 The title of my talk is a bit misleading. I'm afraid, although this is going to be just another boring praxeology lecture, although I will put in some comments about opposition to the great thinkers of the past. Sandy Klein reminded me that I should mention this point that some of you may wonder when you learn about praxeology, well, it's all rather abstract. What can I do if I learn praxeology? What is the good thing to do? Well, one thing you can do with it, you can always open a praxeology shop. Now, what I want to do is, I'm also the lecturers in, the title of the lecture is misleading in this way, that it's a 10 men who made the West. At my glacial pace, I'll be lucky to get through three or four. The people I'm going to be talking about are all falling to the category of dead white males. In recent times, there's been a movement that says we shouldn't concentrate on dead white males. This is racist or sexist, and there have been serious proposals by people to either get rid of these thinkers or to at least add other thinkers who don't fall into these categories. If we take the phrase dead white males, Bob Nozick objected to that. He said, the part of protest against dead white males that bothered him the most was the reference to dead people. He said, it's really not fair to attack those who can't fight back. Now, the first one I want to talk about is the great Greek philosopher Aristotle who lived from 384 to 322 BC. And one of the most important of his discoveries had to do with logic. Aristotle is really the person who very systematized the rules of deductive reasoning, especially syllogistic reasoning. A syllogism is something like all men are mortal. Socrates was a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. There were other Greeks who worked on other types of logic, such as the Stoics worked on various kinds of hypothetical reasoning, but Aristotle was the main one who systematized deductive reasoning. And I'd like to one point as you will learn by now, deductive reasoning is the way we reason in praxeology. And I think that people in thinking about this tend to concentrate too much on whether the premises are a priori or a posteriori, what the nature or the premises are. But the more important thing is the deduction that in deductive reasoning, if we have true premises and we reason validly in accordance with these premises, then the conclusion is guaranteed to be true. If we have a valid argument, which means one that follows the rules of deductive inference and the premises are true, that's called a sound argument. So all sound arguments are valid, but we can have valid arguments with that aren't sound that have at least one false premise. So the key point is that if we start with the premises that are true and we reason correctly, then we've got a true conclusion. But we have to be very careful about the way we reason. It's easy to make mistakes in reasoning. And I'd like to take as an example, I wanna give an argument that is sometimes here, one sometimes here is I understand that one of the lecturers used this argument, but in my opinion, it's not a sound argument, although the conclusion is true. I should say I warned the lecturer about this, so I'm not pulling any surprises. The argument I have in mind is this. It's claimed that we can't know future knowledge where that's reference either to our own knowledge or the knowledge that we would, the society will have. We can't know future knowledge because if we did know the future knowledge, then it wouldn't be future knowledge. We would know it now. So it's a contradiction to say we could know future knowledge. Now, how many of you would be inclined to say that's a sound argument? Oh, how many would think there are problems with it? Oh, well, does anyone have any idea what the problem might be or anybody wanna try anything? Quantifier shifts now. Well, that's very often a problem, but I don't think not this time, but that phrase is one I'm somehow familiar with. Well, I think now, one thing we have to be clear about, I think the conclusion that we don't know what our knowledge is going to be in the future is very likely true. People are coming up with all sorts of new inventions and other developments that people didn't predict and it seems very unlikely that people would be able to predict all the new developments. But the point at issue is not whether the conclusion is true, but whether this argument is correct. Now, to see what is wrong with it, I think we have to distinguish two meanings of future knowledge. We would have future knowledge in the narrow sense, which would be knowledge that we don't have now but will have in future. And then future knowledge in the extended sense, which would be knowledge that we have now and will continue to have in the future plus the knowledge that we don't have now and will have in the future. Say, we know now that two plus two equals four, presumably we will continue to know that in the future unless certain educational reformers have their way. So we have to distinguish these two categories. Now, if we take knowledge in the strict sense of knowledge we don't know now but will know in the future, then of course it's true that we don't know future knowledge now because we simply define future knowledge as knowledge we don't know now. So it must be the case we don't know future knowledge. But the problem is if we go to the extended sense where we have knowledge, future knowledge is knowledge that we continue to have plus knowledge we don't have now, then it doesn't follow that we can't know our future knowledge and the reason for that is we have the future knowledge is knowledge we have now plus knowledge we don't have now and will have in future. It could be the case, it hasn't been ruled out that knowledge we don't have now but will have in the future is an empty class. It could be that we have all the knowledge now that we will have in future and it hasn't been ruled out. The argument that we can't know future knowledge in the strict sense doesn't rule out the possibility that we never learn anything new. It would be perhaps an example might make this clear. Suppose I