 During the lecture in the last period, Tom DeLorenzo told us 10 things that are wrong with socialism. I'm expecting that at the end of my talk, you'll be able to give 10 things that are wrong with my lecture. That's much easier to come up with more than that, but we don't want to make it too demanding. Now, I'm going to be talking about Mises and Rothbard on ethics. Ethics is a very important subject. There's some people who don't care for ethics at all. One recalls in one of the novels of the great British humorist, P.G. Woodhouse. A character says to Jeeves, whenever anything comes up, I always ask myself one question. What's in it for me? I think if you hold that view, you probably won't find this lecture of all that much interest. Now, if we look at the alluded by Mises and Murray Rothbard, we find that they have very similar views about policy, especially economic policy. Both Mises and Rothbard support the free market opposed socialism and government intervention in the economy. Now, there are differences about property rights. I'll get into that later. The main difference between Mises and Rothbard, aside, of course, from the anarchism, monarchism issue concerns foundations of ethics. Rothbard, in contrast to Mises, thought that ethics is objective. If we say, for example, that people, we ought to promote the free market, this tells us what we ought morally to do. It isn't only that we're, this isn't only a claim about how we can realize the preferences or peace and prosperity that people in fact have. Mises said, well, everybody or practically everybody wants peace and prosperity. Those who don't will tend to die out, so we'll have left those who want peace and prosperity. And if we want that, then we should institute the free market. So this is a claim about, it's a hypothetical claim. If we want this, we should have the free market. In fact, we do want this, so then we should have the free market you have. If A, then B, but A, therefore B, it's hypothetical. So it doesn't say that we ought to value peace and prosperity, it's just that we do value peace and prosperity. Many people along similar lines argue in this way, they say, well, we could imagine, Henry Hazlett is one who argues, this way he says, we could, the ideal state of affairs for everybody might be one where everybody could do whatever he wanted. You could just, anything you like would be all right, but we realize if everybody had that preference, we wouldn't be able to get much of what we wanted, we'd just be fighting and being in conflict with each other. So it's to our advantage to establish certain social institutions and limit our are trying to get what we want. So we restrict each other. So morality on this view is a device or an institution. It's not that we get together and decide on this, but it's as if we had decided on this, we can use this as an explanatory hypothesis to explain morality. Morality is a system of instituted, people are trained to follow certain customs. And the result of this is that people will get more of what they wanted, what they want, at least in the long term, more than if they just acted as they immediately wanted to do. So on this view, morality is an institution or a device, but in the Rothbardian view where morality is objective, it isn't, morality isn't invented. It's discovered rather than invented. It's not that we just discover that certain rules will be in our interests. It's we're discovering objective truths about the world. What do we mean when we say, we're asking questions, is ethics objective? What do we mean by this? This is one of the most important topics in contemporary ethics. As most philosophers understand this question, let me say what is, do we mean when we say morality is objective? It's, can't our moral judgments true or false that are in a way that's not dependent on us or our opinions to answer no would be to accept subjectivism? Suppose as I, as in fact the case that I like vanilla ice cream, but you don't. So in a subjectivist view, neither of us is correct or incorrect. We would just have different views on what we liked. So a subjectivist would claim morality is like this. We just have different tastes as it were. Some people like one thing, other people like other things. It can turn out that a lot of people or most people like the same thing, but the preference is just subjective in the sense it's dependent on people's tastes. If we say morality is objective, we would be claiming that moral judgments are true, regardless of what people think about them. Just as say, we say we're, this we're now at the foundation of morality. At the Mises Institute, that's a matter of fact. It's not dependent on your thinking. You're at the Mises Institute. You could all be thinking you're somewhere else or wishing that I were somewhere else, but this, so here if you say morality is objective, you're claiming there matters of fact about morality. I'll just say, as a matter of interest, there are some people who just find this notion incomprehensible. For example, there was a book that came out recently I did a brief review of it. It was by Patricia Churchland, who's a well-known philosopher at the University of San Diego. She was commenting on a view that Tom Nagel has, that morality is objective. In the sense I've been explaining, she said, she just can't understand how anyone could say this once you give an evolutionary account showing how certain moral reactions develop. How could