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NOTE Objective and Subjective Value

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I'd like to thank Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute for inviting me to give this series of lectures.

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I am going to be talking about the foundations of libertarian ethics,

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praxeological foundations of libertarian ethics.

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Now, praxeology, as many of you will know, is a set of conceptual truths about the nature of action.

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Facts about the nature of action. We don't have to discover by looking around empirically, but you can, by simply analyzing the relevant concepts, you can see that certain things have to be true about action, and this is the basis of the economic theories developed by Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.

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They both developed their economics based on these conceptual insights into the nature of action.

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What I'm going to be trying to do is explore how you might base libertarian ethics on these sorts of conceptual truths about action.

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So you might see that there are two sort of parallel ways of grounding libertarianism in praxeology.

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One is the economic route. You start with these praxeological truths.

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Conceptual truths about the nature of action and then if you assume certain

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widely shared values, values like peace or prosperity or cooperation, you can show

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that these values, you can show simply on the basis of praxeology, that these

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values would be promoted by a libertarian social order, will be

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frustrated by status intervention and so that is one way of getting from

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from Praxeology to Libertarianism.

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I'm going to be exploring a somewhat different route, one that is not so much concerned with

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economics and economic consequences, but concerned with ethics and natural rights.

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This is a line of argument that has been less fully worked out than the economic one.

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In the economic one you've got Mises' Human Action, you've got Rothbard's Man Economy

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and State, works like that. There isn't anything yet analogous in the area of ethics, and this lecture is not going to be it, this seminar is not going to be the ethical equivalent of human action, if it were, I'd be charging a lot more.

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But nevertheless, this does have precedence, the group known as the Classical Eudaimonists from Eudaimonia, the Greek word for happiness or well-being or flourishing.

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The Classical Eudaimonists were the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and then later on the medieval scholastics,

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Ethics, who developed an ethics out of something like praxeology. The ancient and medieval

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ethical theorists generally start off with certain basic conceptual truths about action

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and try and derive their ethics from that. For example, I've often noticed that the similarity

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between the way that Aristotle starts off his great ethical treatise, the Nicomachean

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Ethics, and the way that Mises starts off Human Action. They both start off with the

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the idea that human action aims at ends. Aristotle starts off with every art and every inquiry

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and likewise every action and decision seems to aim at some good. That's the first sentence

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of the Nicomachean Ethics. And the first sentence of human action if you leave out the introduction

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is human action is purposeful behavior. So Mises starts as economics, Aristotle starts

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as Ethics, both with the same insight, that human action is purposeful, that it aims at ends.

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And these two traditions are connected. Austrian economics, the tradition of Mises and Rothbard,

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grows out of a continental subjectivist tradition in economics. We'll see more in a bit about exactly

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what I mean by subjectivist. But there's the subjectivist tradition that you find in, for

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for example, the 19th century, French economists and that in turn grew to a considerable extent out of the background of scholasticism.

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So you can trace a kind of series of connections from the ancient Greek philosophers through the scholastics,

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through the continental economic tradition on through Austrian economics.

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but I'm going to be talking about a less economic more ethical approach. So the

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classically diamondists offered a number of attempts to base something like a

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natural law ethics and praxeology but often with unlibertarian results. For the

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most part these ancient medieval thinkers were not especially libertarian in their

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conclusions, and other exceptions, most notably with the late scholastics, the late Spanish

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scholastics of the Renaissance period who developed quite a lot of libertarian leading

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free market analysis, and then also you can find libertarian spasms here and there in

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the earlier thinkers, you can find libertarian aspects in Aristotle and the Stoics and even

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and sometimes Plato, but still, by and large, the overall approach of the classically diamondists

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was not especially libertarian. They got from praxeology to ethics, but then the politics

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they built on their ethics often looked kind of creepy. Libertarians, by contrast, have

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often attempted to base a specifically libertarian set of ethics on something like that conception

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of Natural Law. But often libertarians have abandoned or not paid much attention to this

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earlier ancient and medieval tradition, sort of tried to start on some more modern foundation.

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So what I'm trying to do is to see whether something like a modern libertarian position

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can be defended in the context of something like an ancient Aristotelian style approach

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Research to Ethics. Now certainly, this has been done before, and the two most notable

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examples, and we might say the two most notable exceptions to the claim that the model libertarians

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don't pay that much attention to the ancients, are Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, who both

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drew explicitly on something like Aristotelian foundations in their work. For example, if

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If you look at the opening chapters of Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty, there's very much Aristotelian

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and Thomistic style argument there that's being used to ground his arguments for rights.

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And Rand famously was a big fan of Aristotle, and less famously, she was a fairly big fan

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of Aquinas.

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She thought Aquinas was the second greatest philosopher ofividest, Aristotle being the

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first, and herself in the third probably. But, and in Rand's virtue of selfishness, you can see that

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there's a way in which her arguments, even though she makes some shots at Aristotle in the course

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of developing them, she is appealing to Aristotelian principles in the course of developing those ethics.

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But there are certain dissatisfactions I have with some of the things that both Rand and Rothbard do that make me want to try to develop things a bit more.

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Probably my main dissatisfaction with the way Rand does it is that the way that Rand develops her ethics strikes me, for reasons I'll explain, as too consequentialist.

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That is, as basing ethics, the value of morality primarily on its consequences rather than on its own inherent value.

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And I don't think that that's what Rand is doing in her novels for the most part.

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But I think that is what happens when she tries to develop a philosophy, develop philosophical foundations of a worldview in her nonfiction.

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I think that she ends up treating actions as merely instrumental means to

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well-being rather than as intrinsic parts of well-being which I think would be the

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more Aristotelian way to do it and I think that there's a problem with this

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briefly the problem is this one of the things that praxeology shows and Mises

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And Rand basically agrees with this, is that there are certain ends you can't achieve unless you are committed to certain principles.

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You can't get certain goals unless you adopt certain principles in a way that you're really committed to them.

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You don't just treat them as rules of thumb, you're really committed to them as principles.

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But here's my objection. Once you're committed to something as a principle, that means you're no longer treating it in a purely consequentialist way.

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You may have a purely instrumental reason to adopt it.

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Someone says, suppose you can't get X unless you get yourself to care about Y.

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Alright, so you get yourself to care about Y, but once you've done it, now you've done it.

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You care about Y now.

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And it's no longer the case that all you're invested in is X.

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So Rand thinks that, as I understand her, she thinks that you can't achieve something like reliable survival.

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survival, long-term survival, you can't achieve that unless you commit yourself to certain

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virtues.

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I think that's probably right for the most part.

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But once you commit yourself to those virtues, then it seems as though you can't consistently

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regard them as merely strategies for advancing your survival, you now have to care about

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them for their own sake, which is sort of what Rand says, but at the same time she still

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seems to want to say that somehow the ultimate justification of them is still survival.

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And that's what I have a problem with. Once you're committed to them, you can't regard them as merely instrumental anymore.

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You sort of kick the ladder away. You may have had a consequentialist reason for becoming a non-consequentialist.

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Once you are one, you are one.

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One of the reasons I'm not fully satisfied with the way Rothbard develops ethics is a little bit different.

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In a way it's the reverse worry. Rothbard for the most part, maybe not entirely, depends on how you read those opening chapters of Ethics of Liberty.

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For the most part, Rothbard at least generally seems to think that the content of justice, and by justice I really mean respect for rights,

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and therefore the content of rights, can be determined independently of the rest of morality.

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that regardless of what you think about courage or generosity or temperance or any of these other traditional virtues,

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regardless of what you think is a good way to live in general, regardless of what you think is valuable in life,

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you can settle the content of justice, the content of rights, without any concern for the rest of that, and that I'm not convinced of.

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I'm convinced of this principle that a lot of the classical idiom is settled, called the unity of virtue, according to which you can't fully specify the content of any one virtue, independently of the content of all the others.

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All our ends have to fit together, I'm going to argue, into a kind of harmonious system.

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and we couldn't have any reason to care about something that couldn't be integrated into our general view about what's worth living so I think that there's what I'm going to call reciprocal determination between justice and the other virtues that the content of the other virtues plays a role in determining what justice is although the content of justice also plays a role in determining what the other virtues are so that's why I think you have

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I have to say something generally about virtue in order to have a firm foundation for the retained ethics.

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Now, these lectures are not going to be a definitive, fully worked out system where I've got decisive arguments for everything.

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A lot of this is sort of a project in process.

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I should also give kind of a warning here, that may be too strong a term, but a kind of advisory note that my approach to praxeology and in fact my approach to philosophy in general

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is not so much a matter of linear deduction from axioms. It's not so much that you start with one axiom and you deduce everything from it.

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Sometimes that's appropriate, but in general I think of it more as tracing relations among concepts.

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It's more like a network or a spider web rather than a structure where everything is built from the ground up.

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For example, I don't think that you can deduce all of economics just from the action axiom because there are other concepts.

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You can't deduce monetary theory from the action axiom unless you introduce the concept of money.

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And so it's not so much that you start from this one concept and action and you deduce everything from it,

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from it, but you have a bunch of concepts that are related to each other, action, money, price, cost, means, and they're all interrelated and you trace what their a priori connections are.

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Alright, well the first question I want to start off with is, according to praxeology, value is subjective.

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And so you might think that's going to be an unpromising foundation for ethics.

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How can you ground ethics in the theory of subjective value?

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I think subjective value just means, you know, you want whatever you want.

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And maybe I want to be nice to people and you want to be nasty to people or vice versa.

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And, you know, value is just whatever is, you know, whatever you want.

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So how can you ground objective ethics on that?

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Well, I want to distinguish between two senses of value subjectivism.

