I'd like to thank Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute for inviting me to give this series of lectures.
I am going to be talking about the foundations of libertarian ethics,
praxeological foundations of libertarian ethics.
Now, praxeology, as many of you will know, is a set of conceptual truths about the nature of action.
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.
They both developed their economics based on these conceptual insights into the nature of action.
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.
So you might see that there are two sort of parallel ways of grounding libertarianism in praxeology.
One is the economic route. You start with these praxeological truths.
Conceptual truths about the nature of action and then if you assume certain
widely shared values, values like peace or prosperity or cooperation, you can show
that these values, you can show simply on the basis of praxeology, that these
values would be promoted by a libertarian social order, will be
frustrated by status intervention and so that is one way of getting from
from Praxeology to Libertarianism.
I'm going to be exploring a somewhat different route, one that is not so much concerned with
economics and economic consequences, but concerned with ethics and natural rights.
This is a line of argument that has been less fully worked out than the economic one.
In the economic one you've got Mises' Human Action, you've got Rothbard's Man Economy
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.
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.
The Classical Eudaimonists were the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and then later on the medieval scholastics,
Ethics, who developed an ethics out of something like praxeology. The ancient and medieval
ethical theorists generally start off with certain basic conceptual truths about action
and try and derive their ethics from that. For example, I've often noticed that the similarity
between the way that Aristotle starts off his great ethical treatise, the Nicomachean
Ethics, and the way that Mises starts off Human Action. They both start off with the
the idea that human action aims at ends. Aristotle starts off with every art and every inquiry
and likewise every action and decision seems to aim at some good. That's the first sentence
of the Nicomachean Ethics. And the first sentence of human action if you leave out the introduction
is human action is purposeful behavior. So Mises starts as economics, Aristotle starts
as Ethics, both with the same insight, that human action is purposeful, that it aims at ends.
And these two traditions are connected. Austrian economics, the tradition of Mises and Rothbard,
grows out of a continental subjectivist tradition in economics. We'll see more in a bit about exactly
what I mean by subjectivist. But there's the subjectivist tradition that you find in, for
for example, the 19th century, French economists and that in turn grew to a considerable extent out of the background of scholasticism.
So you can trace a kind of series of connections from the ancient Greek philosophers through the scholastics,
through the continental economic tradition on through Austrian economics.
but I'm going to be talking about a less economic more ethical approach. So the
classically diamondists offered a number of attempts to base something like a
natural law ethics and praxeology but often with unlibertarian results. For the
most part these ancient medieval thinkers were not especially libertarian in their
conclusions, and other exceptions, most notably with the late scholastics, the late Spanish
scholastics of the Renaissance period who developed quite a lot of libertarian leading
free market analysis, and then also you can find libertarian spasms here and there in
the earlier thinkers, you can find libertarian aspects in Aristotle and the Stoics and even
and sometimes Plato, but still, by and large, the overall approach of the classically diamondists
was not especially libertarian. They got from praxeology to ethics, but then the politics
they built on their ethics often looked kind of creepy. Libertarians, by contrast, have
often attempted to base a specifically libertarian set of ethics on something like that conception
of Natural Law. But often libertarians have abandoned or not paid much attention to this
earlier ancient and medieval tradition, sort of tried to start on some more modern foundation.
So what I'm trying to do is to see whether something like a modern libertarian position
can be defended in the context of something like an ancient Aristotelian style approach
Research to Ethics. Now certainly, this has been done before, and the two most notable
examples, and we might say the two most notable exceptions to the claim that the model libertarians
don't pay that much attention to the ancients, are Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, who both
drew explicitly on something like Aristotelian foundations in their work. For example, if
If you look at the opening chapters of Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty, there's very much Aristotelian
and Thomistic style argument there that's being used to ground his arguments for rights.
And Rand famously was a big fan of Aristotle, and less famously, she was a fairly big fan
of Aquinas.
She thought Aquinas was the second greatest philosopher ofividest, Aristotle being the
first, and herself in the third probably. But, and in Rand's virtue of selfishness, you can see that
there's a way in which her arguments, even though she makes some shots at Aristotle in the course
of developing them, she is appealing to Aristotelian principles in the course of developing those ethics.
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.
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.
That is, as basing ethics, the value of morality primarily on its consequences rather than on its own inherent value.
And I don't think that that's what Rand is doing in her novels for the most part.
But I think that is what happens when she tries to develop a philosophy, develop philosophical foundations of a worldview in her nonfiction.
I think that she ends up treating actions as merely instrumental means to
well-being rather than as intrinsic parts of well-being which I think would be the
more Aristotelian way to do it and I think that there's a problem with this
briefly the problem is this one of the things that praxeology shows and Mises
And Rand basically agrees with this, is that there are certain ends you can't achieve unless you are committed to certain principles.
You can't get certain goals unless you adopt certain principles in a way that you're really committed to them.
You don't just treat them as rules of thumb, you're really committed to them as principles.
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.
You may have a purely instrumental reason to adopt it.
Someone says, suppose you can't get X unless you get yourself to care about Y.
Alright, so you get yourself to care about Y, but once you've done it, now you've done it.