there possibly be anything more to say about it? She just found this view totally incomprehensible. So there are people who think that way. Of course, she's also what's called an eliminativist. She doesn't think, at least at one point in her career, she didn't think people had any beliefs at all. So I guess one might wanna know, does she really believe that this view is incomprehensible? But I'll leave that question to her to answer. I'm sure if I asked her, I'm sure she'd ignore my email. She would just dismiss it as hate mail. And she would be right. Now, I think it's important to see exactly what the issue is between Mises and Rothbard about objectivity. Mises certainly thinks that many judgments that have something to do with ethics are true or false. For example, suppose you say the free market enables people to obtain their preferences, or at least certain preferences, those that can be satisfied by consumers, who are trying to give people what they want to buy. So Mises would certainly say that's objectively true in the sense that just a matter of fact, it's not dependent on people's opinions that the free market works. It's just a law of social science that this is the case. But according to Mises, ultimate value judgments are not true or false. I suppose, for example, somebody doesn't wanna be in pain. And this isn't a means to some further end. It isn't that you say, well, I don't wanna be in pain because that's preventing me or impeding me from doing some work that I have to get out and I'm concentrating on my headache now so I can't do the work. So this, if you said that, then that might very well be something that's capable of being true or false that maybe the headache really is making you feel, preventing you from working. But if you just had felt you don't want the pain anymore, that's it. That, for Mises, would be an ultimate preference, ultimate value judgment. If you said pain is bad, that's just probably most people would agree with that. I suppose there are some who wouldn't, they're masochists who might reject that, but most people would accept that. So according to Mises, that would just be, there's no more you could say about that. That's a preference that people have, that's it. But Rothbard would disagree with that. He thinks that their value judgments are objective in the sense that judgments about facts are true or false. That's not to say that Rothbard doesn't give any place for judgments that are simply preferences. I mean, Rothbard wouldn't say, at least I don't think he would, I never ask him this, that if you like a particular kind of ice cream, there's some objective matter of fact about whether your preference is correct. But he would say that there are value judgments that are not means to some further ends that are straightforwardly true or false. So this is the point at issue between them. Now, how can Rothbard show that ethics is objective in the sense that it's appealing, it claims that certain ultimate value judgments are straightforwardly true or false? Rothbard does this by appealing to natural law, especially as developed by St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Catholic philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. Rothbard in his philosophical views was generally a thomist, although he wasn't a theist, but it does remind me of one philosopher who said he was interested in Thomas Aquinas, but he was no more than a peeping thomist. Now, there is a, oh, I see some people are just getting the joke now. Sometimes he's take a while, but we have time. All right, so there is a problem here. Aquinas was, as I mentioned, was a Catholic theologian who argued that natural law is part of divine law. So the question comes up, does accepting natural law commit you to accepting the claims of particular religion or, if not that, at least philosophical claims about God, in that, so according to Rothbard, and here he has some support in Aquinas himself, considerable support in Aquinas himself, that even though Aquinas thought that natural law was part of God's law, it arriving at the truths of natural law depended only on human reason. It didn't require accepting biblical revelation. Of course, it doesn't exclude that, but according to Aquinas and Rothbard followed him, doesn't require that you accept biblical or other revelation. It would be just discoverable by reason. Now, this is disputed. This is, if you're interested in Thomistic ethics, this is a big topic in dispute. It's a big topic in dispute, even if you're not interested in Thomistic ethics, that in fact is a big topic in dispute, but it's quite clear that Aquinas held this view because if you look at his, he wrote the, in addition to the Summa Theologica, he wrote the Summa Contra Gentiles, which is an apologetic word for those who don't accept Christianity to defense. So he says, well, there are some people who accept Christianity, some people who just believe in God, but are not Christians, some people don't believe in God at all. And he thought there we can show by reason some things to the people who don't believe in God at all. So Aquinas, even though he was a Catholic theologian, thought there was a, we could establish certain things just by reasoning about him. There's a famous quotation by the great Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius, who was also a theologian, not a Catholic. He was what's called an Arminian. He was a Protestant, sort of a critic of certain