second universally accepted axiom in contemporary libertarian philosophy is diversity. 48 00:07:17.560 --> 00:07:24.560 The resources found naturally in our own bodies and now in our environment are scarce and unevenly distributed. 49 00:07:24.560 --> 00:07:34.560 This proposition's epistemological status as an axiom is based on the fact that it is neither a banal definition nor deducible from what is already known. 50 00:07:34.560 --> 00:07:44.560 Instead, it is a description in a reflective and universally valid form of a primary phenomenon, that is to say, the discovery of the world as living space. 51 00:07:44.560 --> 00:07:54.560 The attempt to logically refute diversity would, in claiming to be based on a better and therefore different insight, immediately result in self-contradiction. 52 00:07:54.560 --> 00:07:57.560 The following deductions are 53 00:07:57.560 --> 00:08:02.560 3. Property of alienable things by homesteading, work and title transfer 54 00:08:02.560 --> 00:08:03.560 4. Exchange 55 00:08:03.560 --> 00:08:05.560 5. Injustice 56 00:08:05.560 --> 00:08:14.560 6. Sanctions against the breach of contract resulting from the reduction in the perceived value of future services offered by the party in breach of contract 57 00:08:14.560 --> 00:08:23.560 7. Insurance against damages due to breach of contract, injustice and risk can be stipulated contractually 58 00:08:23.560 --> 00:08:43.560 Hoppe has demonstrated in particular that in the field of security, the insurance solution is always superior in terms of productivity and that it has a systematically civilizing effect, what is here phrased as deduction number eight, the price of the insurance reflects one's observance with regard to the contract. 59 00:08:43.560 --> 00:08:53.560 Deduction No. 9 is that legal proceedings can be freely agreed upon, namely between competing assurers, which is a decisive element of civil law society. 60 00:08:53.560 --> 00:09:09.560 Subsequently, values defined No. 7 as a position on the hierarchical ordinal scale of preferences up to which an individual is prepared to have his freedoms and rights limited in order to acquire a certain thing as a property. 61 00:09:09.560 --> 00:09:26.560 Things, including material and non-material entities, make up the definitions No. 8 through 10, indicating that they all can be placed in everyone's hierarchy of values, thus lining up economic goods, freely available conditions and mental states. 62 00:09:26.560 --> 00:09:37.560 The three last deductions for the moment are No. 10, the division of labor increases productivity and thus the sum total of wealth of each and every participant. 63 00:09:37.560 --> 00:09:43.560 Number 11, that any good to which contract parties agree upon is a possible medium of exchange. 64 00:09:43.560 --> 00:09:49.560 And number 12, that expressions of self-ownership, namely labor and property, are alienable, 65 00:09:49.560 --> 00:09:55.560 whereas the subject of self-ownership, consisting of the physical body and its free will, is inalienable. 66 00:09:55.560 --> 00:10:06.800 Deduction Number 13 deals with the right to evaluate as follows. If our lifetime and our 67 00:10:06.800 --> 00:10:12.960 health last forever, it would be neither necessary to choose between goals nor to ration any 68 00:10:12.960 --> 00:10:20.480 means because at some point all means will be required to accomplish every goal. As neither 69 00:10:20.480 --> 00:10:24.160 The two bodies can be in the same place at the same time. 70 00:10:24.160 --> 00:10:27.080 No, one body can be at two places at one time. 71 00:10:27.080 --> 00:10:30.120 The only a priori limitations would be time and space. 72 00:10:31.920 --> 00:10:33.800 The constant valuations, however, 73 00:10:33.800 --> 00:10:36.280 we are continually obliged to undertake 74 00:10:36.280 --> 00:10:38.920 under conditions of limited lifetime health, 75 00:10:38.920 --> 00:10:42.000 ultimately refer precisely to this prime ordeal, 76 00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:43.600 scarcity of self-ownership. 77 00:10:44.600 --> 00:10:47.720 The source and reference point of all of our valuations 78 00:10:47.720 --> 00:10:51.760 is what Hoppe has called body time. 79 00:10:51.760 --> 00:10:54.600 This is what we each align our valuations to, 80 00:10:54.600 --> 00:10:57.040 which are manifested in our actions. 81 00:10:57.040 --> 00:10:59.560 The valuations being non-material entities, 82 00:10:59.560 --> 00:11:02.440 therefore our property, which means we have a right 83 00:11:02.440 --> 00:11:05.480 to our valuations, that is, as self-owners, 84 00:11:05.480 --> 00:11:07.820 we have the right to value it. 85 00:11:10.040 --> 00:11:13.840 The third axiom, the equal right of inalienable 86 00:11:13.840 --> 00:11:17.360 self-ownership to value it, has interpersonal equal rank. 87 00:11:17.720 --> 00:11:27.720 Think of this kind of a conflict situation. A single primary threat can affect the self-ownership of several bearers of the right to evaluate. 88 00:11:27.720 --> 00:11:42.720 To name some striking examples, a current attack on a state or society by a state, or a state embodying ruling power, a wildfire, a hostage situation in an airplane, or in particular threatening to use weapons of mass destruction. 