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On the one hand, there's what I'm going to call explanatory value subjectivism.

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Explanatory value subjectivism means that when you are explaining what a person is doing,

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or what a group of people are doing, you explain it in terms of their values, not your own.

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If you want to know why they're doing something, you have to understand it in terms of values that they have.

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So, for example, this is sometimes used as a criticism of theories according to which people are doing something because it serves some objective function in society, but there's no explanation about how that actually motivates them.

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So, there's certain, or it's called functionalist explanations in sociology where they're saying, why does this tribe do this?

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Oh, because it turns out that doing this makes the tribe better off, but none of them have any clue,

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none of them know that that makes the tribe better off, they just do it, and so it's not an adequate explanation.

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You need some account of how this actually, how they actually end up individually being motivated.

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It might be that the fact that this benefits the tribe and they don't know it plays some kind of role in explaining why they do it,

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But you need to account for that. You need to say what it is that actually individually motivates them.

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And that's the sense in which praxeology is a theory of subjective value.

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If you want to understand what people are doing, you don't appeal to your values.

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If your favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla, you don't appeal to that in explaining why someone else is choosing chocolate.

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You appeal to the fact that their favorite is chocolate.

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We want to distinguish that from normative value subjectivism, according to which all person's values are equally good.

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There's no basis for criticizing one value or favoring one value over another.

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That's a separate claim, and I don't think praxeology entails that.

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Praxeology entails that everyone acts according to their own values.

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But praxeology doesn't entail the claim that all values are on an equal level,

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level are that no good reasons can be given for supporting some values over others.

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Now Mises seems to have thought that explanatory values subjectivism entails normative values

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subjectivism. Mises seems to have thought that because all values are subjective therefore you

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couldn't really have any objective basis for praising or condemning any particular choice.

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Mises says, for example, if someone says you shouldn't value this, you should value that instead.

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That's just pure effrontery. It's just the arrogance of someone who thinks that their subjective values have some kind of objective basis.

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Well, although I think Mises was wrong about that, I think I can understand why he thought that.

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There is something in the neighborhood of that that I think he's right about.

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Something that's sometimes called internalism.

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Internalism is the view that we can't or don't have any duties

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that aren't somehow grounded in or consistent with or somehow fit in with our motives.

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So the idea is it doesn't make sense to say you ought to do something

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if there's no hook in your motives for you to do it.

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Something the principle of ought implies can. You can't do something unless you've got some motive to do it, or you can be persuaded or shown to have some motive to do it.

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If there's nothing in your existing beliefs, desires and preferences, if there's nothing that can give any hook to this ought I'm throwing at you, then you're not able to act on some ought that doesn't somehow hook up with your existing desires.

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Now, I might hook up with them by showing you that your existing desires really commit you to something else you didn't desire yet. That's fine.

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But I think Mises is right in thinking that explanatory values of objectivism does show that it doesn't make sense to demand of someone that follows some morality that doesn't have any connection to anything they desire.

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But since Mises, I think, also thinks, well, and there's no limit to what you might desire,

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you might desire any crazy thing, therefore, Mises thinks there couldn't be any objective ethics.

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However, the classical? diamondists thought that there were conceptual constraints on what we could prefer or desire or what our commitments were.

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Or even if we happen to desire something bad, the classical? diamondists thought that if you really trace out the logical implications of our desires,

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You'd see that we're really committed to desiring something else other than this thing we desired or what we desired.

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And so, Classically Diamond has thought that there were these conceptual constraints that would narrow the range of what our commitments really are.

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Now as an example of how this sort of thing works, Mises says that praxeology can only advise you on means, not ends.

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Given that you've got a certain goal, praxeology can give you information about what the best means to it is.

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The most efficient means of achieving that goal.

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But praxeology can't tell you what goals to have.

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You know, your psychology determines what your goals are.

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You either got the goal or you don't.

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If you've got the goal, then if you want to get upstairs,

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then praxeology can say, you know, go use the staircase.

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Actually, I'm not sure that's a praxeological principle.

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It seems too empirical.

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But anyway, you can give that kind of advice,

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but it can't tell you whether you ought to go upstairs or not.

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You know, that was Mises' idea.

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Well, in a way, the Classical Edimonists agree, and in a way, they don't.

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On the one hand, the Classical Edimonists are constantly advising people what ends to pursue,

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not just the means, but the ends, constantly telling them, you know,

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these are the ends you should be pursuing, these are the goals you should have.

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But on the other hand, the Classical Edimonists also say things that sound very much like Mises.

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When they say that practical reason can only judge means, not ends,

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How can the classically diamondists say both these things?

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Well, the classically diamondists draw a distinction between what nowadays is called instrumental means and constitutive means.

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In fact, this distinction is the second sentence of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

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Here's the difference. Suppose that my goal is to play the Moonlight Sonata. That's my

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goal. And so what are the means I choose? First I need to have a piano. Where can I

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get a piano? Well, there's one out there. So if I want to play the Moonlight Sonata,

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I can step down and go out there and play. I don't know how to play the Moonlight Sonata.

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First I need sheet music and then I need piano lessons and so forth. So if I go and I buy

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by the sheet music, and I pay for some piano lessons,

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and then I go and walk into that room to the piano.

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These are all means to the end

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of playing the Moonlight Sonata.

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These are gonna be instrumental means.

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And when you think about means and ends,

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that's the usual sort of thing you think of.

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You do a bunch of things,

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there are a bunch of things you have to do first

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before you can get this thing you want later.

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Concentrative means are different.

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Suppose that I've done all those things.

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I've got the sheet music, I've paid for piano lessons,

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I've gone up there, I've sat down at the piano, and I'm now actually playing the Moonlight Sonata.

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And at that point, I happen to hit a particular note at a particular time.

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You ask me, why are you playing that note right now?

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Well, my answer is, it's not that I value that note for its own sake.

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It's not that I think, oh, that note all just by itself sounds so pretty.

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No, I'm valuing it because I want to play the Moonlight Sonata.

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In order to play the Moonlight Sonata, I have to play that note at that point

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because the Moonlight Sonata just is, those notes in that order.

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If you're going to play the Moonlight Sonata, you have to play that note at that point.

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So I'm not really valuing playing that note as an end in itself.

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I'm valuing it as a means to the end of playing the Moonlight Sonata.

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But it's a different kind of means from paying for piano lessons and buying sheet music.

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It's not an end that's external. It's not a means that's external to the end.

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it's a means that's part of the end

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and you can tell the difference because it would make sense to say

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boy, I wish I could play the Moonlight Sonata without having

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to buy sheet music, but it doesn't make any sense to say I wish I could play the Moonlight Sonata

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without playing all these notes

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Moonlight Sonata, like I said, just is these notes

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so you couldn't have the goal without these means because the means are part of the goal

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well

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The ancient Greek thinkers recognize not only instrumental but constitutive means and when

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they talk about deliberating about means, they mean not just deliberating about external

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or instrumental means, but also deliberating about constitutive means.

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Deliberating about what is part of a certain goal.

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Of course, deliberating about what is part of a goal is partly a matter of trying to

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specify the goal more exactly.

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You may have sort of a vague notion of the goal, and you want to specify it.

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And you specify it by trying to figure out what the constitutive means to it are.

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You know, so suppose that I'm trying to, suppose my goal is to have a nice vacation.

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Well, you know, some of my means to that will be instrumental means.

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Like, all right, I'll try to figure out, I need to save up enough money to take the vacation,

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and I have to get tickets, and make reservations, and that sort of thing.

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Those are instrumental means to the vacation.

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But I also have to decide, where am I going to go? And for how long?

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And those are means to having a nice vacation, too, but a little bit differently.

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They're part of the end. When I try to decide where to go, I'm trying to decide

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exactly how to specify this vague end of a nice vacation. I'm trying to make it more specific.

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Now, when I'm trying to figure out how instrumental means, that's really a matter of cause and effect,

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I'm trying to figure out, I've got this goal and I'm trying to do the things that will cause the goal to come into existence.

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But when I'm trying to figure out constitutive means to my end, it's not so much a matter of cause and effect, it's more a matter of conceptual analysis.

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I'm trying to figure out, you know, what is my end really?

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The better understanding I have of my end, the more I'll see what the internal means to it are.

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And the classical e-diamondists think that not only can we make mistakes about instrumental means,

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you can make mistakes about what strategies will bring our desired ends into existence,

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we can also make mistakes about constitutive means.

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We can make mistakes about the nature of what our goal is.

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In particular, if you're pursuing your happiness or your well-being or your self-interest or whatever you want to call it,

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You can make mistakes not just about the means to bringing about this thing, you can make mistakes about what it is.

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You can make mistakes about what the nature of that goal is.

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And so they see one of the functions of philosophy as being to give us advice about how to specify our goal.

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You know, everyone's got, in some broad sense, this goal of well-being or happiness or flourishing or self-interest, whatever you want to call it.

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We've all got this goal. In the next session, I'll say more about what the reason is for thinking we've all got this goal.

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But they think we've all got this goal, but it's kind of generic.

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What is it? What is really the nature of this ultimate goal we're committed to?

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Now, in trying to figure out what's the nature of this ultimate goal we're committed to,

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what are the constitutive means to it, these thinkers often think that we're trying to

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figure out what we should do, and this is when people often say, well, should do in

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what sense?

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You know, there's what we should do, morally do, there's what we should prudentially or

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are self-interestedly due. Of course, the Greeks think that these go together, Greek

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philosophers, but you might think, well, they don't. You know, what should you do? People

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often accuse Socrates in the Platonic dialogues of equivocating on this. He'll

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talk about, you know, what's good for you to do, and people think he's sliding from,

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you know, what's good for you versus what's good for you to do, and the

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difference between what's beneficial to you versus what's morally obligatory for

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People think he's sliding between two different senses of good, or two different senses of should.