You care about Y now.
And it's no longer the case that all you're invested in is X.
So Rand thinks that, as I understand her, she thinks that you can't achieve something like reliable survival.
survival, long-term survival, you can't achieve that unless you commit yourself to certain
virtues.
I think that's probably right for the most part.
But once you commit yourself to those virtues, then it seems as though you can't consistently
regard them as merely strategies for advancing your survival, you now have to care about
them for their own sake, which is sort of what Rand says, but at the same time she still
seems to want to say that somehow the ultimate justification of them is still survival.
And that's what I have a problem with. Once you're committed to them, you can't regard them as merely instrumental anymore.
You sort of kick the ladder away. You may have had a consequentialist reason for becoming a non-consequentialist.
Once you are one, you are one.
One of the reasons I'm not fully satisfied with the way Rothbard develops ethics is a little bit different.
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.
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,
and therefore the content of rights, can be determined independently of the rest of morality.
that regardless of what you think about courage or generosity or temperance or any of these other traditional virtues,
regardless of what you think is a good way to live in general, regardless of what you think is valuable in life,
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.
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.
All our ends have to fit together, I'm going to argue, into a kind of harmonious system.
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
I have to say something generally about virtue in order to have a firm foundation for the retained ethics.
Now, these lectures are not going to be a definitive, fully worked out system where I've got decisive arguments for everything.
A lot of this is sort of a project in process.
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
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.
Sometimes that's appropriate, but in general I think of it more as tracing relations among concepts.
It's more like a network or a spider web rather than a structure where everything is built from the ground up.
For example, I don't think that you can deduce all of economics just from the action axiom because there are other concepts.
You can't deduce monetary theory from the action axiom unless you introduce the concept of money.
And so it's not so much that you start from this one concept and action and you deduce everything from it,
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.
Alright, well the first question I want to start off with is, according to praxeology, value is subjective.
And so you might think that's going to be an unpromising foundation for ethics.
How can you ground ethics in the theory of subjective value?
I think subjective value just means, you know, you want whatever you want.
And maybe I want to be nice to people and you want to be nasty to people or vice versa.
And, you know, value is just whatever is, you know, whatever you want.
So how can you ground objective ethics on that?
Well, I want to distinguish between two senses of value subjectivism.
On the one hand, there's what I'm going to call explanatory value subjectivism.
Explanatory value subjectivism means that when you are explaining what a person is doing,
or what a group of people are doing, you explain it in terms of their values, not your own.
If you want to know why they're doing something, you have to understand it in terms of values that they have.
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.
So, there's certain, or it's called functionalist explanations in sociology where they're saying, why does this tribe do this?
Oh, because it turns out that doing this makes the tribe better off, but none of them have any clue,
none of them know that that makes the tribe better off, they just do it, and so it's not an adequate explanation.
You need some account of how this actually, how they actually end up individually being motivated.
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,
But you need to account for that. You need to say what it is that actually individually motivates them.
And that's the sense in which praxeology is a theory of subjective value.
If you want to understand what people are doing, you don't appeal to your values.
If your favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla, you don't appeal to that in explaining why someone else is choosing chocolate.
You appeal to the fact that their favorite is chocolate.
We want to distinguish that from normative value subjectivism, according to which all person's values are equally good.
There's no basis for criticizing one value or favoring one value over another.
That's a separate claim, and I don't think praxeology entails that.
Praxeology entails that everyone acts according to their own values.
But praxeology doesn't entail the claim that all values are on an equal level,
level are that no good reasons can be given for supporting some values over others.
Now Mises seems to have thought that explanatory values subjectivism entails normative values
subjectivism. Mises seems to have thought that because all values are subjective therefore you
couldn't really have any objective basis for praising or condemning any particular choice.
Mises says, for example, if someone says you shouldn't value this, you should value that instead.
That's just pure effrontery. It's just the arrogance of someone who thinks that their subjective values have some kind of objective basis.
Well, although I think Mises was wrong about that, I think I can understand why he thought that.
There is something in the neighborhood of that that I think he's right about.
Something that's sometimes called internalism.
Internalism is the view that we can't or don't have any duties
that aren't somehow grounded in or consistent with or somehow fit in with our motives.
So the idea is it doesn't make sense to say you ought to do something
if there's no hook in your motives for you to do it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But since Mises, I think, also thinks, well, and there's no limit to what you might desire,
you might desire any crazy thing, therefore, Mises thinks there couldn't be any objective ethics.
However, the classical? diamondists thought that there were conceptual constraints on what we could prefer or desire or what our commitments were.
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,
You'd see that we're really committed to desiring something else other than this thing we desired or what we desired.
And so, Classically Diamond has thought that there were these conceptual constraints that would narrow the range of what our commitments really are.
Now as an example of how this sort of thing works, Mises says that praxeology can only advise you on means, not ends.
Given that you've got a certain goal, praxeology can give you information about what the best means to it is.
The most efficient means of achieving that goal.
But praxeology can't tell you what goals to have.
You know, your psychology determines what your goals are.
You either got the goal or you don't.
If you've got the goal, then if you want to get upstairs,
then praxeology can say, you know, go use the staircase.