89 00:11:42.720 --> 00:11:48.720 The effect of the secondary action taken against such collective dangers can again be collective. 90 00:11:48.720 --> 00:11:57.720 Even if according to each situation they may be individually planned and executed, we will call them individual secondary actions. 91 00:11:57.720 --> 00:12:07.720 For those who are actually or allegedly primarily threatened in their self-ownership, it is possible to arrive at different judgements regarding the effectiveness or ineffectiveness 92 00:12:07.720 --> 00:12:13.720 of various such possible individual secondary actions of prevention, defense or containment 93 00:12:13.720 --> 00:12:17.720 without thereby getting involved in any ethical conflict. 94 00:12:17.720 --> 00:12:24.720 Those who are collectively threatened might, however, disagree with the assessment of the potential danger to self-ownership 95 00:12:24.720 --> 00:12:29.720 which the secondary individual measures themselves pose to them and others. 96 00:12:29.720 --> 00:12:36.720 Insofar as neither those dangers to life and health arising from primary attack or threat 97 00:12:36.720 --> 00:12:52.720 Now, those arising from secondary defense can actually be allotted to individuals who have a fundamentally different conflict situation, one that cannot be sufficiently described by solely using the two accents of human action and diversity and deductions thereof. 98 00:12:52.720 --> 00:13:07.720 The attacker remains responsible for his attack, even if an attempt to defend may have aggravated him in the eyes of a tactical appeaser, or if an inadequate choice impeded an alternative and more effective measure of defense. 99 00:13:07.720 --> 00:13:17.720 However, the collective danger emanating from an act of defense itself will only be justified by those who rate this danger lower than the one arising from the primary attack. 100 00:13:17.720 --> 00:13:33.720 This class of conflict emerges only where dissenters are endangered or damaged by the second act of defense, who would rather have accepted the danger of the primary threat or would have preferred an alternative but not concurrently possible defense. 101 00:13:36.720 --> 00:13:44.720 In that case, some action against the rightful valuations by self-owners and thereby an infringement of self-ownership is inevitable. 102 00:13:44.720 --> 00:13:50.720 This obvious dilemma raises the question of the interpersonal value of competing rights. 103 00:13:50.720 --> 00:14:04.720 As interpersonal exchangeability cannot be assumed, equal value of self-ownership as a reference point of equally rightful valuations cannot be deduced but only postulated to be autonomous. 104 00:14:04.720 --> 00:14:26.720 Such an assumption rightfully claims reflective evidence. Otherwise, the requirement that every ethical regime should apply equally to everyone would obviously make no sense, because this very demand of universal applicability describes the principle equality of all humans with regard to the conditio humana. 105 00:14:26.720 --> 00:14:40.720 This, however, one understands it, is based on the affirmation of life, that is an equal status of ownership of one's body, and thus on equality of self-ownership, as otherwise would be a conditio dominis eviquae. 106 00:14:40.720 --> 00:14:52.720 Taking into account the fact mentioned, that due to the lack of intra-personal and inter-personal exchangeability, the term value, as stated in the seventh definition, is not applicable here. 107 00:14:52.720 --> 00:15:00.720 We will instead use the terms of weight, validity, and especially the interpersonal equal length of barrels of equal rights. 108 00:15:02.720 --> 00:15:16.720 The statement thus phrased, the autonomous equal length of interpersonal equal rights to evaluate, is intellectually self-evident, universally applicable and valid a priori, and moreover, it is not deducible. 109 00:15:16.720 --> 00:15:24.280 Yet the final criterion for attaining axiom status is a self-contradiction in which its 110 00:15:24.280 --> 00:15:29.280 antithesis must inevitably become entangled. 111 00:15:29.280 --> 00:15:33.120 This antithesis would have to justify why the scale of value of one bearer of the right 112 00:15:33.120 --> 00:15:37.320 to evaluate should rank higher and why it is therefore ought to be adopted by another 113 00:15:37.320 --> 00:15:40.400 non-consenting bearer of the same right. 114 00:15:40.400 --> 00:15:44.800 It could do this first and foremost by taking the autonomy of the equal rank. 115 00:15:44.800 --> 00:15:47.600 It would have to justify the primacy of society 116 00:15:47.600 --> 00:15:50.720 over the individual, and thereby get lost 117 00:15:50.720 --> 00:15:52.920 in the self-contradiction indicated earlier. 118 00:15:54.560 --> 00:15:56.920 A second approach of denying the equal rank 119 00:15:56.920 --> 00:15:59.160 of rights to evaluate is a claim 120 00:15:59.160 --> 00:16:01.800 that one's own scale of value is more suitable 121 00:16:01.800 --> 00:16:05.680 and that this can be measured in an objective way. 122 00:16:05.680 --> 00:16:08.680 For instance, by majority vote, academic credentials, 123 00:16:08.680 --> 00:16:12.000 theoretical stringency, or historical experience, 124 00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:14.080 including one's own economic success. 