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But the Classically Dynast think, and I agree, that there is a unitary sense of should,

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where it doesn't mean morally should, as opposed to prudentially should, as opposed to some other kind of should.

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It's just should. Think about this. Think about when you're deciding what to do.

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Now you could say, there's a case where when I'm deciding what I should morally do, you might think I'm trying to decide what morality says, and after morality says it, then I still have to decide whether to do it.

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You could think of it that way. It's just like I'm trying to figure out what the law says. So I look through the law books and find out what the law is, and once you see what it is, you still have to decide whether to do it or not.

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And so you might think of things like that, you might think, all right, here's what morality says, I figured that out, here's what self-interest says, here's what Uncle Zeke says, whatever, you go to all these various authorities to see what they say to do, but you still have to decide what to do.

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Well, there's a sense of should, in which deciding what to do is deciding what I should do.

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When I finally decide what to do, you'll know I've decided what to do because I do it.

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And deciding what to do in that sense isn't a matter of deciding what some authority requires, which I might then do or not.

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Deciding what to do is a matter of when I decide what to do, I then do it.

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If I don't do it, that shows that wasn't what I decided to do.

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So when I decide what to do something, I'm treating that as the thing to do. I'm treating it as what to do.

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And there's a sense of should, or good, or whatever, where that's just what it means.

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And so it's not as though morality is one should and prudential is another should, they're

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just the same should.

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Morality is trying to tell you what is the thing to do, and self-interest is trying to

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tell you what the thing is to do, but there's just something that is the thing to do, that

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you decide is the thing to do whenever you do it.

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Part of the point here is that evaluative terms involve endorsement.

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When I say that something is good, I'm thereby endorsing it.

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You might think, well, isn't that, that might not necessarily be true.

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Suppose I'm evil and, you know, of the sort of the deliberate embracing evil kind of villain

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that exists, you know, mainly in fumenchu movies in Washington, or I decide that something

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I said I will do it because it's evil. I'm against good. I'm in favor of evil.

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Nietzsche even talks like that, although Nietzsche didn't really do much evil in his life, but he talked a good game or an evil game.

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So couldn't an immoralist say, well, I'm against good. I'm in favor of evil.

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Well, sure, you can say anything you want, but I don't think that they're doing that without changing the meaning of the term.

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I think it's part of the meaning of the term good that we apply it to things that we're in favor of.

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Now, I could use the term good to mean things that other people are in favor of, or that most other people are in favor of, but that I'm against.

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And, you know, we use the term that way too, like, oh, you're a goody-two-shoes, or whatever.

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But that's not the most usual meaning of the word good.

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The most usual meaning of the word good is you're using it to endorse something.

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In fact, it's very hard even for the self-consciously evil to avoid using the term this way.

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There's the famous example in Paradise Lost where Satan is deciding to rebel against God.

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And so what he says is, evil be thou my good.

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In other words, from now on I'm going to be pro-evil.

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Look at the way he puts it, evil be thou my good.

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you know he's trying to get rid of the ordinary uses of moral terms he can't

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quite extricate himself from them you know Satan gets stuck back into the

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ordinary meaning of good evil be thou my good you know he's still using good as a

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turn I mean when he's using term evil he's trying to use it as something he's

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in favor of but his way of putting it as evil be thou my good he's using the

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term good as something he's in favor of too or to descend a bit to less

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The ordinary use of evaluative terms is to endorse them, you can use them differently if you want, but those are sort of non-standard uses.

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Now, some people think, some philosophers have thought, the moral of this is that the value of terms merely express endorsement.

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That they're not really making statements. They seem like they're making statements, but they're really, you know,

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saying X is good is more like saying, yay, X, or hooray for X, or something like that.

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And that's not really a statement that can be true or false.

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It wouldn't make any sense to say, no, you are mistaken that hooray, X.

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No, it doesn't make any sense.

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So there's a school of thought called emotivists. The logical positivists were big fans of this idea.

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They saw that it's crucial to the ordinary use of evaluative terms that they express endorsement.

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They thought, well, that's all they're doing. There's nothing to a moral term other than it's expressing endorsement.

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And likewise, they thought that X is bad and something like X yuck or X boo or something like that.

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But there's a problem that's often pointed out about this approach.

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Which is that there are things that we do with evaluative terms that you can't do with merely expressive terms.

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So on the handout you see I've got these two arguments.

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Here's the first one, taking property without consent is wrong. Taxation is taking property

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without consent, therefore taxation is wrong. A perfectly deductively valid argument. It's

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also sound, but that's neither here nor there. It's a valid argument. If you accept the premises,

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then you are committed to the conclusion. If the premises are true, the conclusion must

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must be true. Inclusion follows from the premises. But suppose you're an emotivist, suppose you think that X is good just means yay X and X is bad means boo X or whatever.

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Well then how would you have to translate this argument? Well the first premise, taking property without consent is wrong, you'd have to change to taking property without consent, yuck, or boo on taking property without consent or something like that.

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Then, you know, the second premise is not evaluative, so that can stay the same way.

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In conclusion, we now have to read taxation, yuck.

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Well, here's the problem.

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The second one is not a valid argument, because nothing follows from a premise like yuck.

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It's not an assertion.

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Taking property that can set yuck doesn't assert anything.

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Unless you want to treat it as a disguised assertion, in which case that would sort of reverse emotivism.

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Instead of saying when people say something is bad, they mean yuck,

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You'd really be saying when people say something, say yuck, they mean something is bad.

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You know, that would be the opposite of emotivism.

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But if you don't, if you think that yuck just means yuck, it doesn't, you know, you're just expressing an attitude, but you're not making any statement.

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Well, the statement like that cannot enter into logical relations.

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It can't be a premise or a conclusion.

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So if evaluative statements were merely expressive, we know that they are expressive, evaluative statements do express endorsements.

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But if they were merely expressive, if they were not predications, if they didn't assert anything,

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then we couldn't do things with them that we can perfectly well do.

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We're perfectly capable of, and we all the time do,

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use evaluative statements as premises or as conclusions and derive one from the other and it all works perfectly well.

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And so it would be a misunderstanding of ethical terms if you felt that they were merely,

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if they were merely expressive.

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We'd also make a mistake if you thought they were merely predicated and not expressive.

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Predicated, predicative, and not expressive.

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If you thought that they were merely ascribing properties of things

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but not expressing any kind of endorsement, that's not how they work either.

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So normative terms, when you use them,

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you're committed to saying that goodness and wrongness are genuine properties.

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When you say that something is good,

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The logic of the way that word works commits you to saying that there really is such a thing as goodness, that that object really has it, and you're there by endorsing it.

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Now, I didn't mention this on the handout, but there's a famous argument by J.L. Mackey,

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which claims that this is precisely why normative terms must all be some sort of

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a mistake. He says look if normative terms really refer to properties but if

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it's also true that normative terms express this endorsement what that means

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is that they would have to refer to properties such that as soon as you

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recognize something has that property you automatically want it and so they

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It would have to be such a thing as goodness, such that as soon as you recognize this thing has this property, it automatically has this kind of pull or tug on your will.

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And that would be very strange. It would be very odd if there was some property that existed out there in the world independently of us,

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but as soon as we saw it, we immediately necessarily wanted it as a matter of some sort of logical necessity.

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Mackey thought that would just be too weird, and so he concluded that all moral statements are false, that morality is like unicorns, it's something that just doesn't exist, we're really describing properties but the properties we're describing are all fictional.

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Because he thought that there would have to be some kind of weird tug on our will from these properties out there.

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Well, does this imply that? Are these properties objective?

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Well, the term objective is used a lot of different ways.

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There's this famous distinction that Rand makes.

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And the way she uses these terms is different from the way most philosophers use them.

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I just want to get this out of the way to avoid certain kind of confusion.

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Rand draws a distinction between intrinsic, subjective, and objective values.

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She thinks most people have made a mistake of making a two-way distinction when there should really be a three-way distinction.

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I'm going to be making a three-way distinction a little later also, although mine is different from hers, but she starts off with this.

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So an intrinsic value is one that depends solely on the object apart from the valuer.

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So, for example, if this pen is good, in the sense of intrinsic value, the way Rand uses that term,

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what that would mean is that this pen is just good in and of itself, apart from anyone who wants it or desires it or gets anything out of it.

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It's just sitting there in the world glowingly good.

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Subjective value, on the other hand, would depend solely on the value or apart from the object.

390
00:39:24.640 --> 00:39:30.940
In other words, the value of this pen then would depend solely on the fact that I've got some kind of internal state, but it's got nothing to do with the pen.

391
00:39:32.440 --> 00:39:36.740
I just project under the pen my own subjective whims about it or something like that.

392
00:39:38.340 --> 00:39:44.440
By contrast, objective value would depend on some sort of relationship between the object and the valuer.

393
00:39:44.440 --> 00:39:53.840
So to say that this pen is good is to say something about the nature of the pen, but also something about how the nature of the pen is related to someone who could

394
00:39:54.640 --> 00:40:09.640
I think there's a similarity here with what Carl Menger says in his opening of his Principles of Economics

395
00:40:09.640 --> 00:40:12.640
where he talks about what it is for something to have goods character

396
00:40:12.640 --> 00:40:19.640
where it depends partly on the nature of the object, objective in the more usual sense.

397
00:40:19.640 --> 00:40:36.640
Now, the way most philosophers use the term intrinsic valuable is different from the way RAND does.

398
00:40:36.640 --> 00:40:41.640
By intrinsic value, RAND means a value that's out there in the object independently of us.

