 I don't know whether you've noticed it or not, but I've noticed it for years that when I have to listen to somebody or to talk to someone, to understand a position, I have to work very hard to understand. I have to focus my mind. And then now and then, all at once, I find myself drifting away thinking about football or who knows what. And then I got to focus my mind back on. Our consciousness, our intelligence, requires application, requires effort. In other words, to think, to understand the situation that we're in, whether it's listening to a lecture or trying to figure out the best way to get to Copenhagen or whatever it is, we have to focus or direct our mind. Human flourishing is rational living and requires the use of our mind, but it requires a focusing or a direction of our mind. And let me sort of start a drawing. Think of an electrical circuit. Think of completing an electrical circuit. And think of there being a gate that needs to be closed in order for the circuit to be complete. In a way, this old drawing expresses what I'm thinking about when I say, in order to use your rational capacity, in order to think, to understand the situation that you're in, you have to be self-directed. You have to initiate the effort to maintain a cognitive focus on what you're doing. Human well-being involves this activity at every aspect of life, even in deciding how to use your leisure time, how to relax, you need to use your intelligence. Being your intelligence to bear on the problems of living is a fundamental human thing, and it requires self-directedness. Now, I'm going to go ahead and do a drawing. There is no one single activity saying, now I am going to think, ah, now I've done it. I'm in focus. No, it isn't quite how it works. The activity of reasoning, of thinking about life, is manifested in different issues and problems, is manifested, in fact, in different virtues, and again, for simplicity's sake, think of everyone having the power or the capacity to use their mind, and think of each one of these, this is just, again, for simplicity, being electrical circuits, gates that need to be closed, have the virtues that you need. What exactly does integrity require of me in this situation? What is integrity? How does it work? You've got to figure this out. You've got to apply it. Okay, that requires some use of your mind. You have to exercise the effort to have that virtue, and for corresponding other virtues. And then, let's put it together some more. What are the goods of human well-being? Now I said something like wealth, health, knowledge, friendship, and you could say if we put the whole thing together, we flourish, we flow. Now, that in a very, very rough, and I mean rough, and ready way, is this idea of flourishing. It's an idea in which we have the goods that our life requires, and we have the virtues by which to obtain, maintain, and integrate them, put them together. And we could, you could come to St. John's and take a course in ethics from me, and I'd talk about what's all involved with this, and talk about the moral knowledge, and try to defend this idea. This is what we'd be talking about, okay? But I want to say that this, without being too philosophical, but just playing in a common sense sort of way, is what we all want, what we all need. We want to make the most of our lives. We don't want to be fools. We want to know really how to obtain health, how to have the knowledge, how to friendship, and we want to have the virtues, we want to have some kind of character. That's what we're about. This is important, I think, for us as libertarians or classical liberals to focus on, because we spend so much time talking about liberty, talking about individual rights, myself included, that sometimes people forget that what we're concerned with is living a worthwhile life that we are not just politicians, not just theoreticians. We are fundamentally human beings, and we all want to live well. Okay, so with this sort of idea in mind, let me now talk about something I mentioned in my earlier talk, and that something is, I'll give you another word, pronesis, which again in English comes out to mean something like practical reason. The Latin word for it was prudencia, which came to be prudence, which regrettably in today's terminology is considered something that has nothing to do with morality, but looking at this notion of udimonia or human flourishing, you might notice, you say well look, yeah we need to have these virtues, I need justice, I need integrity, I need charity, I need to have some courage, I need these goods, yeah okay, but how does that help me figure out what I'm going to do tomorrow at work? How does that help me figure out what career to choose? Who to be a friend with? You know what type of problems, real everyday problems we have? How do I handle that? Well from Nesis is the idea that we need not only to use our reason to discover what is really good for us, what virtues we need to have, we need to use our reason to apply these virtues and goods. We need to use our reason to obtain, maintain, and coherently integrate as I said before these things. We need to figure out what the good looks like for us in the concrete situation. Now let me illustrate this again, let's go back and let's talk about person one and again let's let these lines represent virtues and let each one of these parts represent, what did I have, health, wealth, knowledge, friendship, and let each one of the parts of the pie represent the goods that we need. Now that's sort of an abstract way of looking at it. Now think about it for a second, what role, how should our life look? Well maybe for some of us the pie would look like this, maybe for some of us the pie would look, what I'm trying to show is that the proportion of the pie that belongs to knowledge, health, wealth, and friendship, which I'm just using for, you know, it's much more complicated than that, that can be a different proportion for different persons. And the virtues that you need will have a different role. In other words, have you ever heard people criticize capitalism for saying in capitalism you let the consumers decide and then we get a society that is mediocre, a society that likes McDonald's rather than filet mignon, a society that likes, what's the latest thing on television as opposed to some art and entertainment thing, you know, haven't you ever heard that sort of criticism? And