125 00:16:14.800 --> 00:16:27.800 Whoever frames the argument this way would be renouncing his old scale of values because he claims the existence of an objective scale of values that overrides all others, including his own. 126 00:16:27.800 --> 00:16:35.800 He would no longer argue as I, that is, as an actor, but would have to rely on some non-material idealistic entities. 127 00:16:35.800 --> 00:16:43.800 In that case, the self-prediction seems to take this form. I know that I know nothing, but I know this for certain. 128 00:16:43.800 --> 00:17:03.800 Whether or not these are the right antithesis and whether or not the second one really is self-contradicting has to be left to further consideration, for that the axiomatic character of the statement of the equal rank of the rights to evaluate can for the time being only be assumed. 129 00:17:03.800 --> 00:17:16.800 The 14th deduction, the exit option. The bearer of the right to evaluate, who descends from an inevitably individual foreign action affecting self-ownership, has the option to exit. 130 00:17:16.800 --> 00:17:25.800 This is the only solution in such an inevitable and territorially limited case of conflict, by which an infringement of self-ownership can be avoided. 131 00:17:25.800 --> 00:17:32.400 However, a question that is perhaps altogether impossible to answer satisfactorily in various 132 00:17:32.400 --> 00:17:37.880 such hypothetical situations is, who must leave allegedly dangerous territory if need 133 00:17:37.880 --> 00:17:40.080 be permanently? 134 00:17:40.080 --> 00:17:44.960 More generally speaking, can any collective choice be legitimate? 135 00:17:44.960 --> 00:17:51.720 A still greater problem is likely to arise from situations in which a territorial limitation 136 00:17:51.720 --> 00:17:53.800 is not sufficiently plausible, 137 00:17:53.800 --> 00:17:56.760 and in which the exit option therefore does not exist. 138 00:17:57.920 --> 00:18:00.640 Human action, which contrary to the viability 139 00:18:00.640 --> 00:18:03.960 of natural situations is an ethical category, 140 00:18:03.960 --> 00:18:06.280 has with the progress of technology achieved 141 00:18:06.280 --> 00:18:08.320 an increasing and global reach, 142 00:18:08.320 --> 00:18:12.600 and so has secondary individual action. 143 00:18:12.600 --> 00:18:14.400 It looks as though the theoretical structure 144 00:18:14.400 --> 00:18:17.000 of Austrian school is reaching a limit here. 145 00:18:17.000 --> 00:18:47.000 The scope of racial ethics seems to have been delineated by the statements made so far. All relevant interpersonal and non-aggressive actions with regard to alienable and inalienable property have been categorically listed and sketched in outlines, using an extended structure of axioms and deductions. The further deductions and definitions following logically from this constitutes a particular 146 00:18:47.000 --> 00:18:50.080 is the subject of the science of economics. 147 00:18:50.080 --> 00:18:52.160 Seen this way, the logical structure described here 148 00:18:52.160 --> 00:18:54.960 should be approached as rational ethics. 149 00:18:54.960 --> 00:18:59.160 At the same time, it constitutes the foundation of economics. 150 00:18:59.160 --> 00:19:02.000 What implications the expansion of the axiomatic structure 151 00:19:02.000 --> 00:19:05.680 may have for economics remains to be seen. 152 00:19:05.680 --> 00:19:08.840 Although economics is concerned with alienated property 153 00:19:08.840 --> 00:19:11.680 and the equal right of self-owners to evaluate 154 00:19:11.680 --> 00:19:14.560 is concerned with inalienable property, 155 00:19:14.560 --> 00:19:16.720 it is to be expected that economic implications 156 00:19:16.720 --> 00:19:21.720 can no result due to the situationally inseparable involvement of both spheres of property. 157 00:19:24.720 --> 00:19:26.720 What can be gained from all this? 158 00:19:27.720 --> 00:19:35.720 Outside the Austrian tradition, the more or less pre-conscious motive of defending perceived equality has led to bizarre twists in thinking. 159 00:19:36.720 --> 00:19:42.720 Recognition of their own species is part of the established behavioral pattern of all higher developed animals. 160 00:19:42.720 --> 00:19:51.720 The attempt to transpose this biologically given equality into philosophical terms has obviously led to careless equations. 161 00:19:51.720 --> 00:19:58.720 These in turn have come into conflict with empirical data and thus fall short of cumulating universal ethics. 162 00:19:58.720 --> 00:20:05.720 On the other hand, Austrian analysis of equality does not seem to have drawn too much attention, 163 00:20:05.720 --> 00:20:11.720 even if John Locke actually had stated a similarly concise concept of equality and diversity, 164 00:20:11.720 --> 00:20:21.720 As has been pointed out to the notion of equal rank in this presentation, it would be about time to be repeated after 323 years. 165 00:20:21.720 --> 00:20:34.720 As a consequence, I suggest to replace the contradictory odd propositions of liberty and equality with the bold logical is propositions of self-ownership 166 00:20:34.720 --> 00:20:39.720 and of the autonomous equal rank of self-owning bearers of the right to value it. 167 00:20:39.720 --> 00:20:49.720 Since this is highly inelegant, I would not mind the last definition for the day. Let's name it the human rank. Thank you for your attention.