399
00:40:41.640 --> 00:40:47.640
But most philosophers, by intrinsic value, mean something that's valued as an end, not as a means.

400
00:40:47.640 --> 00:40:53.640
So you don't value just as a means to getting something else, but you value it for its own sake.

401
00:40:53.640 --> 00:41:00.640
In some ways they don't make clear whether the contrast is with all means or only with instrumental means.

402
00:41:00.640 --> 00:41:11.640
So when non-Randians talk about intrinsic value, Randians often think they're talking about the thing having value all by itself,

403
00:41:11.640 --> 00:41:18.640
And sometimes non-randings mean that, but usually they just mean it's valuable as a means.

404
00:41:18.640 --> 00:41:21.640
So just watch out for terms like intrinsic and objective.

405
00:41:21.640 --> 00:41:28.640
Don't assume that whenever you see it, it's being used the same way as the last time you saw it with someone else.

406
00:41:28.640 --> 00:41:32.640
Or even with the same writer sometimes.

407
00:41:32.640 --> 00:42:02.440
All right, well, so, one way of seeing Mackey's worry is Mackey thinks if goodness, Mackey is worried about, I think, goodness being intrinsic, in Rand's sense, that goodness would be out there in the world, independently of us, and yet, it would have this strange tug on our will, such that we couldn't see or assert that something was good without thereby being drawn to it.

408
00:42:02.440 --> 00:42:10.340
That's the thing Mackey thinks is weird. It's not necessarily so weird if you think that it's something like objective in Rand's sense.

409
00:42:10.340 --> 00:42:20.540
What I'm going to suggest is something that's, it's a third way too, but it's not Rand's third way, it's a different third way, it's a second third way.

410
00:42:20.540 --> 00:42:26.740
And the analogy I'm going to draw is with what Wittgenstein says about pain.

411
00:42:26.740 --> 00:42:31.140
One of the obvious features about pain is you can be wrong about whether someone else is in pain.

412
00:42:31.140 --> 00:42:34.780
You can see them screaming and moaning. You think they're in pain, but they're only faking.

413
00:42:34.780 --> 00:42:39.900
Or you can look at them and think they're not in pain, because they're putting on a good front, but really, you know, they're in agony.

414
00:42:39.900 --> 00:42:42.900
So you can be wrong about whether someone else is in pain.

415
00:42:42.900 --> 00:42:46.820
But you can't be wrong about whether you're in pain.

416
00:42:46.820 --> 00:42:49.940
You can't be mistaken about that.

417
00:42:49.940 --> 00:42:55.940
You can't say, wow, you know, it sure felt like it hurt, but it turned out it really didn't. I really felt fine all that time.

418
00:42:55.940 --> 00:42:59.260
So you can't be wrong about your own pain.

419
00:42:59.260 --> 00:43:01.980
What sort of fact is that?

420
00:43:01.980 --> 00:43:07.140
Well, one thing a lot of people have thought,

421
00:43:07.140 --> 00:43:12.540
Descartes thought something like this, is it's just a basic fact about the nature of pain,

422
00:43:12.540 --> 00:43:16.620
that it's somehow luminously obvious to its possessor.

423
00:43:16.620 --> 00:43:20.140
Pain is the sort of thing that just necessarily reveals itself to its possessors,

424
00:43:20.140 --> 00:43:23.420
sort of a fact about the metaphysical nature of pain,

425
00:43:23.420 --> 00:43:27.980
that its possessor can't be wrong about it, although other people can.

426
00:43:27.980 --> 00:43:33.980
Or it's just a basic fact about self-consciousness, that pain is one of the things we can't be wrong in ascribing to ourselves.

427
00:43:33.980 --> 00:43:42.980
We can be wrong about other things. I can think I'm brilliant when I'm not, but I can't think I'm in pain when I'm not, or vice versa.

428
00:43:42.980 --> 00:43:49.980
And you could think of this as kind of an intrinsicist thing. It's just a fact about the nature of pain.

429
00:43:49.980 --> 00:43:54.980
It's analogous to intrinsic. I suppose it's not really apart from consciousness, since you can't have pain without consciousness.

430
00:43:54.980 --> 00:44:01.980
is analogous to it, thinking that it's just a fact about the nature of pain that it has this feature.

431
00:44:01.980 --> 00:44:08.980
And that's kind of like what Mackey thinks goodness would have to be like if there were such a thing.

432
00:44:08.980 --> 00:44:15.980
Goodness is just the sort of thing that necessarily grabs our will, just as pain is the sort of thing that necessarily grabs our knowledge,

433
00:44:15.980 --> 00:44:19.980
and we can't fail to know about it.

434
00:44:19.980 --> 00:44:27.980
Now, Wittgenstein has an objection to this way of thinking about pain, which is this.

435
00:44:27.980 --> 00:44:31.980
It's not an empirical discovery that we can't be wrong about our own pain.

436
00:44:31.980 --> 00:44:34.980
It's not like we did some sort of study and found this out.

437
00:44:34.980 --> 00:44:37.980
Rather, Wittgenstein thinks it's part of the meaning of the word pain,

438
00:44:37.980 --> 00:44:42.980
that you can't be wrong about whether you have it.

439
00:44:42.980 --> 00:44:46.980
Nothing would count as pain if you could be wrong about it.

440
00:44:46.980 --> 00:44:52.180
So if one day someone said, oh look, here's a case where you can have pain but be completely

441
00:44:52.180 --> 00:44:57.220
unaware of it, most people would not say, oh wow, here's a great empirical discovery.

442
00:44:57.220 --> 00:44:59.940
They'd say, that just doesn't count as pain.

443
00:44:59.940 --> 00:45:08.260
We just don't mean by pain anything that we could be mistaken about having.

444
00:45:08.260 --> 00:45:16.780
And if you think that, then you might be tempted to slide to the other side and be a subjectivist

445
00:45:16.780 --> 00:45:24.780
and think that pain is, that the fact that we can't be wrong about pain is simply an artifact of our linguistic conventions.

446
00:45:24.780 --> 00:45:32.780
And I think that this, I think that this dispute between these two ways of thinking about pain is analogous to, on the one hand,

447
00:45:32.780 --> 00:45:41.780
people think that goodness would have to be something out there independently of us, versus people who think, you know, are just demotivists,

448
00:45:41.780 --> 00:46:09.780
I think that someone who is struck by Wittgenstein's observing that we just wouldn't call something pain unless, you know, if we could be wrong about it, would then be tempted over to think there's nothing to pain, there's nothing to the infallibility of our own pain ascriptions other than just this linguistic fact that

449
00:46:09.780 --> 00:46:18.780
that he's in pain licenses the question how do you know but I'm in pain does not

450
00:46:18.780 --> 00:46:23.420
license the question how do you know and one way that I put this is that it's

451
00:46:23.420 --> 00:46:28.100
ungrammatical and his sort of extended sense of grammar if I say I'm in pain

452
00:46:28.100 --> 00:46:31.700
it's ungrammatical for you to ask how do you know and it's a question how do you

453
00:46:31.700 --> 00:46:35.620
know is sort of forbidden by the rules of language whereas if I say he's in

454
00:46:35.620 --> 00:46:45.620
If I say he's in pain pointing to no person at all, then once again I am violating Wittgensteinian grammar.

455
00:46:45.620 --> 00:46:53.620
But if I point to some actual person and say he's in pain, then the question how do you know makes sense?

456
00:46:53.620 --> 00:46:57.620
So the rules of language allow it in one case and not in the other, Wittgenstein says.

457
00:46:57.620 --> 00:47:07.460
Well, a lot of people think, well, the upshot of that must be that, you know, we can make the rules of language whatever we want, right?

458
00:47:07.460 --> 00:47:15.780
And so, the fact that we can be wrong about others' payment on our own is merely a byproduct of the rules of language, which we could change.

459
00:47:15.780 --> 00:47:21.900
We could now adopt a new rule according to which you're allowed to ask, how do you know after both questions?

460
00:47:21.900 --> 00:47:27.580
Or you're not allowed to ask it after both statements, or you're not allowed to ask it after either one, or whatever you want.

461
00:47:27.580 --> 00:47:30.440
but that's not what Wittgenstein means

462
00:47:30.440 --> 00:47:35.460
because I'm sure we could change what the word means

463
00:47:35.460 --> 00:47:39.020
but you know just as I can't

464
00:47:39.020 --> 00:47:43.060
just as I don't know whether I'm allowed to quote Abraham Lincoln in this room but

465
00:47:43.060 --> 00:47:47.040
Abraham Lincoln said you know if you call a, how many legs does a

466
00:47:47.040 --> 00:47:50.020
sheep have if you call a tail a leg and his answer was

467
00:47:50.020 --> 00:47:54.140
four because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one

468
00:47:54.140 --> 00:48:03.860
One thing we can just write about, if I start using the word pain differently to mean something

469
00:48:03.860 --> 00:48:08.620
different from what I used to, that doesn't mean I've thereby made pain, in the original

470
00:48:08.620 --> 00:48:15.980
sense, different. If I start using the word pain for something we can be wrong about,

471
00:48:15.980 --> 00:48:23.660
that doesn't mean that pain is now something we can be wrong about, using it in the original

472
00:48:23.660 --> 00:48:34.660
As long as the word pain means what it does, then we cannot, simply by changing our linguistic conventions, we can't make access to our own pain fallible.

473
00:48:34.660 --> 00:48:45.660
So, Wittgenstein is not saying, a lot of people think he's saying, that pain, that the infallibility of pain descriptions is not a fact,

474
00:48:45.660 --> 00:48:49.660
but pain is simply the byproduct of a linguistic convention. I don't think he's saying that at all.