Actually, I'm not sure that's a praxeological principle.
It seems too empirical.
But anyway, you can give that kind of advice,
but it can't tell you whether you ought to go upstairs or not.
You know, that was Mises' idea.
Well, in a way, the Classical Edimonists agree, and in a way, they don't.
On the one hand, the Classical Edimonists are constantly advising people what ends to pursue,
not just the means, but the ends, constantly telling them, you know,
these are the ends you should be pursuing, these are the goals you should have.
But on the other hand, the Classical Edimonists also say things that sound very much like Mises.
When they say that practical reason can only judge means, not ends,
How can the classically diamondists say both these things?
Well, the classically diamondists draw a distinction between what nowadays is called instrumental means and constitutive means.
In fact, this distinction is the second sentence of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
Here's the difference. Suppose that my goal is to play the Moonlight Sonata. That's my
goal. And so what are the means I choose? First I need to have a piano. Where can I
get a piano? Well, there's one out there. So if I want to play the Moonlight Sonata,
I can step down and go out there and play. I don't know how to play the Moonlight Sonata.
First I need sheet music and then I need piano lessons and so forth. So if I go and I buy
by the sheet music, and I pay for some piano lessons,
and then I go and walk into that room to the piano.
These are all means to the end
of playing the Moonlight Sonata.
These are gonna be instrumental means.
And when you think about means and ends,
that's the usual sort of thing you think of.
You do a bunch of things,
there are a bunch of things you have to do first
before you can get this thing you want later.
Concentrative means are different.
Suppose that I've done all those things.
I've got the sheet music, I've paid for piano lessons,
I've gone up there, I've sat down at the piano, and I'm now actually playing the Moonlight Sonata.
And at that point, I happen to hit a particular note at a particular time.
You ask me, why are you playing that note right now?
Well, my answer is, it's not that I value that note for its own sake.
It's not that I think, oh, that note all just by itself sounds so pretty.
No, I'm valuing it because I want to play the Moonlight Sonata.
In order to play the Moonlight Sonata, I have to play that note at that point
because the Moonlight Sonata just is, those notes in that order.
If you're going to play the Moonlight Sonata, you have to play that note at that point.
So I'm not really valuing playing that note as an end in itself.
I'm valuing it as a means to the end of playing the Moonlight Sonata.
But it's a different kind of means from paying for piano lessons and buying sheet music.
It's not an end that's external. It's not a means that's external to the end.
it's a means that's part of the end
and you can tell the difference because it would make sense to say
boy, I wish I could play the Moonlight Sonata without having
to buy sheet music, but it doesn't make any sense to say I wish I could play the Moonlight Sonata
without playing all these notes
Moonlight Sonata, like I said, just is these notes
so you couldn't have the goal without these means because the means are part of the goal
well
The ancient Greek thinkers recognize not only instrumental but constitutive means and when
they talk about deliberating about means, they mean not just deliberating about external
or instrumental means, but also deliberating about constitutive means.
Deliberating about what is part of a certain goal.
Of course, deliberating about what is part of a goal is partly a matter of trying to
specify the goal more exactly.
You may have sort of a vague notion of the goal, and you want to specify it.
And you specify it by trying to figure out what the constitutive means to it are.
You know, so suppose that I'm trying to, suppose my goal is to have a nice vacation.
Well, you know, some of my means to that will be instrumental means.
Like, all right, I'll try to figure out, I need to save up enough money to take the vacation,
and I have to get tickets, and make reservations, and that sort of thing.
Those are instrumental means to the vacation.
But I also have to decide, where am I going to go? And for how long?
And those are means to having a nice vacation, too, but a little bit differently.
They're part of the end. When I try to decide where to go, I'm trying to decide
exactly how to specify this vague end of a nice vacation. I'm trying to make it more specific.
Now, when I'm trying to figure out how instrumental means, that's really a matter of cause and effect,
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.
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.
I'm trying to figure out, you know, what is my end really?
The better understanding I have of my end, the more I'll see what the internal means to it are.
And the classical e-diamondists think that not only can we make mistakes about instrumental means,
you can make mistakes about what strategies will bring our desired ends into existence,
we can also make mistakes about constitutive means.
We can make mistakes about the nature of what our goal is.
In particular, if you're pursuing your happiness or your well-being or your self-interest or whatever you want to call it,
You can make mistakes not just about the means to bringing about this thing, you can make mistakes about what it is.
You can make mistakes about what the nature of that goal is.
And so they see one of the functions of philosophy as being to give us advice about how to specify our goal.
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.
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.
But they think we've all got this goal, but it's kind of generic.
What is it? What is really the nature of this ultimate goal we're committed to?
Now, in trying to figure out what's the nature of this ultimate goal we're committed to,
what are the constitutive means to it, these thinkers often think that we're trying to
figure out what we should do, and this is when people often say, well, should do in
what sense?
