WEBVTT NOTE Commentary: Morality, Justice and Markets 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.440 I want to thank all the four authors of the papers for very interesting comments, and 2 00:00:07.440 --> 00:00:15.520 I also want to thank the various authors for sending me their papers in advance of the 3 00:00:15.520 --> 00:00:16.520 session. 4 00:00:16.520 --> 00:00:24.640 I must say this is the first time that's happened in the 17 Austrian Scholars Conference that 5 00:00:24.640 --> 00:00:26.880 I've attended. 6 00:00:26.880 --> 00:00:36.880 Now, we began with Professor Bedelford's paper, and I must say, although the idea of comparing 7 00:00:36.880 --> 00:00:46.380 Adam Smith and von Mises is a very interesting idea and very important, his was the paper 8 00:00:46.380 --> 00:00:51.860 I found myself most in disagreement with. 9 00:00:51.860 --> 00:01:01.780 At one point he says following Glenn Morrow that Adam Smith had abandoned strict methodological 10 00:01:01.780 --> 00:01:13.020 individualism in his moral theory in that the realm of morality exists apart from the 11 00:01:13.020 --> 00:01:14.740 individual. 12 00:01:14.740 --> 00:01:20.580 But it seems to me Smith's theory is still quite consistent with methodological individualism 13 00:01:20.580 --> 00:01:29.980 in that it rests on acts of sympathetic identification with others, the impartial spectator, so the 14 00:01:29.980 --> 00:01:43.260 realm of morality is built up out of individuals' reactions or feelings about the actions of 15 00:01:43.260 --> 00:01:44.260 others. 16 00:01:44.260 --> 00:01:49.200 That's quite in line with methodological individualism. 17 00:01:49.200 --> 00:01:54.780 Methodological individualism doesn't say there's nothing but individuals and their actions, 18 00:01:54.780 --> 00:02:05.060 but that social institutions can ultimately be analyzable in terms of individuals. 19 00:02:05.060 --> 00:02:13.540 Even somewhat later in his paper, he says about that utilitarianism is an ethically 20 00:02:13.540 --> 00:02:22.580 empty theory and the argument for this was that each individual will be acting to try 21 00:02:22.580 --> 00:02:31.060 to achieve whatever he considers will make him the happiest and so you can't, if that's 22 00:02:31.060 --> 00:02:37.780 So it's just you would just have each individual trying to act as whatever way he thought best 23 00:02:37.780 --> 00:02:43.900 and there would be no judgments possible about what was good or bad we would just have each 24 00:02:43.900 --> 00:02:47.200 individual would be doing whatever he wanted. 25 00:02:47.200 --> 00:02:56.400 Now it seems to me there were confusing there's a confusion between Bentham held both psychological 26 00:02:56.400 --> 00:02:59.540 hedonism and ethical hedonism. 27 00:02:59.540 --> 00:03:29.540 He thought people actually were motivated by trying to achieve the greatest happiness which we took for the greatest pleasure, balance of pleasure or pain at all times, and that they ought to do this, but neither position implies the other, so it's quite consistent to say that even if it's true, each individual is aiming at what he takes to be, give him the most happiness that a utilitarian could say, well, some individuals 28 00:03:29.540 --> 00:03:39.420 are wrong about what will best achieve happiness for the whole group. Utilitarianism is usually 29 00:03:39.420 --> 00:03:46.740 taken to be maximizing happiness for a whole group. So it's quite consistent to say individuals 30 00:03:46.740 --> 00:03:52.540 are making mistakes about it, even if each individual is trying to do whatever he thinks 31 00:03:52.540 --> 00:04:01.860 will attain his own happiness. So if utilitarianism is an ethically empty theory, I don't think 32 00:04:01.860 --> 00:04:10.020 the argument in this paper is sufficient to show that. Then at another place, it was suggested 33 00:04:10.020 --> 00:04:21.100 that Mises endorses an invisible hand account, and the passages quoted in support of that 34 00:04:21.100 --> 00:04:29.860 had to do with a passage where Mises speaks about the benefits of social cooperation. 35 00:04:29.860 --> 00:04:39.820 He said in one such passage that many people can think that in the economy it's based 36 00:04:39.820 --> 00:04:46.940 on antagonisms between people, they confuse the economic cooperation, the economic system 37 00:04:46.940 --> 00:04:53.660 and with ones of fighting with wars and in fact people had mutually beneficial interests 38 00:04:53.660 --> 00:05:00.780 and another passage quoted Mises on Ricardo law of comparative cost which Mises extended 39 00:05:00.780 --> 00:05:07.180 into general law of association but is quite right to say those were very important notions 40 00:05:07.180 --> 00:05:14.500 for Mises but they were not ones where that show Mises had an invisible hand explanation 41 00:05:14.500 --> 00:05:20.700 because to show that, you would have to show that Mises held that people had come into 42 00:05:20.700 --> 00:05:27.700 the market not by conscious intent but as a result of other actions which had led to 43 00:05:27.700 --> 00:05:32.500 the existence of the market and he doesn't particularly emphasize that. 44 00:05:32.500 --> 00:05:40.540 To the contrary, he's more of a social rationalist as Joseph Salerno has pointed out in an important 45 00:05:40.540 --> 00:05:47.100 ," he tended to think that people had consciously entered into the market. So the very good 46 00:05:47.100 --> 00:05:53.780 point that the market is a realm not of antagonism but of social cooperation