475
00:48:49.660 --> 00:48:57.160
He's saying it's not either one. It's not grounded in the metaphysical nature of pain because nothing, because it's not an imperative discovery about pain.

476
00:48:57.160 --> 00:49:08.660
Nothing would count as pain if it were something we could be wrong about, but it's not grounded in our linguistic conventions either.

477
00:49:08.660 --> 00:49:17.660
So at this point people think, well, what is it grounded in? Well, Wittgenstein's point, as I see it, is that pain isn't grounded in anything or the nature of pain isn't grounded in anything

478
00:49:17.660 --> 00:49:23.540
or they're more broadly what he calls grammatical facts and what I might call conceptual facts or

479
00:49:23.540 --> 00:49:30.100
a priori facts aren't grounded in anything they're not grounded in something else they're just basic

480
00:49:30.100 --> 00:49:37.660
I think that this is what Plato was trying to say we started talking about the platonic forms but

481
00:49:37.660 --> 00:49:43.380
then he's Plato slid from treating these basic logical facts as ungrounded to treating them as

482
00:49:43.380 --> 00:49:46.740
is being grounded in some weird sort of entities,

483
00:49:46.740 --> 00:49:49.420
and that sort of undoes the whole insight.

484
00:49:49.420 --> 00:49:51.260
But I think that when he talks about these weird entities,

485
00:49:51.260 --> 00:49:52.660
he was trying to express the idea,

486
00:49:52.660 --> 00:49:54.980
and he's tripping himself up in the course of expressing it,

487
00:49:54.980 --> 00:49:56.820
trying to express the idea that logic isn't grounded

488
00:49:56.820 --> 00:49:57.980
in anything more basic.

489
00:49:59.220 --> 00:50:01.020
So logical facts, conceptual facts,

490
00:50:01.020 --> 00:50:05.540
a priori truths are not grounded in anything.

491
00:50:08.660 --> 00:50:09.860
When Mark introduced me,

492
00:50:09.860 --> 00:50:14.860
He mentioned my Wittgenstein manuscript, an early draft of which is online.

493
00:50:14.860 --> 00:50:19.860
If you go online to see more about this idea of logical conceptual facts,

494
00:50:19.860 --> 00:50:25.860
they're not either imposed by our mind on reality or imposed by reality on our minds.

495
00:50:25.860 --> 00:50:28.860
They're just basic.

496
00:50:28.860 --> 00:50:36.860
So, Rand's third way is to say it's neither out there nor in here.

497
00:50:36.860 --> 00:50:38.860
It's in the relationship between the two.

498
00:50:38.860 --> 00:50:46.860
My third way, following Wittgenstein's, is to say it's not up there, it's not up in here, it's not grounded anywhere.

499
00:50:46.860 --> 00:50:59.860
So what I want to say about goodness is like that, that goodness isn't some sort of mysterious property out there independent of us,

500
00:50:59.860 --> 00:51:03.860
It's also not just a product of our linguistic conventions.

501
00:51:03.860 --> 00:51:08.860
The nature of goodness is just basic.

502
00:51:08.860 --> 00:51:12.860
It's just part of what you're committed to in using normative terms.

503
00:51:12.860 --> 00:51:15.860
Now that raises the question,

504
00:51:15.860 --> 00:51:20.860
well, is this just basic goodness, agent-relative or agent-neutral?

505
00:51:20.860 --> 00:51:25.860
Agent-relative means something like it's relative to each person.

506
00:51:25.860 --> 00:51:28.860
What's good for me, bad for you.

507
00:51:28.860 --> 00:51:33.860
For example, when the squirrel eats the acorn, that's good for the squirrel, bad for the acorn, that's agent-relative value.

508
00:51:33.860 --> 00:51:38.860
Or is it agent-neutral? Is it somehow a shared good?

509
00:51:38.860 --> 00:51:42.860
Or a good that's sort of equally commonly accessible to all of us?

510
00:51:42.860 --> 00:51:45.860
So if I say it's good for me, I'm somewhat committed to saying it's good for you.

511
00:51:45.860 --> 00:51:48.860
Which of these senses of good are we talking about?

512
00:51:48.860 --> 00:51:51.860
Well, I'm going to say more about that tomorrow afternoon.

513
00:51:51.860 --> 00:51:59.220
But briefly, here's a way of setting up the puzzle I'm going to be talking about later.

514
00:51:59.220 --> 00:52:08.100
Praxeology might seem to imply agent-relative value, because praxeology talks about the fact that we each have our own values.

515
00:52:08.100 --> 00:52:16.740
And it's called something an end, when an end has to be an end of somebody, and an end can't be an end of the whole human collective,

516
00:52:16.740 --> 00:52:21.660
and has to be end of some individual person. So that seems to support the idea of agent-relative value.

517
00:52:21.660 --> 00:52:27.980
On the other hand, you might think, well look, the way we actually use normative terms seems to apply

518
00:52:27.980 --> 00:52:33.460
agent-neutral value. When I say that something is good, generally I tend to, you know, it's just not

519
00:52:33.460 --> 00:52:40.860
that I want it, but that you ought to want it too. When we use normative terms, we tend to be

520
00:52:40.860 --> 00:52:52.220
Inviting others to share our value. So that might seem like a puzzle. And then when we look at the

521
00:52:52.220 --> 00:52:56.700
classically diamondists, well they talk about each person having their own odymonea, their own

522
00:52:56.700 --> 00:53:02.820
flourishing, and that your actions are aimed at your own flourishing, not at some big collective

523
00:53:02.820 --> 00:53:08.420
flourishing. So that looks like it might be agent-relative, each has their own value they're

524
00:53:08.420 --> 00:53:12.140
Pursuing, even if they're the same kind of value, you know, each one has their own individual one.

525
00:53:12.140 --> 00:53:18.860
On the other hand, the Classically Dynamists also think that there's a harmony of interests,

526
00:53:18.860 --> 00:53:25.140
and in a more extreme sense than Mises thinks. And Mises thinks there's a harmony of interests

527
00:53:25.140 --> 00:53:36.020
in the sense that the, in a causal sense, consequentialist sense, that the social system

528
00:53:36.020 --> 00:53:40.020
The question that's going to be the best for me would also be the best for you.

529
00:53:40.020 --> 00:53:43.020
It will turn out to benefit us both.

530
00:53:43.020 --> 00:53:48.020
But classically, that must think more strongly that even apart from questions of what causes what,

531
00:53:48.020 --> 00:53:55.020
there is some kind of deep conceptual harmony among our self-interest,

532
00:53:55.020 --> 00:54:01.020
such that I can't consistently endorse the conception of my self-interest that would violate your self-interest.

533
00:54:01.020 --> 00:54:04.020
You might think, well, that implies a kind of agent-neutral value.

534
00:54:04.020 --> 00:54:09.020
It implies that these values are in some way shared or common.

535
00:54:09.020 --> 00:54:19.020
Anyway, so I'm not really going to resolve that now. I'm going to make a stab at resolving that tomorrow afternoon in session four.

536
00:54:19.020 --> 00:54:26.020
But that's something to keep in mind.

537
00:54:26.020 --> 00:54:31.020
Let me open it up to questions at this point.

538
00:54:31.020 --> 00:54:49.820
yes Jeff okay question is I've been given this useful piece of advice the question

539
00:54:49.820 --> 00:54:59.100
is could I say more about why I prefer Wittgenstein's third way to Rand's where

540
00:54:59.100 --> 00:55:10.620
Dr. Rand thinks that instead of the resolution to intrinsic versus objective being object

541
00:55:10.620 --> 00:55:15.940
of value in her sense, where it's a relationship between the object and the valuer, I go for

542
00:55:15.940 --> 00:55:22.180
this Wittgensteinian third way, where instead of it being out there or in here, it exists

543
00:55:22.180 --> 00:55:27.220
in a, not in a relationship, not grounded in one or the other in both, but somehow grounded

544
00:55:27.220 --> 00:55:28.220
in neither.

545
00:55:28.220 --> 00:55:37.220
I used to hold something more like the Randian view, and in some sense, there may be some level of description in which that's all right.

546
00:55:37.220 --> 00:55:48.220
What got me onto the Wittgensteinian one, really, is not originally thinking about ethics, but trying to sort out other aspects of Wittgenstein.

547
00:55:48.220 --> 00:56:11.220
Before I came to Auburn, I didn't think much of Wittgenstein. I hadn't read much Wittgenstein, but I had read, I hadn't made much sense of, and didn't much like, but I came to Auburn and was seduced by Wittgenstein, slowly but surely, on a number of points.

548
00:56:11.220 --> 00:56:15.060
And there's this distinction that Barry Smith draws,

549
00:56:15.060 --> 00:56:19.980
and he draws it in the context of talking about Austrian a prioriism.

550
00:56:19.980 --> 00:56:27.540
He draws the distinction between impositionism and reflectionism,

551
00:56:27.540 --> 00:56:30.700
as two different ways of thinking about a priori truth.

552
00:56:30.700 --> 00:56:37.820
And impositionism is that our mind imposes some kind of structure on experience,

553
00:56:37.820 --> 00:56:40.420
or the nature of our mind imposes some structure on experience.

554
00:56:40.420 --> 00:56:47.340
Smith points out that Mises often talks this way. Mises and Human Action talks about, and there's

555
00:56:47.340 --> 00:56:51.340
dispute about whether this is quite the right interpretation of Mises, but anyway Mises often

556
00:56:51.340 --> 00:56:55.180
talks as though there's a structure of our mind, there's some kind of experience coming in from

557
00:56:55.180 --> 00:57:01.620
reality out there and who knows what it's like, but our mind sort of processes it, just like you

558
00:57:01.620 --> 00:57:08.260
know Plato going through the star-shaped thing and all comes out star-shaped, so the stuff out

559
00:57:08.260 --> 00:57:16.260
out there, whatever it is, is filtered through the structure of our consciousness, and it all comes out spatial, temporal, and causal, and so forth.