You know, there's what we should do, morally do, there's what we should prudentially or
are self-interestedly due. Of course, the Greeks think that these go together, Greek
philosophers, but you might think, well, they don't. You know, what should you do? People
often accuse Socrates in the Platonic dialogues of equivocating on this. He'll
talk about, you know, what's good for you to do, and people think he's sliding from,
you know, what's good for you versus what's good for you to do, and the
difference between what's beneficial to you versus what's morally obligatory for
People think he's sliding between two different senses of good, or two different senses of should.
But the Classically Dynast think, and I agree, that there is a unitary sense of should,
where it doesn't mean morally should, as opposed to prudentially should, as opposed to some other kind of should.
It's just should. Think about this. Think about when you're deciding what to do.
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.
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.
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.
Well, there's a sense of should, in which deciding what to do is deciding what I should do.
When I finally decide what to do, you'll know I've decided what to do because I do it.
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.
Deciding what to do is a matter of when I decide what to do, I then do it.
If I don't do it, that shows that wasn't what I decided to do.
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.
And there's a sense of should, or good, or whatever, where that's just what it means.
And so it's not as though morality is one should and prudential is another should, they're
just the same should.
Morality is trying to tell you what is the thing to do, and self-interest is trying to
tell you what the thing is to do, but there's just something that is the thing to do, that
you decide is the thing to do whenever you do it.
Part of the point here is that evaluative terms involve endorsement.
When I say that something is good, I'm thereby endorsing it.
You might think, well, isn't that, that might not necessarily be true.
Suppose I'm evil and, you know, of the sort of the deliberate embracing evil kind of villain
that exists, you know, mainly in fumenchu movies in Washington, or I decide that something
I said I will do it because it's evil. I'm against good. I'm in favor of evil.
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.
So couldn't an immoralist say, well, I'm against good. I'm in favor of evil.
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.
I think it's part of the meaning of the term good that we apply it to things that we're in favor of.
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.
And, you know, we use the term that way too, like, oh, you're a goody-two-shoes, or whatever.
But that's not the most usual meaning of the word good.
The most usual meaning of the word good is you're using it to endorse something.
In fact, it's very hard even for the self-consciously evil to avoid using the term this way.
There's the famous example in Paradise Lost where Satan is deciding to rebel against God.
And so what he says is, evil be thou my good.
In other words, from now on I'm going to be pro-evil.
Look at the way he puts it, evil be thou my good.
you know he's trying to get rid of the ordinary uses of moral terms he can't
quite extricate himself from them you know Satan gets stuck back into the
ordinary meaning of good evil be thou my good you know he's still using good as a
turn I mean when he's using term evil he's trying to use it as something he's
in favor of but his way of putting it as evil be thou my good he's using the
term good as something he's in favor of too or to descend a bit to less
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.
Now, some people think, some philosophers have thought, the moral of this is that the value of terms merely express endorsement.
That they're not really making statements. They seem like they're making statements, but they're really, you know,
saying X is good is more like saying, yay, X, or hooray for X, or something like that.
And that's not really a statement that can be true or false.
It wouldn't make any sense to say, no, you are mistaken that hooray, X.
No, it doesn't make any sense.
So there's a school of thought called emotivists. The logical positivists were big fans of this idea.
They saw that it's crucial to the ordinary use of evaluative terms that they express endorsement.
They thought, well, that's all they're doing. There's nothing to a moral term other than it's expressing endorsement.
And likewise, they thought that X is bad and something like X yuck or X boo or something like that.
But there's a problem that's often pointed out about this approach.
Which is that there are things that we do with evaluative terms that you can't do with merely expressive terms.
So on the handout you see I've got these two arguments.
Here's the first one, taking property without consent is wrong. Taxation is taking property
without consent, therefore taxation is wrong. A perfectly deductively valid argument. It's
also sound, but that's neither here nor there. It's a valid argument. If you accept the premises,
then you are committed to the conclusion. If the premises are true, the conclusion must
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.
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.
Then, you know, the second premise is not evaluative, so that can stay the same way.
In conclusion, we now have to read taxation, yuck.
Well, here's the problem.
The second one is not a valid argument, because nothing follows from a premise like yuck.
It's not an assertion.
Taking property that can set yuck doesn't assert anything.
Unless you want to treat it as a disguised assertion, in which case that would sort of reverse emotivism.
Instead of saying when people say something is bad, they mean yuck,
You'd really be saying when people say something, say yuck, they mean something is bad.
You know, that would be the opposite of emotivism.
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.
Well, the statement like that cannot enter into logical relations.
It can't be a premise or a conclusion.
So if evaluative statements were merely expressive, we know that they are expressive, evaluative statements do express endorsements.
But if they were merely expressive, if they were not predications, if they didn't assert anything,
then we couldn't do things with them that we can perfectly well do.
We're perfectly capable of, and we all the time do,
use evaluative statements as premises or as conclusions and derive one from the other and it all works perfectly well.
And so it would be a misunderstanding of ethical terms if you felt that they were merely,
if they were merely expressive.
We'd also make a mistake if you thought they were merely predicated and not expressive.
Predicated, predicative, and not expressive.
If you thought that they were merely ascribing properties of things
but not expressing any kind of endorsement, that's not how they work either.
So normative terms, when you use them,
you're committed to saying that goodness and wrongness are genuine properties.
When you say that something is good,
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.