kinds of Calvinism called Arminian. So he had a famous sentence. He says, what we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded out the utmost wickedness. There is no God or the affairs of men or no concern to him. So the claim there would be we can show that natural law is true just by reason. Suarez said something about this. Now there's an interesting, I won't go into details about this. There's an interesting logical problem with the statement by Grotius. If you hold that God exists necessarily, it's a necessary truth that God exists. Then on the supposition that he's giving we would have a necessary truth. God doesn't exist and there's a necessary truth that's false. And if you have a necessary falsehood in your system then you're going to get into a whole lot of logical trouble. So maybe Grotius shouldn't have worded his claim this way. He should have just said we could establish the certain truths about ethics just by reasoning about it. If you didn't get that, don't worry about it. I'm not going to worry about it. It is an interesting logical point though I think. Now Rothbard draws an interesting parallel between divine command ethics and positivism. For those of you who are in Judge Napolitano's class you remember legal positivism is the view that law is just the command of the legislator. So something is law just because the legislator says it is law, it doesn't have to meet any requirements of natural law or anything else, it's just this is commanded. So according to divine command ethics at least in certain versions of divine command ethics, ethics has no basis in reason. Ethical rules are just commands of God. I should say there are versions more sophisticated versions of divine command ethics of which this claim isn't right, but I'm not going to go into that right now much as I like to, it's not relevant to this lecture and I digress enough in my lectures as it is. We don't wanna overdo it, but here the legal positivism we could say, well, if God commands something we could at least say we have good reason to do it because God is an omnipotent all good being. So if you command something we have good reason to do it but here the legal positivist would be arrogating to himself the divine prerogatives in acting as if he were able to tell us what to do as if he were have had divine capacities that just his command could make something right. So Rothbard says, no, no, this isn't true in law. It isn't true in ethics. There's a matter of fact about what's right that can be established by reason. Now, how does natural law show that ethical judgment are objective? Rothbard appeals to essences. What does it mean by this? Well, an object properties can be divided into two classes. One class or the essential properties, characteristics of the object, the object wouldn't be that object unless it had those properties. For example, it's the essence of water to be composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Nothing that isn't consist of hydrogen and oxygen would be water and the rest of the properties of the object are non-essential. So we have for any object, at least most of it, they're essential properties. Now, the followers of Ayn Rand carry this view to an extreme, they think that every property of the object is essential. That's a rather strange view, but that they hold that. So for them, if anything about an object were different, it wouldn't be that object. All the properties are essential, but that isn't the standard view in Aristotle or in Thomas Aquinas. So, but Rothbard, again, in the standard Tomas in Aristotelian way, thinks we can determine the essence of human beings just as we can for other things. But here there is an objection. Somebody might say, well, suppose Rothbard's right, we could determine what are the essential, what is the essence of a human being in an analogous way, so the way chemists can say the essence of water is to be composed of hydrogen and oxygen mixed in a certain way. If somebody said that, wouldn't this be part, just be part of anthropology, not ethics, how would an account of the human essence tell us what we should do? It would just be saying this is what human beings are, but that leaves open the question what human beings should be. So Rothbard answers these questions by appealing to the concept of flourishing or happiness. If you want to flourish, you need to do certain things and what those things are dictated by human nature. Now, so far, as you will, I'm sure have noticed, this is parallel to Mises. It just says if you want to flourish, you should do such and such. So this is like Mises claim, if you want peace and prosperity, you should favor the free market. So the question would come up, well, is there really any difference between Mises and Rothbard? Have I been wasting your time and devoting all this attention to suppose going into all this material about essences? Is this, do they all come down, does it just come down to the same conclusion with Rothbard just putting in a little different philosophical terminology? But here is the crux, the matter, is that Rothbard doesn't take human flourishing as a mere hypothetical. In the natural law, it's objectively true, this is a good, you should want to flourish if you, for some reason said, I just don't want to flourish, I don't care about happiness. You would be wrong about it in the same way that somebody would say confused H2O with H2SO4 would be wrong. Also, it would be probably