560
00:57:16.260 --> 00:57:21.260
People often refer to that as the Kantian aspect of Mises.

561
00:57:21.260 --> 00:57:23.260
It's disputable whether that's the right way to interpret Kant.

562
00:57:23.260 --> 00:57:30.260
But at least one popular way of interpreting Kant is reality is really unknowable, but reality is filtered through the structure of our mind.

563
00:57:30.260 --> 00:57:33.260
Our mind imposes the structure on our experience.

564
00:57:33.260 --> 00:57:36.260
So that's what Barry Smith calls impositionism.

565
00:57:36.260 --> 00:57:46.260
And he contrasts that with reflectionism, where our mind doesn't impose anything on the nature of reality, our mind is simply open or reflective to the nature of reality.

566
00:57:46.260 --> 00:58:00.260
Reality imposes, rather than our mind imposing something on reality, it's more that reality imposes something on our mind, that reality makes...

567
00:58:00.260 --> 00:58:06.560
So we think about logical facts like nothing can be both A and 90 at the same time or something like that.

568
00:58:06.560 --> 00:58:13.260
The question is, is that something our mind imposes on reality or is it something that reality sends into our mind?

569
00:58:13.260 --> 00:58:20.860
And Smith is plumping for the latter. He prefers reflectionism, which he sees in the phenomenological tradition.

570
00:58:20.860 --> 00:58:28.060
Well, I was convinced by Wittgenstein that there's something odd about both those ways of thinking about it.

571
00:58:28.060 --> 00:58:32.660
If you think that our mind imposes logical structure on reality,

572
00:58:32.660 --> 00:58:36.460
then you have to think that were it not for what our mind is doing,

573
00:58:36.460 --> 00:58:38.020
reality might be illogical.

574
00:58:38.020 --> 00:58:41.180
Reality in its own nature might violate the laws of logic,

575
00:58:41.180 --> 00:58:45.660
but that our mind imposes this logical structure on it.

576
00:58:45.660 --> 00:58:49.060
But in order to make sense of that, you have to think that the notion that

577
00:58:49.060 --> 00:58:52.220
reality might be illogical could make sense.

578
00:58:52.220 --> 00:58:57.860
We can't make sense of the notion that reality might be violating the laws of logic.

579
00:58:57.860 --> 00:59:04.860
And so we can't coherently think that it's just because our minds come along and impose something on it that reality is logical.

580
00:59:04.860 --> 00:59:07.860
Because we can't make sense of any illogical reality.

581
00:59:07.860 --> 00:59:11.860
You might think, well, that's an argument for reflectionism. A lot of people thought it is.

582
00:59:11.860 --> 00:59:14.860
But reflectionism seems to have the same problem.

583
00:59:14.860 --> 00:59:21.860
That implies that logic is something that reality imposes on our minds.

584
00:59:21.860 --> 00:59:26.860
Such that our minds might be illogical.

585
00:59:26.860 --> 00:59:38.260
Our minds might think 2 plus 2 equals 5, and not A at the same time, were it not for reality imposing this logic on it.

586
00:59:38.260 --> 00:59:46.760
But that implies that we could make sense of the notion of an illogical mind, and that doesn't seem to make sense either.

587
00:59:46.760 --> 00:59:52.260
Of course, obviously, there's a sense of the phrase illogical mind, where we can make all too much sense of it and we see it all the time.

588
00:59:52.260 --> 00:59:56.060
There's also a sense of the phrase illogical reality, where we can do that.

589
00:59:56.060 --> 01:00:13.060
But I mean, you know, a mind that, you know, that really, you know, clearly sees A and clearly sees not A and merges them into one or really infers, not just thinks it infers, but really infers not P from P or whatever.

590
01:00:13.060 --> 01:00:21.060
And, as Victor Sain points out, we just, you know, we wouldn't call that thinking, we wouldn't call that a mind, it just wouldn't count as a mind.

591
01:00:21.060 --> 01:00:26.900
So I think that both reflectionism and impositionism treat logic as though it were a constraint

592
01:00:26.900 --> 01:00:29.860
on something that otherwise would be illogical.

593
01:00:29.860 --> 01:00:36.140
Impositionism treats the logic as a constraint the mind imposes on what might otherwise be

594
01:00:36.140 --> 01:00:38.420
an illogical reality.

595
01:00:38.420 --> 01:00:42.740
Reflectionism treats logic as a constraint that reality imposes on what otherwise might

596
01:00:42.740 --> 01:00:45.260
be an illogical mind.

597
01:00:45.260 --> 01:00:49.700
And if you can't make sense of an illogical reality or an illogical mind, then you can't

598
01:00:49.700 --> 01:01:07.700
I think of logic as a constraint and so the logicality of the mind and the logicality of reality are sort of two halves of the same coin and it's probably because of the attractiveness of that model that I want to do the same thing with goodness.

599
01:01:07.700 --> 01:01:17.700
So it might turn out that it doesn't necessarily contradict this other way of putting it.

600
01:01:17.700 --> 01:01:30.700
I mean that's something I haven't quite worked out as to exactly what relation I want to see between this sort of railless or constraintless way of thinking about it versus this relational way that Rand is thinking about it.

601
01:01:30.700 --> 01:01:32.700
I don't have a fully worked out story yet.

602
01:01:32.700 --> 01:01:40.700
That's just sort of why this model of thinking about it has tempted me to try to do the same thing with goodness.

603
01:01:40.700 --> 01:01:48.700
Other questions? Please ask questions of clarification because a lot of this must have gone by fast and puzzlingly, I imagine.

604
01:01:48.700 --> 01:01:55.700
Don't be afraid to say, what the heck were you talking about at this point?

605
01:01:55.700 --> 01:02:05.700
When Rand starts talking about objective value, what does he mean when he says it depends on the relationship between the object and the valuer?

606
01:02:25.700 --> 01:02:30.700
So you could say our own particular theory would be a version of objective value.

607
01:02:30.700 --> 01:02:52.700
So our own particular theory would be that a value is something out there in the world whose real nature out there in the world is such that it will enable a person to live their life better, to live their life more successfully,

608
01:02:52.700 --> 01:03:03.780
and it's people being identified as doing that so it's not it's not a value unless it can really help

609
01:03:03.780 --> 01:03:09.820
you live your life more successfully and therefore it's not a value apart from you it's not a value

610
01:03:09.820 --> 01:03:14.460
that you need to recognize apart from the fact that benefits you but it's not just your you know

611
01:03:14.460 --> 01:03:20.100
your own subjective whim to determine that it's a value you could make a mistake about whether

612
01:03:20.100 --> 01:03:28.100
So whether it's valuable or not depends both, in fact, about you and in fact about it.

613
01:03:28.100 --> 01:03:33.100
Then take Menger's example, which is similar but not identical.

614
01:03:33.100 --> 01:03:37.100
Menger says in order for something to have goods character, as he puts it,

615
01:03:37.100 --> 01:03:46.100
it has to be the case that the thing is causally able to meet a human need,

616
01:03:46.100 --> 01:03:58.100
But it also has to be the case that you're aware of that fact about it, and that you have access to the thing.

617
01:03:58.100 --> 01:04:04.100
If you don't have the need in question, or if you have the need in question but you have no idea that this thing will meet it,

618
01:04:04.100 --> 01:04:09.100
or you know this thing will meet it but you can't get a hold of the thing, then it's not of value to you.

619
01:04:09.100 --> 01:04:13.100
Now there he's talking about economic value, not ethical value, but still it's a similar idea

620
01:04:13.100 --> 01:04:22.100
It's a similar idea that its existence depends on a relationship between the valuer and the object.

621
01:04:22.100 --> 01:04:29.100
Instantly this question of whether something has to be available to you in order to be of value is one we'll be talking about later.

622
01:04:29.100 --> 01:04:36.100
Some of the Greek thinkers thought that nothing was of value to you unless it was available, which has a kind of a cheery conclusion.

623
01:04:36.100 --> 01:04:40.100
That means that if it's not available it's of no value to you and so therefore you don't have to miss it.

624
01:04:40.100 --> 01:04:49.100
The Stoics and Socrates had a very cheerful view about this. Nothing can really go too wrong for you because as soon as something is unavailable, you don't need it anymore.

625
01:04:49.100 --> 01:04:55.100
Aristotle is more pessimistic. He thinks that something you can't get might really still be something you need.

626
01:04:55.100 --> 01:05:05.100
I'll talk later about why they had that dispute and why, of course, Aristotle is right.

627
01:05:05.100 --> 01:05:22.620
yeah okay the question is if Mises thinks that all the praxeology can give

628
01:05:22.620 --> 01:05:29.180
advice only on means not on ends then where does he get the idea that all

629
01:05:29.180 --> 01:05:34.900
action aims at the removal of felt dissatisfaction well well first of all he

630
01:05:34.900 --> 01:05:50.900
One doesn't think that praxeology can advise you to aim at the removal of felt dissatisfaction as though you might be aiming at something else because necessarily you always aim at the removal of dissatisfaction, you have no choice about that.

631
01:05:50.900 --> 01:06:01.900
Mises also thinks that you don't have much choice about what will remove felt dissatisfaction for you. It might be different for different people.

632
01:06:01.900 --> 01:06:11.900
For some people, the feeling of dissatisfaction, the thing that would remove it, would be just to sit down and read a long economics book.