it's an interesting criticism because I think that criticism supposes that when we talk about the human good or human well-being or human flourishing that this or one of these is the only acceptable form of human flourishing that we can have. The idea that I'm suggesting is that if you understand what practical reason is supposed to do, practical reason is supposed to decide what form this human flourishing must take in each of our lives. Now I'm not saying that you can choose to live without the virtues. I'm not saying that you can choose to live without these human goods. But I am saying that you must learn to figure out what these look like for you in your life and in your situation if you are to flourish, according to this point of view that I'm presenting. So there is no platonic form, one set of things. This is what flourishing is. Yes, well I should be contemplating the eternal truths and the life of the mind is superior to the life of wealth. Not necessarily. You need to have all of these things in your life, but the particular way it's put together is something your practical reason has to determine and decide. So this goes with this handout that I gave you also with my talk on the other day. If you look at that handout again, you'll see that I talk about the human good being individualized. Do you know what an RDA requirement is? An RDA requirement. In the U.S. on the side of a cereal box, we have required dietary amounts. And they say how much a person needs are these different types of vitamins and minerals. And they put the specific amount down on the side of, okay, what I'm thinking about is that when people think about the human goods, wealth, health, friendship, et cetera, they think about it in a way that there are RDA amounts, required amounts, that the particular weighting, that the particular emphasis is already set so that when I talk about human flourishing, I'm talking about something that's the same for each of us. What I'm arguing, what I'm saying is that's false. Lossom and diversity are consistent with there being an objective human good. And that practical reason, reason not that you can use from an arm chair, not that you can deductively determine, but reason used by the individual in the concrete situation, that is what is required for us to flourish. Okay? Now, this is a very long and complicated argument, okay? And this is just the barest of outlaw, okay? You get my idea, though? Okay, now, now let's go over now and talk about capitalism. And particularly, let's talk about the issue that someone that I think we're all familiar with has discussed, FA Hayek and the role of economic planning in society. Now if you remember, the issue of planning, according to Hayek, has to do with the use of knowledge in society. And Hayek makes it quite clear that the issue is not whether to plan or not to plan. The issue is whether, is who will do the planning? From central planners or individuals throughout the economy. Now, when it comes to scientific knowledge, when it comes to abstract speculative knowledge, Hayek admits that it might be the case that such knowledge would best be handled by a central authority. Yet, Hayek makes it very clear that that's not the kind of knowledge that a market works on. That's not the kind of knowledge that makes a market an efficient system. The type of knowledge that makes a marketplace work is knowledge that is concrete. Knowledge that is particular. Knowledge of what something is now, which could be otherwise, tomorrow. To again mention something that I said in my talk the other day, the type of knowledge he's talking about is knowledge that is particular and contingent. And Hayek in this essay, the use of knowledge in society, talks about the possibility of central planners having computers that could be fed all the vital statistics. Now, let me read from this paper. Yet this forgets that statistical aggregates are arrived at, quote, by abstracting from minor differences between things, by lumping together as resources of one kind items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, unquote. Yet it is just the differences that abstraction ignores that are crucial to adjusting one's plan on how to use his resources. Indeed, to anyone familiar with the daily economic decisions of, for example, a plant manager, or even their own life, it must seem that only rationalistic hubris could make one believe that central authorities could have such concrete information. Okay, so when we talk about what makes the market work, there is a type of knowledge that is available to the participants in the market that cannot be obtained or held by central planners. This knowledge is concrete knowledge. Now, Hayek says that when you go to explain the efficiency of a competitive system, you need to always understand that this knowledge is not already there. To those of you who are in economics, you might have heard the model of perfect competition, which assumes absolute knowledge on the part of everyone. That ain't the way the world works. What you have in a market is you have limited knowledge and you're trying to communicate that knowledge through a system of prices. What makes the system work is what Hayek calls entrepreneurial insight, insight which discovers opportunities for profit and knowledge of the concrete situation. It's that upon which the efficiency of the system depends. Now, with that, again, very brief view of what Hayek thinks makes the free market, the capitalist system, efficient in works. In this emphasis on concrete particular knowledge, I would now like to relate my comments about practical reasoning and woodymonia or human flourishing to what Hayek's view of how the market works. Let me read. Hayek's recognition of the role of entrepreneurial insight in the use of concrete knowledge is important when it comes to examining the role of that practical reason plays in the operation of a capitalist system. In order that a concrete situation can be seen as affording an opportunity for a more efficient use of resources and the necessary action taken, the practical reason of the individual must be exercised. A particular situation which could be otherwise must come to be recognized by an individual as a way to achieve the goal of efficiently allocating his resources. Knowledge of ways, I'll repeat this, knowledge of ways to achieve a more efficient use of a resource is not provided like