more easy to show that the second person was wrong fairly quickly. So Rothbard here rejects what some people call Hume's law, which is that no ought judgment follows from is judgments. If you have just statements of what is the case, you can't deduce what ought to be the case. So Rothbard argues it from the fact that certain things are needed for human beings to flourish, it follows that we ought to want those things. If you don't want them, you should. Now, again, but then the question, this seems like an odd thing to say, how is it supposed to follow from the fact that we need to do certain things to flourish, that we unconditionally ought to do those things? Most people certainly want to flourish, but what if somebody didn't, what would be the point of saying to this person, well, you ought to, whether you want to or not? Again, suppose you just said, if you want to flourish, you should do that. That would be Mises position and also Ayn Rand's position, but it isn't standard natural law theory. Again, according to natural law theory, and I'm going over this a number of times because it is at first a rather counterintuitive view to many people, especially those people who've been corrupted by too many courses in economics. In standard natural law theory, what you ought to do isn't dependent on your choosing something, you simply ought to do it. So it's not the view that if you, as Ayn Rand says, if you choose to live, you should do such and such where the choice is up to you. In the standard natural law theory, if you said, I don't want to live, that would be wrong. You would be choosing something that's objectively wrong. So how do we get these non-hyperthetical odds? Would be one thing I just thought of. I could just say, I haven't the slightest idea and then finish the lecture. But I don't think that would be a good way to do things. It would also be a false claim. So I'm not going to do that. Not that I'm above making false claims from time to time. Now Rothbard notes that living things have certain tendencies. For example, a normal colt will develop into a horse and a colt that failed to do this would be defective. So we could say a good horse is one that develops normally. And in this view, an animal should develop according to its tendencies. That's just what should means that an organism should develop normally, ought to develop normally. Things ought to fulfill these essences. Their essences, this is just on this Aristotelian view, what we mean by ought, it's the way really you get an ought from an is is that the characterization of ought is just fulfilling your normal or natural tendency. So you're not making any logical leap. You're just giving the consequences of following that definition. So on this view, if you didn't want to flourish, you would be abnormal. You would be going against your natural tendencies. So you would be not wanting what you ought to want. Now, there's a famous objection to arguments of this sort, which is called the open question objection. And this was famously given by G.E. Moore. You remember, I talked about him in my first lecture on praxeology where Moore was the one who said there are certain facts that are obvious that are just, we know these intuitively. This is the same person, G.E. Moore. He made famous contributions a lot of different areas. So he said, well, suppose you say ought means, suppose you ask the question, ought we to do what we need to flourish? Should we do what we need to flourish? This question seems to make a difference. This question seems to make sense. We can ask, we wanna say, what are the reasons that we ought to want this or why maybe we shouldn't want this? Seems to make sense in people, in fact, to argue about this. But if ought just means what we need to do to flourish, the question wouldn't make sense. It would be something like saying, ought we to do what we ought to do? It would just be a tautology. So Moore said, just from the fact that we can ask the question and have it make sense, at least seems to make sense, that shows that ought doesn't mean what we need to do to flourish. But Rothbard could just reply to that, if we think the question makes sense, we're mistaken. So the argument, the objection here is really assuming what the point in controversy. I should say there are more technical ways to answer the open question argument. But again, fortunately for you, I'm not going to go into those in this lecture. My lecture is confusing enough as it is. Why make things worse? They're bad enough already. Now, Rothbard says that political philosophy is just concerned with part of ethics. It's confined to delimiting permissible use of force and threats of force. So ethical issues that don't involve force aren't covered in political philosophy. It's just political philosophy is just confined to this one sphere. And this separation between political philosophy and other parts of ethics comes from John Locke, the great British philosopher of the 17th century. And the 19th century German philosopher, Fichte, who was not generally regarded as a libertarian, although he was at certain stage of his career, he had strong libertarian tendencies, also stressed this notion of a separation of political philosophy from the rest of ethics. So political philosophy, just concerned with permissible use of force. So one point, also very important in Rothbard's view of trying to determine what we need to flourish, here he's quite a bit in contrast with