Now, I didn't mention this on the handout, but there's a famous argument by J.L. Mackey,
which claims that this is precisely why normative terms must all be some sort of
a mistake. He says look if normative terms really refer to properties but if
it's also true that normative terms express this endorsement what that means
is that they would have to refer to properties such that as soon as you
recognize something has that property you automatically want it and so they
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.
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,
but as soon as we saw it, we immediately necessarily wanted it as a matter of some sort of logical necessity.
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.
Because he thought that there would have to be some kind of weird tug on our will from these properties out there.
Well, does this imply that? Are these properties objective?
Well, the term objective is used a lot of different ways.
There's this famous distinction that Rand makes.
And the way she uses these terms is different from the way most philosophers use them.
I just want to get this out of the way to avoid certain kind of confusion.
Rand draws a distinction between intrinsic, subjective, and objective values.
She thinks most people have made a mistake of making a two-way distinction when there should really be a three-way distinction.
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.
So an intrinsic value is one that depends solely on the object apart from the valuer.
So, for example, if this pen is good, in the sense of intrinsic value, the way Rand uses that term,
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.
It's just sitting there in the world glowingly good.
Subjective value, on the other hand, would depend solely on the value or apart from the object.
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.
I just project under the pen my own subjective whims about it or something like that.
By contrast, objective value would depend on some sort of relationship between the object and the valuer.
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
I think there's a similarity here with what Carl Menger says in his opening of his Principles of Economics
where he talks about what it is for something to have goods character
where it depends partly on the nature of the object, objective in the more usual sense.
Now, the way most philosophers use the term intrinsic valuable is different from the way RAND does.
By intrinsic value, RAND means a value that's out there in the object independently of us.
But most philosophers, by intrinsic value, mean something that's valued as an end, not as a means.
So you don't value just as a means to getting something else, but you value it for its own sake.
In some ways they don't make clear whether the contrast is with all means or only with instrumental means.
So when non-Randians talk about intrinsic value, Randians often think they're talking about the thing having value all by itself,
And sometimes non-randings mean that, but usually they just mean it's valuable as a means.
So just watch out for terms like intrinsic and objective.
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.
Or even with the same writer sometimes.
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.
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.
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.
And the analogy I'm going to draw is with what Wittgenstein says about pain.
One of the obvious features about pain is you can be wrong about whether someone else is in pain.
You can see them screaming and moaning. You think they're in pain, but they're only faking.
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.
So you can be wrong about whether someone else is in pain.
But you can't be wrong about whether you're in pain.
You can't be mistaken about that.
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.
So you can't be wrong about your own pain.
What sort of fact is that?
Well, one thing a lot of people have thought,
Descartes thought something like this, is it's just a basic fact about the nature of pain,
that it's somehow luminously obvious to its possessor.
Pain is the sort of thing that just necessarily reveals itself to its possessors,
sort of a fact about the metaphysical nature of pain,
that its possessor can't be wrong about it, although other people can.
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.
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.
And you could think of this as kind of an intrinsicist thing. It's just a fact about the nature of pain.
It's analogous to intrinsic. I suppose it's not really apart from consciousness, since you can't have pain without consciousness.
is analogous to it, thinking that it's just a fact about the nature of pain that it has this feature.
And that's kind of like what Mackey thinks goodness would have to be like if there were such a thing.
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,
and we can't fail to know about it.
Now, Wittgenstein has an objection to this way of thinking about pain, which is this.
It's not an empirical discovery that we can't be wrong about our own pain.
It's not like we did some sort of study and found this out.
Rather, Wittgenstein thinks it's part of the meaning of the word pain,
that you can't be wrong about whether you have it.
Nothing would count as pain if you could be wrong about it.
So if one day someone said, oh look, here's a case where you can have pain but be completely
unaware of it, most people would not say, oh wow, here's a great empirical discovery.
They'd say, that just doesn't count as pain.
We just don't mean by pain anything that we could be mistaken about having.
And if you think that, then you might be tempted to slide to the other side and be a subjectivist
and think that pain is, that the fact that we can't be wrong about pain is simply an artifact of our linguistic conventions.
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,
people think that goodness would have to be something out there independently of us, versus people who think, you know, are just demotivists,
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
that he's in pain licenses the question how do you know but I'm in pain does not
license the question how do you know and one way that I put this is that it's
ungrammatical and his sort of extended sense of grammar if I say I'm in pain
it's ungrammatical for you to ask how do you know and it's a question how do you
know is sort of forbidden by the rules of language whereas if I say he's in
If I say he's in pain pointing to no person at all, then once again I am violating Wittgensteinian grammar.
But if I point to some actual person and say he's in pain, then the question how do you know makes sense?
So the rules of language allow it in one case and not in the other, Wittgenstein says.
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?
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.
We could now adopt a new rule according to which you're allowed to ask, how do you know after both questions?