doesn't at all show 47 00:05:53.780 --> 00:06:02.660 that Mises was engaged in an invisible hand sort of explanation. Now turning to Professor 48 00:06:02.660 --> 00:06:11.220 Mr. Weigler's very erudite paper, I have very little to comment on that. I would only 49 00:06:11.220 --> 00:06:17.620 suggest there then discussion of Grotius in the part of the, this didn't come out in the 50 00:06:17.620 --> 00:06:26.700 oral presentation. He emphasizes that Grotius developed natural law as something just dependent 51 00:06:26.700 --> 00:06:32.580 on reason. He quotes the famous sentence where Grotius says that the natural law would hold 52 00:06:32.580 --> 00:06:43.300 even if God didn't exist. Now, I don't say he's wrong to take that view, but there is a competing 53 00:06:43.300 --> 00:06:50.420 view of Grotius in the literature, for example, in the writings of Oliver O'Donovan that claims that 54 00:06:50.420 --> 00:06:58.180 Grotius had a more theological content to natural law, that there isn't this sort of strict separation 55 00:06:58.180 --> 00:07:05.620 that some people have claimed for Grotius when he quotes that famous sentence from Suarez. 56 00:07:08.900 --> 00:07:17.380 That was the only point I had on that paper. Now, turning to Jared Casey's paper, that was the one 57 00:07:17.380 --> 00:07:25.300 I found myself, I really found the most interesting one, the one that coincides with a lot of my own 58 00:07:25.300 --> 00:07:32.180 interest, I was most interested in reading that. And I think he's arguing on entirely 59 00:07:32.180 --> 00:07:38.300 the right lines that we do have to take. It's very important to take property as unowned 60 00:07:38.300 --> 00:07:47.040 rather than claim that people have pre-existing rights to property. And the only points I 61 00:07:47.040 --> 00:07:53.540 would have on his paper are he started off with a very valuable discussion of Soraydi's 62 00:07:53.540 --> 00:08:22.540 The point of which was to say that even though we don't have, there's no in a continuum situation, there's no exact cut-off point that still we can get, we know at least within a certain zone of indeterminacy where the one thing changes into another, say we can say certain people are tall, we know certain people are tall and certain people are short. 63 00:08:22.540 --> 00:08:29.980 even though we can't say exactly when, where the point of division is or that there isn't 64 00:08:29.980 --> 00:08:35.220 an exact point of division, but we can still know that some people are tall and other people 65 00:08:35.220 --> 00:08:43.180 are short. I think we could say that his point follows even if we accept the minority position 66 00:08:43.180 --> 00:08:48.780 on sororities. It's been argued by Timothy Williamson in his famous book, Vagueness, 67 00:08:48.780 --> 00:08:55.400 where he says, there is an exact cutoff point, we don't know what it is, and he argues for 68 00:08:55.400 --> 00:09:01.180 that somewhat counterintuitive point of view on various technical grounds and logic. 69 00:09:01.180 --> 00:09:07.380 But even if you accepted that view, I think what Professor Casey said would still hold 70 00:09:07.380 --> 00:09:15.980 that we would still be relying on our common sense judgments to delimit where the boundary 71 00:09:15.980 --> 00:09:16.980 was. 72 00:09:16.980 --> 00:09:33.460 Now the only other point I would comment on his paper is there's a footnote where he's talking about the view that everyone owns things in common and he raises an objection that many people have raised that view. 73 00:09:33.460 --> 00:09:38.140 Well, wouldn't you have to get everyone's permission if you wanted to do anything? 74 00:09:38.140 --> 00:09:43.780 Say, if everybody owns everything, then if I wanted to pick up something, 75 00:09:43.780 --> 00:09:47.060 I'd have to get everybody to approve and everybody would die 76 00:09:47.060 --> 00:09:50.940 because before I could get that approval. 77 00:09:50.940 --> 00:09:58.900 But I think there it isn't evident that that view strictly follows from the common ownership position. 78 00:09:58.900 --> 00:10:28.900 I mean, one could hold views that you can do something unless someone to common property, unless somebody objects to it. So I don't think there's any strict logical implication there, although it's certainly an interesting objection to that theory. But I don't think it's strictly logically required. And I found the last paper a very, I found that a very convincing argument on how government action crowds out private 79 00:10:28.900 --> 00:10:44.900 of a Charity. And the only comment I had on that was in, one thing again wasn't in the oral presentation, but in the discussion of theology, which is far outside my area of knowledge, whatever that's supposed to be, 80 00:10:44.900 --> 00:10:55.340 And Father Walker and his co-authors quoted the statement of Jesus, my kingdom is not 81 00:10:55.340 --> 00:11:02.700 of this world, and they argued that this was a limit, this expressed a limit to political 82 00:11:02.700 --> 00:11:03.700 power. 83 00:11:03.700 --> 00:11:09.860 And it's not evident to me that that's the case, although one could certainly imagine 84 00:11:09.860 --> 00:11:11.860 The Theory of Money and Credit 85 00:11:39.860 --> 00:11:49.860 It would be a good idea to add to the paper exactly how that passage is supposed to be taken to limit political power. 86 00:11:49.860 --> 00:11:55.860 So I want to thank again all the authors for their very valuable papers. 87 00:11:55.860 --> 00:11:57.860 Thank you very much.