Henry Haslett and Friedrich Hayek. He's suspicious of the role of custom and common law if they're just taken purely by themselves. He says we have to test them by reason and he doesn't accord them a presumption of truth. Although in certain areas he did, he did like the English common law tradition and he did play some emphasis on that, but he said we always have to examine this by reason. Now Rothbard thinks in order to flourish, each person needs to be a self-owner, meaning each person has the right to decide what to do with his or her own body. I mean, supposing let's say somebody needs a kidney, the person needs to have a kidney transplant in order to live and as it happens, you're a match for this person. So if the person doesn't get the kidney, then he's going to die, but you after all can get along with just one kidney you might have certain problems, but the other person would needs this in order to live. It's up to you whether you want to donate the kidney to the other person. It isn't, you can't be forced to do that. Of course, for me it wouldn't be a question, I'd just say absolutely not. That would be foolish. I would agree more with the character in the Woodhouse novel I quoted at the start of the lecture, but that many things in this lecture is beside the point. So it's up, it isn't, I should say, it isn't the notion of self-ownership isn't a philosophical notion. It isn't a philosophically problematic concept contrary to what some people think. Again, all it means is that each person should be in control of certain decisions about his own body, such as the kidney example or blood transfusion example I just mentioned. Now, I should say also self-ownership does not imply as some people wrongly think that the mind is separate from the body and owns it. You're not making, and talk about self-ownership, you're not making any assumptions about the mind-body relation. So self-and-self-ownership is what we call reflexive. Suppose you say, for example, somebody lacks self-esteem. We don't mean that the person's self lacks esteem for something else, namely the person's body. We just mean he doesn't regard himself very highly. So in the same way, a self-owner controls certain aspects of himself. It isn't that we're taking the self as something separate. Now, some people object to this and they say, well, that isn't real ownership because real ownership must involve a separation between the owner and what's own. I must say I find this an odd objection because even though I've argued before in the Aristotelian view, there are essences. Ownership isn't a thing in the world, it's just a term invented for our convenience. It doesn't have an essence, we can define it as we please. So if you don't like the term self-ownership, feel free to use some other term. Nothing turns on what word we use, but some people really will make a big fuss about this. Oh, you can't talk about self-ownership. This is illegitimate, but they're wrong about that. Take it from me. If you say that, if you give this view on the oral exam, the one I objected to, you won't do well, I guarantee it. So I'll just say we're running out of time, but how does Rothbard make the claim for self-ownership? He does it in certain way by contrasting self-ownership with other systems, like we could suppose we imagine a system where some people own others, where there's slavery. So Rothbard says, well, isn't it obvious slavery is wrong? So here, at least at this point, he's somewhat of a moral intuitionist, someone who thinks we can grasp the truth about some moral claims. For example, suppose we say it's wrong to kill babies for fun, and somebody said, well, how do we know that? Why is that true? I think we would say that person is missing the point. It isn't true owing to certain, its truth isn't dependent on accepting a particular theory or certain reasons, it just is true. So after he establishes self-ownership, Rothbard then develops an account of how people acquire property, where he says land and other resources start out unowned, and people own their own labor, and when they mix their labor with the unowned land in an appropriate way, they acquire the land, and property rights leave no room for a legitimate state. Now, on the last point, I see we're out of running on time, so I'll just conclude with an interesting point that's often missed, that how Mises differs with Rothbard on property rights. Mises thinks we need a legal system where people have stable property rights, because this is essential to how the free market works, but it doesn't follow that for Mises, these rights have to be acquired through homesteading. Any stable system of property rights will do, so Mises in fact is an opponent of traditional natural law theory, he rejects these kind of a Lockean appropriation views, this just isn't his way of doing things. You could certainly accept what Mises says about the benefits of the free market and still accept this Lockean view of ownership, but that isn't the way Mises does it. I remember there was someone who used to work at the Mises Institute who was trying to insist, no, no, Mises does accept the same views of property as Rothbard does, because those would be the ones supported by utilitarian theory, but that view isn't right. I don't think it's a coincidence that person isn't with the Mises Institute anymore, but I don't claim responsibility for that. So all right, well, we're out of time now, so thank you very much. Thank you.