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.
but that's not what Wittgenstein means
because I'm sure we could change what the word means
but you know just as I can't
just as I don't know whether I'm allowed to quote Abraham Lincoln in this room but
Abraham Lincoln said you know if you call a, how many legs does a
sheep have if you call a tail a leg and his answer was
four because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one
One thing we can just write about, if I start using the word pain differently to mean something
different from what I used to, that doesn't mean I've thereby made pain, in the original
sense, different. If I start using the word pain for something we can be wrong about,
that doesn't mean that pain is now something we can be wrong about, using it in the original
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.
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,
but pain is simply the byproduct of a linguistic convention. I don't think he's saying that at all.
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.
Nothing would count as pain if it were something we could be wrong about, but it's not grounded in our linguistic conventions either.
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
or they're more broadly what he calls grammatical facts and what I might call conceptual facts or
a priori facts aren't grounded in anything they're not grounded in something else they're just basic
I think that this is what Plato was trying to say we started talking about the platonic forms but
then he's Plato slid from treating these basic logical facts as ungrounded to treating them as
is being grounded in some weird sort of entities,
and that sort of undoes the whole insight.
But I think that when he talks about these weird entities,
he was trying to express the idea,
and he's tripping himself up in the course of expressing it,
trying to express the idea that logic isn't grounded
in anything more basic.
So logical facts, conceptual facts,
a priori truths are not grounded in anything.
When Mark introduced me,
He mentioned my Wittgenstein manuscript, an early draft of which is online.
If you go online to see more about this idea of logical conceptual facts,
they're not either imposed by our mind on reality or imposed by reality on our minds.
They're just basic.
So, Rand's third way is to say it's neither out there nor in here.
It's in the relationship between the two.
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.
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,
It's also not just a product of our linguistic conventions.
The nature of goodness is just basic.
It's just part of what you're committed to in using normative terms.
Now that raises the question,
well, is this just basic goodness, agent-relative or agent-neutral?
Agent-relative means something like it's relative to each person.
What's good for me, bad for you.
For example, when the squirrel eats the acorn, that's good for the squirrel, bad for the acorn, that's agent-relative value.
Or is it agent-neutral? Is it somehow a shared good?
Or a good that's sort of equally commonly accessible to all of us?
So if I say it's good for me, I'm somewhat committed to saying it's good for you.
Which of these senses of good are we talking about?
Well, I'm going to say more about that tomorrow afternoon.
But briefly, here's a way of setting up the puzzle I'm going to be talking about later.
Praxeology might seem to imply agent-relative value, because praxeology talks about the fact that we each have our own values.
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,
and has to be end of some individual person. So that seems to support the idea of agent-relative value.
On the other hand, you might think, well look, the way we actually use normative terms seems to apply
agent-neutral value. When I say that something is good, generally I tend to, you know, it's just not
that I want it, but that you ought to want it too. When we use normative terms, we tend to be
Inviting others to share our value. So that might seem like a puzzle. And then when we look at the
classically diamondists, well they talk about each person having their own odymonea, their own
flourishing, and that your actions are aimed at your own flourishing, not at some big collective
flourishing. So that looks like it might be agent-relative, each has their own value they're
Pursuing, even if they're the same kind of value, you know, each one has their own individual one.
On the other hand, the Classically Dynamists also think that there's a harmony of interests,
and in a more extreme sense than Mises thinks. And Mises thinks there's a harmony of interests
in the sense that the, in a causal sense, consequentialist sense, that the social system
The question that's going to be the best for me would also be the best for you.
It will turn out to benefit us both.
But classically, that must think more strongly that even apart from questions of what causes what,
there is some kind of deep conceptual harmony among our self-interest,
such that I can't consistently endorse the conception of my self-interest that would violate your self-interest.
You might think, well, that implies a kind of agent-neutral value.
It implies that these values are in some way shared or common.
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.
But that's something to keep in mind.
Let me open it up to questions at this point.
yes Jeff okay question is I've been given this useful piece of advice the question
is could I say more about why I prefer Wittgenstein's third way to Rand's where
Dr. Rand thinks that instead of the resolution to intrinsic versus objective being object
of value in her sense, where it's a relationship between the object and the valuer, I go for
this Wittgensteinian third way, where instead of it being out there or in here, it exists
in a, not in a relationship, not grounded in one or the other in both, but somehow grounded
in neither.
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.
What got me onto the Wittgensteinian one, really, is not originally thinking about ethics, but trying to sort out other aspects of Wittgenstein.
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.
And there's this distinction that Barry Smith draws,
and he draws it in the context of talking about Austrian a prioriism.
He draws the distinction between impositionism and reflectionism,
as two different ways of thinking about a priori truth.
And impositionism is that our mind imposes some kind of structure on experience,
or the nature of our mind imposes some structure on experience.
Smith points out that Mises often talks this way. Mises and Human Action talks about, and there's
dispute about whether this is quite the right interpretation of Mises, but anyway Mises often
talks as though there's a structure of our mind, there's some kind of experience coming in from
reality out there and who knows what it's like, but our mind sort of processes it, just like you
know Plato going through the star-shaped thing and all comes out star-shaped, so the stuff out
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.
People often refer to that as the Kantian aspect of Mises.
It's disputable whether that's the right way to interpret Kant.
But at least one popular way of interpreting Kant is reality is really unknowable, but reality is filtered through the structure of our mind.