633
01:06:11.900 --> 01:06:15.900
And there are other people for whom that would not be what would remove their felt dissatisfaction.

634
01:06:15.900 --> 01:06:19.900
In fact, their felt dissatisfaction would increase if they had to do that.

635
01:06:19.900 --> 01:06:22.900
So Mises thinks we have no choice, but what do we aim at that?

636
01:06:22.900 --> 01:06:35.400
We also have very little choice about, and there's no real point in advising us about what would directly remove the dissatisfaction.

637
01:06:35.400 --> 01:06:45.400
However, once we figure out what would, if sitting down and reading a thousand pages of Human Action is what would remove your dissatisfaction,

638
01:06:45.400 --> 01:06:48.900
then we can start getting advice about, all right, well you need to get a hold of a copy of the book.

639
01:06:48.900 --> 01:07:18.860
Where can you get one? Well, in that next room and so on. So we have no choice about the end, but we do have a choice about the means, whereas these Greek thinkers are going to say, well, this is getting a little bit into this afternoon's talk, but the Greeks are going to say, well, we've got this very

640
01:07:18.860 --> 01:07:23.860
There's a very generic end, but there's advice that philosophy can give us about how to specify it,

641
01:07:23.860 --> 01:07:27.860
and there's some ways of specifying it that make more sense than other ways.

642
01:07:27.860 --> 01:07:31.860
So you have a very generic sounding end like removable dissatisfaction,

643
01:07:31.860 --> 01:07:34.860
but it might turn out that we're committed to thinking about that in a certain way,

644
01:07:34.860 --> 01:07:37.860
and that some ways of thinking about it make more sense than others,

645
01:07:37.860 --> 01:07:41.860
and would be constitutive means of that goal.

646
01:07:41.860 --> 01:07:48.860
Yes.

647
01:08:11.860 --> 01:08:39.860
Why was it that in the transition from the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance, not into the Enlightenment,

648
01:08:39.860 --> 01:08:54.860
This older sort of Aristotelian style tradition of virtue ethics gives way to utilitarian theories and contian theories and various theories that seem not virtue ethical.

649
01:08:54.860 --> 01:08:59.860
The question is, is it because the Enlightenment was just challenging everything? What's going on?

650
01:08:59.860 --> 01:09:06.860
Well, I have a few thoughts on that.

651
01:09:06.860 --> 01:09:30.860
One is this, the scientific revolution got people very excited, and rightly so, but I think part of the excitement is that they came to adopt, or many thinkers came to adopt a certain view of the world that they thought was licensed by the success of modern science.

652
01:09:30.860 --> 01:09:37.860
And I don't think that, in fact, the success of modern science necessarily supported this.

653
01:09:37.860 --> 01:09:49.860
But they thought it did. They thought that certain of the older metaphysical views and older epistemological views just were no longer defensible.

654
01:09:49.860 --> 01:09:58.860
They had this view of the world as sort of a very cause and effect, kind of a mechanistic view of the universe,

655
01:09:58.860 --> 01:10:03.860
which a lot of the early scientific discoveries might have seemed to support

656
01:10:03.860 --> 01:10:12.860
and as a result, they became much more interested in causal connections than in conceptual ones.

657
01:10:12.860 --> 01:10:16.860
That's certainly true of the empiricists. I think to some extent it's even true of the rationalists,

658
01:10:16.860 --> 01:10:19.860
although the rationalists may be less so.

659
01:10:19.860 --> 01:10:24.860
But the focus on sort of a mechanistic cause and effect

660
01:10:24.860 --> 01:10:31.020
cause and effect as opposed to sort of more holistic conceptual connections became less popular.

661
01:10:31.020 --> 01:10:40.140
Now and that tends to lead maybe to something like utilitarianism. Now virtue ethics doesn't

662
01:10:40.140 --> 01:10:46.180
completely die out during this period and David Hume and Adam Smith were both virtue ethicists

663
01:10:46.180 --> 01:10:52.540
and quite self-consciously saw themselves as at least in some respects continuing the older

664
01:10:52.540 --> 01:10:58.540
tradition. But their version of virtue ethics is what I would call

665
01:10:58.540 --> 01:11:04.860
psychologistic. That is to say, they base it on what they take to be empirical

666
01:11:04.860 --> 01:11:11.780
facts about human psychology, that human beings just have tendencies to admire

667
01:11:11.780 --> 01:11:15.020
certain things and dislike others. And we can explain these in terms of certain

668
01:11:15.020 --> 01:11:18.460
kinds of psychological mechanisms. But that's just it, just a brute fact of a

669
01:11:18.460 --> 01:11:24.100
human nature that we've got these psychological mechanisms so where the

670
01:11:24.100 --> 01:11:27.460
ancients would have tried to ground this in some sort of conceptual connection or

671
01:11:27.460 --> 01:11:33.860
terms of what kind of notion of human well-being we could make sense of the

672
01:11:33.860 --> 01:11:37.540
the moderns tried to base it in sort of cause and effect they thought they were

673
01:11:37.540 --> 01:11:40.520
being more scientific they thought you know this old Aristotelian way of doing

674
01:11:40.520 --> 01:11:48.100
things led to lousy astronomy and we've got good astronomy now and so they tended

675
01:11:48.100 --> 01:12:01.100
They tended to jump to the conclusion that because empirical methods were more successful in physics, they wouldn't be more successful in ethics, I think that's partly what's going on.

676
01:12:01.100 --> 01:12:13.100
As for Kantianism, and that's a complicated story, and Kant is rebelling against some of those same features of the Enlightenment.

677
01:12:13.100 --> 01:12:23.100
I think Kant in some ways sees himself in some extent correctly as trying to recapture this older tradition.

678
01:12:23.100 --> 01:12:34.100
I think one crucial difference, this gets a bit ahead to things we'll be talking about, but Kant famously has a very fancy and stringent conception of morality.

679
01:12:34.100 --> 01:12:39.100
But he does not have, in my view, a very fancy conception of self-interest.

680
01:12:39.100 --> 01:12:43.100
The concept of self-interest is fairly crude and heathenistic.

681
01:12:43.100 --> 01:12:48.100
Empirical science is the right way to approach self-interest.

682
01:12:48.100 --> 01:12:50.100
Just try to figure out what gives people jollies.

683
01:12:50.100 --> 01:12:57.100
Whereas the ancient Greeks thought that the concept of morality and the concept of self-interest

684
01:12:57.100 --> 01:13:02.100
were both complex philosophical issues that had to be investigated.

685
01:13:02.100 --> 01:13:04.100
In the course of investigating them, we might find some surprises.

686
01:13:04.100 --> 01:13:09.100
Surprises, we might have to revise our concepts of them in order to make better sense of them and so forth.

687
01:13:09.100 --> 01:13:14.600
But as I see it, Kant thinks, you know, empirical psychology just tells us what self-interest is,

688
01:13:14.600 --> 01:13:19.660
tells us what happiness is, and there's no interesting philosophical questions about the

689
01:13:19.660 --> 01:13:24.620
concept of happiness much. But the concept, but, and therefore, he develops a conception of duty

690
01:13:24.620 --> 01:13:29.780
that develops largely independently of any conception of happiness or well-being, because

691
01:13:29.780 --> 01:13:35.300
Because he's got his sort of conceptual a priori approach to ethics, and he's got a

692
01:13:35.300 --> 01:13:42.540
psychologistic empirical approach to happiness, and so that's why Kant's theory has a kind

693
01:13:42.540 --> 01:13:50.260
of sternness to it that you don't find with the ancients so much.

694
01:13:50.260 --> 01:13:54.700
There's a sense in which Kant is sort of a virtue ethicist, but he's kind of a virtue

695
01:13:54.700 --> 01:13:56.100
ethicist with only one virtue.

696
01:13:56.100 --> 01:14:06.100
I mean, it's the virtue of, you know, something like respect for humanity, you know, something is right if it expresses this attitude of respect for humanity.

697
01:14:06.100 --> 01:14:15.100
Of course, the ancients talk about something being right if it expresses the virtues, but Kant squeezes the virtues all down to one thing, respect for humanity.

698
01:14:15.100 --> 01:14:18.100
And then out of that, he tries to sort of build them up again.

699
01:14:18.100 --> 01:14:25.100
But I think it's a kind of bifurcation in Kant between morality and self-interest these ancients didn't have.

700
01:14:25.100 --> 01:14:28.300
have that's because he thought of self-interest in this in these

701
01:14:28.300 --> 01:14:32.980
psychologistic terms and if you think of it that way then you can see why he

702
01:14:32.980 --> 01:14:35.620
might have thought a lot of the Enlightenment thinkers trying to base

703
01:14:35.620 --> 01:14:41.860
morality on you know what people want and you know what people actually feel

704
01:14:41.860 --> 01:14:45.380
themselves wanting in any given moment you can see what can't we think oh lord

705
01:14:45.380 --> 01:14:50.260
I could want anything they do want anything people feel themselves wanting

706
01:14:50.260 --> 01:14:54.300
all kinds of crazy stuff you can't base morality on that you know I can see you

707
01:14:54.300 --> 01:14:59.900
So he was right to be critical of the Enlightenment thinkers, but I think he chose the wrong fix,

708
01:14:59.900 --> 01:15:05.700
rather than trying to come up with a more sophisticated conception of self-addressed,

709
01:15:05.700 --> 01:15:10.100
he just tried to sever the connection between morality and self-addressed entirely.

710
01:15:10.100 --> 01:15:16.500
That's my diagnosis there.

711
01:15:16.500 --> 01:15:18.700
Yes, Charles.