manna awaiting distribution to the cognitively hungry. Such knowledge does not exist prior to and apart from the alertness and insight of persons who are acting in their own concrete circumstances to efficiently allocate their resources. It should be realized that entrepreneurial insight in attaining practical knowledge of the concrete opportunities for economic explanation and the use of practical reason in the creation and maintenance of a morally worthwhile life are not separate activities. They go together. The insight that is necessary for someone to see an opportunity for profit in the concrete knowledge he possesses is an act of reason. And while this is not the only insight that is needed for a person to flourish, it is a necessary part of the self-perfection process. It is often forgotten that, quote, apart from the pathological case of the miser, there is no economic motive, but only economic factors conditioning are striving to other ends. What an ordinary language is misleadingly called economic motive means merely the desire for general opportunity, the power to achieve unspecified ends, unquote, is higher. There is no such thing as the economic side of life, as the economic side of a person's life that exists in splendid isolation, separate and apart and unrelated to the rest of a person's life. While economic activities do not and indeed should not exhaust human action, economic factors affect everything a person does. There can be no pursuit of human flourishing that does not involve the exercise of practical reason in the creation, maintenance, and use of wealth. So one of the things I'm contending is that this is indeed a part of our well-being, and that's there. And the practical reason must be involved in figuring out, you know, how you're going to put it together. Involve! So the evaluations, what weighting are you going to put on each one of these? Okay, so how much time are you going to have with friends? How much time are you going to work on your health? I mean, are you going to have a Nordic track? Are you going to have a stair climber? You're going to go to a health club? Are you just going to walk in the field a lot? How are you going to do it? How are you going to, what concrete decision are you going to make? Okay, that decision that you're going to make involves the use of your time and resources. So that decision can be expressed in economic terms. Indeed, a system of free prices expresses the valuations or weightings people have made of basic human goods. Prices are the result of the exercise of practical reason by persons regarding how to use their time and resources so as to attain the goods and services their flourishing requires. And while it is true that some of these judgments of practical reason can be mistaken, I mean, how many times have we made those decisions that we go, ah, stupid. It is also true that human flourishing could not exist in an economic system that did not allow practical reason to play a central role in its operation. So, I have a question. If the human good is indeed something that has to be individualized, something that was going to allow for different weightings, so it's going to vary. And if that requires a person's use of their own judgment dealing with that concrete knowledge that Hayek talks about, then only a system that allows that kind of reason to work is going to be consistent with human flourishing. Hayek notes economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life, which can be separated from the rest. It is control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served. What values are to be rated higher and which lower? In short, what men should believe and strive for, unquote. Now, that was Hayek from the road to serfdom, and indeed he was talking about the threat that central planning has. I'm using that, but I'm using that now to relate this to a certain view about morality, a view that emphasizes the importance of the individual taking charge of his life to make the decision about what the good life will look like for him or for her. That is an important thing because, and now this is the final point I want to get at, I'm very practical about what needs to be done in changing a society. And I'm really reluctant to, from an armchair or from a podium or a lecture, and try to say, this is what a particular society should do. This is how you should go about bringing liberty into your country. I think you have to look at the situation and decide. And so there's all sorts of variations, but what I'm very much convinced about is that when you make your practical solutions, when you make your suggestions about how to solve this or that problem, know the facts as the previous speaker said, know the science, get this down, make a full effort to really solve a problem. But when you do that, also couple that with a commitment to not only liberty and individual rights, but also a commitment to the idea of human moral well-being, of human flourishing, of people figuring out exactly what form their flourishing is to take. Because even though we are all human beings, we are all different. I think this is a very, in a way, commonsensical idea. If you think about it, I mean you need to go to the doctor, you need to go to the doctor, but how much? As much as I do, more, less, you want a friend, who will be your friend? How many friends? What type of friends? You want wealth, how much wealth? A lot, so much wealth? It varies. All of us make our own choices. All of us try to figure out what's the proper combination. Only a system that will let that kind of reason work and making economic decisions is going to even allow for the flourishing to be achieved, not to mention, of course, that such a system is consistent with self-directedness and people being autonomous and free. So think about that. Think about the idea that what do you know about morality before you even sit in a philosopher's class, maybe that's the first thing. Think about morality just as an everyday person and the questions that you face, how to use your time efficiently, how to have friends, what virtues you need. If you do that, I think you're going to see that capitalism is not only a system consistent with liberty, but capitalism is the only system that allows people the chance to putting together a worthwhile life for themselves. So we're not just for liberty. Indeed, I think we're for morality. Questions?