Our mind imposes the structure on our experience.
So that's what Barry Smith calls impositionism.
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.
Reality imposes, rather than our mind imposing something on reality, it's more that reality imposes something on our mind, that reality makes...
So we think about logical facts like nothing can be both A and 90 at the same time or something like that.
The question is, is that something our mind imposes on reality or is it something that reality sends into our mind?
And Smith is plumping for the latter. He prefers reflectionism, which he sees in the phenomenological tradition.
Well, I was convinced by Wittgenstein that there's something odd about both those ways of thinking about it.
If you think that our mind imposes logical structure on reality,
then you have to think that were it not for what our mind is doing,
reality might be illogical.
Reality in its own nature might violate the laws of logic,
but that our mind imposes this logical structure on it.
But in order to make sense of that, you have to think that the notion that
reality might be illogical could make sense.
We can't make sense of the notion that reality might be violating the laws of logic.
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.
Because we can't make sense of any illogical reality.
You might think, well, that's an argument for reflectionism. A lot of people thought it is.
But reflectionism seems to have the same problem.
That implies that logic is something that reality imposes on our minds.
Such that our minds might be illogical.
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.
But that implies that we could make sense of the notion of an illogical mind, and that doesn't seem to make sense either.
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.
There's also a sense of the phrase illogical reality, where we can do that.
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.
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.
So I think that both reflectionism and impositionism treat logic as though it were a constraint
on something that otherwise would be illogical.
Impositionism treats the logic as a constraint the mind imposes on what might otherwise be
an illogical reality.
Reflectionism treats logic as a constraint that reality imposes on what otherwise might
be an illogical mind.
And if you can't make sense of an illogical reality or an illogical mind, then you can't
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.
So it might turn out that it doesn't necessarily contradict this other way of putting it.
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.
I don't have a fully worked out story yet.
That's just sort of why this model of thinking about it has tempted me to try to do the same thing with goodness.
Other questions? Please ask questions of clarification because a lot of this must have gone by fast and puzzlingly, I imagine.
Don't be afraid to say, what the heck were you talking about at this point?
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?
So you could say our own particular theory would be a version of objective value.
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,
and it's people being identified as doing that so it's not it's not a value unless it can really help
you live your life more successfully and therefore it's not a value apart from you it's not a value
that you need to recognize apart from the fact that benefits you but it's not just your you know
your own subjective whim to determine that it's a value you could make a mistake about whether
So whether it's valuable or not depends both, in fact, about you and in fact about it.
Then take Menger's example, which is similar but not identical.
Menger says in order for something to have goods character, as he puts it,
it has to be the case that the thing is causally able to meet a human need,
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.
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,
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.
Now there he's talking about economic value, not ethical value, but still it's a similar idea
It's a similar idea that its existence depends on a relationship between the valuer and the object.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Aristotle is more pessimistic. He thinks that something you can't get might really still be something you need.
I'll talk later about why they had that dispute and why, of course, Aristotle is right.
yeah okay the question is if Mises thinks that all the praxeology can give
advice only on means not on ends then where does he get the idea that all
action aims at the removal of felt dissatisfaction well well first of all he
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.
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.
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.
And there are other people for whom that would not be what would remove their felt dissatisfaction.
In fact, their felt dissatisfaction would increase if they had to do that.
So Mises thinks we have no choice, but what do we aim at that?
We also have very little choice about, and there's no real point in advising us about what would directly remove the dissatisfaction.
However, once we figure out what would, if sitting down and reading a thousand pages of Human Action is what would remove your dissatisfaction,
then we can start getting advice about, all right, well you need to get a hold of a copy of the book.
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
There's a very generic end, but there's advice that philosophy can give us about how to specify it,
and there's some ways of specifying it that make more sense than other ways.
So you have a very generic sounding end like removable dissatisfaction,
but it might turn out that we're committed to thinking about that in a certain way,
and that some ways of thinking about it make more sense than others,
and would be constitutive means of that goal.
Yes.
Why was it that in the transition from the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance, not into the Enlightenment,
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.
The question is, is it because the Enlightenment was just challenging everything? What's going on?
Well, I have a few thoughts on that.
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.
And I don't think that, in fact, the success of modern science necessarily supported this.
But they thought it did. They thought that certain of the older metaphysical views and older epistemological views just were no longer defensible.
They had this view of the world as sort of a very cause and effect, kind of a mechanistic view of the universe,
which a lot of the early scientific discoveries might have seemed to support
and as a result, they became much more interested in causal connections than in conceptual ones.
That's certainly true of the empiricists. I think to some extent it's even true of the rationalists,
although the rationalists may be less so.
But the focus on sort of a mechanistic cause and effect
cause and effect as opposed to sort of more holistic conceptual connections became less popular.