712
01:15:18.700 --> 01:15:43.700
I'm wondering if there are, you know, it's concerning to me that you can talk about 20 years of community, community-based, various life activities, and I'm wondering if there's a, I guess I'm wondering if there's a, what could possibly be intended for the future, because I think there's probably something that could be implemented.

713
01:15:43.700 --> 01:15:47.700
It's not a possibility that there are...

714
01:15:49.700 --> 01:15:51.700
It's not a possibility that, you know,

715
01:15:51.700 --> 01:15:53.700
they've said to me...

716
01:16:03.700 --> 01:16:05.700
I think you could argue that...

717
01:16:05.700 --> 01:16:34.700
If there's a being out there, there's a government, a student-student economy that's failing and a student-student balance is falling, and then there's this dialectic in another way you can get from the expense and value of the economy, and you can get into the value of the economy, and you can argue with the developers to do something about it.

718
01:16:34.700 --> 01:17:03.700
On the other hand, you could say that, you know, that doesn't mean that, you know, that there's an alien to the values and content, and you can say that the values and content is still used, because I like to say that we can't get what they value from the actual constituent to the value of the constituent, how you do it and stuff like that.

719
01:17:03.700 --> 01:17:06.020
and the

720
01:17:07.860 --> 01:17:11.700
for whatever reason they're in such a state you can't give them the

721
01:17:11.700 --> 01:17:15.540
to the actual people who are part of the dining room.

722
01:17:15.540 --> 01:17:23.540
You can't direct them to the state, not the people who are part of the dining room at all.

723
01:17:23.540 --> 01:17:27.540
It's a human-independent institution.

724
01:17:27.540 --> 01:17:52.540
and I guess what I'm wondering is whether the sort of, sort of things that in terms of intended to make a weaker point in terms of...

725
01:17:52.540 --> 01:18:09.540
I'm sorry. What I'm trying to ask is whether it matters to me to make an argument for subjective values.

726
01:18:09.540 --> 01:18:13.540
You certainly have to move out of the box for other experiences.

727
01:18:13.540 --> 01:18:17.540
You don't need values.

728
01:18:17.540 --> 01:18:21.540
You don't know whether you also have to make the case that

729
01:18:21.540 --> 01:18:25.540
any agency can create a value that doesn't tend to be

730
01:18:25.540 --> 01:18:29.540
of actual or individual parts.

731
01:18:29.540 --> 01:18:33.540
Things like

732
01:18:33.540 --> 01:18:37.540
some people do in that case.

733
01:18:37.540 --> 01:19:07.540
Okay, let me make a stab at first at restating that question and then answering it. So I think the question is this, what is it that internalism, this idea that there can't be

734
01:19:07.540 --> 01:19:13.540
Moral values binding on us that don't somehow hook up with our own existing desires and commitments.

735
01:19:13.540 --> 01:19:27.540
What does that rule out? Does it rule out only the possibility of there being creatures who simply are not committed to these values?

736
01:19:27.540 --> 01:19:33.540
Creatures whose desires simply, you know, so that here's the right moral values over here,

737
01:19:33.540 --> 01:19:53.540
or does it also go on more strongly and rule out a being whose desires do commit them to these values, but they can't see that they're committed to them for some reason?

738
01:20:03.540 --> 01:20:13.340
I think that on one hand you could say reason is experimental and on the other hand you could say that it's something that's hooked up with the value that's not part of the value at all.

739
01:20:13.340 --> 01:20:23.840
On the other hand you could say reason is experimental and on the other hand you could say that it's one that's inaccessible to the reason.

740
01:20:23.840 --> 01:20:31.840
So it's one thing for the team to be able to do it, but it's one thing for the community to incorporate it into something.

741
01:20:31.840 --> 01:21:01.840
Yeah, so the question is exactly what does external to our motives mean. External to our motives could mean external to anything our motives commit us to, or could mean more strongly external to anything that we're able to see that our motives commit us to, just as people are committed to things that everyone believes commit them to complex mathematical formulae because those complex mathematical formulae might

742
01:21:01.840 --> 01:21:13.840
are not logically followed from things they believe, but they might just be lousy at math and they're never going to be able to derive those conclusions, even though those conclusions really do follow.

743
01:21:13.840 --> 01:21:24.840
So likewise, I may have certain motives that would commit me to certain values, but I might not be able to figure it out for some reason, cognitively disabled for some reason for doing that.

744
01:21:24.840 --> 01:21:35.840
So, when internalism says that we have external motives that we're capable of seeing the commitments of.

745
01:21:35.840 --> 01:21:48.840
My first impulse is to say that it seems like this is one case where questions of morality and questions of happiness might come slightly apart.

746
01:21:48.840 --> 01:22:01.840
It seems as though, except odd implies can, then it seems as though it's going to be the strong sense that if I can't see that I'm committed to some value, then I can't be sort of morally bound in the sense that I can't be blameworthy.

747
01:22:01.840 --> 01:22:08.840
Of course you might think there's more than one sense of morally bound, at least in the sense where morally bound means you'd be blameworthy if you didn't do it.

748
01:22:08.840 --> 01:22:15.840
It seems like I can't be blameworthy for not doing something that I'm incapable of seeing the force of.

749
01:22:15.840 --> 01:22:27.840
However, if I really am committed to it, then there might be some sense in which my not achieving it counts as a falling short and therefore counts as some failure in my life.

750
01:22:27.840 --> 01:22:41.840
Maybe it's not a moral failing, but it seems like it might be a eudaimonic failing, a failure of happiness, and so a failure to be all that I could in some sense in principle be.

751
01:22:41.840 --> 01:22:53.840
And I guess that's what I'm inclined to say about people whose rationality is severely impaired in some way.

752
01:22:53.840 --> 01:22:59.840
I remember I once had an argument with one of my professors back in grad school about this.

753
01:22:59.840 --> 01:23:04.840
He said that if someone is severely mentally disabled, there's nothing wrong with them.

754
01:23:04.840 --> 01:23:08.840
It's just like we don't think there's something wrong with a puppy that it can't grasp certain things.

755
01:23:08.840 --> 01:23:12.800
say a person is like a puppy in that way and it didn't seem right to me it seems

756
01:23:12.800 --> 01:23:17.000
that their natures are different it's it's not a defect in the puppy that they

757
01:23:17.000 --> 01:23:20.540
can't and they can't understand what I'm saying but it is a defect in the

758
01:23:20.540 --> 01:23:26.560
severely mentally disabled person that they can't understand anything so yeah so

759
01:23:26.560 --> 01:23:30.360
I guess I want to say that it's and because I wanted to make think that the

760
01:23:30.360 --> 01:23:34.500
the strong sense of externalism applies a strong sense of external applies to

761
01:23:34.500 --> 01:23:40.220
Morality and the Weakest Sense to Happiness. That's my first stab.

762
01:23:40.220 --> 01:24:09.380
The question is, if someone, if someone says, if you tell them someone that they have some moral duty and they say they don't care,

763
01:24:09.380 --> 01:24:20.380
Are you allowed, according to internalism, to say, well, you ought to care, or do you just have to say, well, no, it's okay, if you don't care, then, you know, it's not binding on you.

764
01:24:20.380 --> 01:24:34.380
I'd say more than just, the question is not what they care about, what they're committed to caring about, and also what they're capable of seeing, you know, to go back to Charles' point, capable of seeing what they're committed to.

765
01:24:34.380 --> 01:24:39.100
I think someone could be capable of seeing that they're committed to something and yet not see it.

766
01:24:39.100 --> 01:24:43.740
It's probably because they believe in free will, which we'll be getting to in a later lecture.

767
01:24:43.740 --> 01:24:54.140
But I think that if someone has a commitment and they're capable of seeing it, but they don't,

768
01:24:54.140 --> 01:24:59.180
then they are on the hook. They ought to see it. They ought to pay more attention to this issue.

769
01:24:59.180 --> 01:25:04.300
They ought to try and work through it. If they're not, it's because they are allowing

770
01:25:04.380 --> 01:25:19.380
They're allowing that to give them a reason not to investigate something they ought to investigate or not to pay attention to something they ought to pay attention to.

771
01:25:19.380 --> 01:25:37.860
The question is, if it turned out they're really not committed to it, then we have to say that they ought not to care about it.

772
01:25:37.860 --> 01:25:42.740
Yeah, internalism does have that upshot. However, for the classically diamondists,

773
01:25:42.740 --> 01:25:49.240
Unlike, for example, someone like Hume, who thinks there's no limit to what you might be committed to.

774
01:25:49.240 --> 01:25:55.740
So Hume says, it's not irrational for me to just prefer the destruction of the universe to the scratching of my finger.

775
01:25:55.740 --> 01:26:00.740
Even though presumably your finger would go with the universe.

776
01:26:00.740 --> 01:26:08.740
But the Udianists think that there are conceptual constraints on what someone can intelligibly value.

777
01:26:08.740 --> 01:26:38.740
So, in both the, you know, both Aristotle and Hume are internalists, but they're very different flavors because in Hume thinks, well, we're necessarily, you know, we can't be bound by, except by what we value, but heck, we can value anything that's no limit to what we might be committed to, and therefore it can't be any objective values, but Aristotle, Socrates, people like that are going to say, there are in fact

778
01:26:38.740 --> 01:27:04.740
and what we can intelligibly be committed to, so in fact there couldn't really be a rational agent, or at least a rational agent, a human agent anyway, it's unclear how much of this applies to rational agent and how much to human agent, but anyway, there couldn't be any being like us that didn't have these commitments, because I'm going to give arguments which I will be trying to give my versions of over the course of the next few lectures.

779
01:27:04.740 --> 01:27:15.740
Okay, I think we have reached the zero hour and so I will be back in the afternoon and tell you what happiness is.