Now and that tends to lead maybe to something like utilitarianism. Now virtue ethics doesn't
completely die out during this period and David Hume and Adam Smith were both virtue ethicists
and quite self-consciously saw themselves as at least in some respects continuing the older
tradition. But their version of virtue ethics is what I would call
psychologistic. That is to say, they base it on what they take to be empirical
facts about human psychology, that human beings just have tendencies to admire
certain things and dislike others. And we can explain these in terms of certain
kinds of psychological mechanisms. But that's just it, just a brute fact of a
human nature that we've got these psychological mechanisms so where the
ancients would have tried to ground this in some sort of conceptual connection or
terms of what kind of notion of human well-being we could make sense of the
the moderns tried to base it in sort of cause and effect they thought they were
being more scientific they thought you know this old Aristotelian way of doing
things led to lousy astronomy and we've got good astronomy now and so they tended
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.
As for Kantianism, and that's a complicated story, and Kant is rebelling against some of those same features of the Enlightenment.
I think Kant in some ways sees himself in some extent correctly as trying to recapture this older tradition.
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.
But he does not have, in my view, a very fancy conception of self-interest.
The concept of self-interest is fairly crude and heathenistic.
Empirical science is the right way to approach self-interest.
Just try to figure out what gives people jollies.
Whereas the ancient Greeks thought that the concept of morality and the concept of self-interest
were both complex philosophical issues that had to be investigated.
In the course of investigating them, we might find some surprises.
Surprises, we might have to revise our concepts of them in order to make better sense of them and so forth.
But as I see it, Kant thinks, you know, empirical psychology just tells us what self-interest is,
tells us what happiness is, and there's no interesting philosophical questions about the
concept of happiness much. But the concept, but, and therefore, he develops a conception of duty
that develops largely independently of any conception of happiness or well-being, because
Because he's got his sort of conceptual a priori approach to ethics, and he's got a
psychologistic empirical approach to happiness, and so that's why Kant's theory has a kind
of sternness to it that you don't find with the ancients so much.
There's a sense in which Kant is sort of a virtue ethicist, but he's kind of a virtue
ethicist with only one virtue.
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.
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.
And then out of that, he tries to sort of build them up again.
But I think it's a kind of bifurcation in Kant between morality and self-interest these ancients didn't have.
have that's because he thought of self-interest in this in these
psychologistic terms and if you think of it that way then you can see why he
might have thought a lot of the Enlightenment thinkers trying to base
morality on you know what people want and you know what people actually feel
themselves wanting in any given moment you can see what can't we think oh lord
I could want anything they do want anything people feel themselves wanting
all kinds of crazy stuff you can't base morality on that you know I can see you
So he was right to be critical of the Enlightenment thinkers, but I think he chose the wrong fix,
rather than trying to come up with a more sophisticated conception of self-addressed,
he just tried to sever the connection between morality and self-addressed entirely.
That's my diagnosis there.
Yes, Charles.
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.
It's not a possibility that there are...
It's not a possibility that, you know,
they've said to me...
I think you could argue that...
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.
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.
and the
for whatever reason they're in such a state you can't give them the
to the actual people who are part of the dining room.
You can't direct them to the state, not the people who are part of the dining room at all.
It's a human-independent institution.
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...
I'm sorry. What I'm trying to ask is whether it matters to me to make an argument for subjective values.
You certainly have to move out of the box for other experiences.
You don't need values.
You don't know whether you also have to make the case that
any agency can create a value that doesn't tend to be
of actual or individual parts.
Things like
some people do in that case.
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
Moral values binding on us that don't somehow hook up with our own existing desires and commitments.
What does that rule out? Does it rule out only the possibility of there being creatures who simply are not committed to these values?
Creatures whose desires simply, you know, so that here's the right moral values over here,
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
So, when internalism says that we have external motives that we're capable of seeing the commitments of.
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.
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.
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.
It seems like I can't be blameworthy for not doing something that I'm incapable of seeing the force of.
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.
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.
And I guess that's what I'm inclined to say about people whose rationality is severely impaired in some way.
I remember I once had an argument with one of my professors back in grad school about this.
He said that if someone is severely mentally disabled, there's nothing wrong with them.
It's just like we don't think there's something wrong with a puppy that it can't grasp certain things.
say a person is like a puppy in that way and it didn't seem right to me it seems
that their natures are different it's it's not a defect in the puppy that they
can't and they can't understand what I'm saying but it is a defect in the
severely mentally disabled person that they can't understand anything so yeah so
I guess I want to say that it's and because I wanted to make think that the
the strong sense of externalism applies a strong sense of external applies to
Morality and the Weakest Sense to Happiness. That's my first stab.
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,
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.
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.
I think someone could be capable of seeing that they're committed to something and yet not see it.
It's probably because they believe in free will, which we'll be getting to in a later lecture.
But I think that if someone has a commitment and they're capable of seeing it, but they don't,
then they are on the hook. They ought to see it. They ought to pay more attention to this issue.
They ought to try and work through it. If they're not, it's because they are allowing
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.
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.
Yeah, internalism does have that upshot. However, for the classically diamondists,
Unlike, for example, someone like Hume, who thinks there's no limit to what you might be committed to.
So Hume says, it's not irrational for me to just prefer the destruction of the universe to the scratching of my finger.
Even though presumably your finger would go with the universe.
But the Udianists think that there are conceptual constraints on what someone can intelligibly value.
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
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.
Okay, I think we have reached the zero hour and so I will be back in the afternoon and tell you what happiness is.