say, well, I'm going to give a multiple choice test and no one will get all the answers correct because you can't get the correct answers to the ones you miss. So no one will get the correct result. That would be silly because it doesn't follow just because you can't get the right answers to the ones you miss that you are going to miss any. So you see it's quite the same point as in this argument that you can't know future knowledge because if you did know it, you would know it now. The argument I think was used, one of the ones who first used it was Carl Popper in the introduction to poverty of historicism that came out in 1957. It's a very good book, but I don't think that argument is right. So as I say, Aristotle systematized logic and we have to be very careful the way we use logic. Now another point at which Aristotle made a major contribution in one relevant to praxeology is in the notion of action, which is the key concept in praxeology, action is the use of means to achieve ends. Aristotle has this idea that this is the way he analyzes human behavior, that he has this clear teleological structure of action and he used this notion of ends or goals as a way of developing a system of ethics and one of the key ideas in understanding Aristotle's ethics, we could get at in this way, we would say what is it if we're looking to say what is good, what is the good? According to Aristotle, when we say something is good, we have to say a good what it's what he called an attributive adjective. Say something is, if I say something is a good knife, it would be something that's sharp and able to cut or for all sorts of objects, we could ask what is a good thing of that kind? Aristotle thought there were certain natural kinds in the world, there were substances of various sorts and we could ask what is a good thing of that kind? That's to be distinguished from a predicative use of good, where we say something like promoting the greatest good of the greatest number is good, that that would just say this state of affairs has this quality, but we wouldn't be using it as an attribute of adjective, we wouldn't be saying, we're not saying, we say promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number is good, we're not saying there is something of which that is true. This is a big division between Aristotelian ethics and some of the more modern ethical systems, for example, in utilitarianism is a system where we take good to be a predicative adjective. Jean Moore is a famous philosopher who talked about the good in that way. The way this applies to ethics, if we say what is a good human being? Aristotle answered this, a good human being is a human being that exercises the proper function of a human being. The way, according to him, we determine the proper function is we say what is the quality that human beings have that distinguishes them from other entities? He said this was being a rational animal. According to him, the function of ethics is to develop ourselves as rational animals. In doing this, we'll achieve our flourishing or well-being if we develop according to our proper function. As you will imagine, those arguments are quite controversial. There are many people who say the notion of function doesn't apply to human beings. It applies only to constructed objects. You can talk about the function of tools or other things that we construct, but it doesn't make sense according to those people that talk about function of human beings. Murray Rothbard accepted Aristotelian ethics, so he thought there was a human essence in that the way we achieve our well-being is to develop ourselves as our rationality, and then he went on to talk about what was necessary to do that, and as we'll see later in the lecture, if I get that far, which is very doubtful, we'll see how Rothbard changed around altered Aristotle's ethics. At one point before we leave Aristotle, is this, there are some people who argue that the notion of a human essence or nature has been refuted by modern biology and that biologists take species to be simply interbreeding populations, and so this renders Aristotle's account obsolete. I don't think that's a very good argument because biologists might, for their own purposes, have a different way of looking at species but it doesn't follow from that that what Aristotle said is wrong. He's trying to answer, he was trying to answer different questions, and his way of conceiving the human essence is based on a philosophical analysis of the concept, so whether he thought, although he thought that this could also be applied to biology, perhaps he's wrong about that, it doesn't invalidate what he said from the standpoint of ethics. Oh good, I finally got to the next slide. I was hoping I would. I mean I know I'm slow but this is ridiculous. Now I want to talk now about John Locke who had a new view of natural law and this is one that Murray Rothbard took over but before going into that, he was one whose Locke has been one who's been subject to attack by some of the politically correct people. There is an influential book by the philosopher from Jamaica, Charles W. Mills called The Racial Contract. So what Mills argued in his book was as you probably know from studying your political philosophy, you no doubt come across the notion that Locke talked about a social contract in which people start out with natural rights and then they agree to form a society and once they've done that they have another contract by which they form a government. So this sounds, when you first hear it according to Mills, this sounds like a reasonable idea or there are no doubt objections to it but it doesn't sound like there's anything bad about it but according to Mills, there is something bad about it and could anyone guess what that is, what's bad in this notion of the social contract? Well, that's the standard philosophical objection to it but that wouldn't show it's really evil or bad. Yes, you're on the right track there. What he says is this contract is based on a prior contract which is this, the notion of the contract really applies only to white men and the prior contract is to exclude people of other races especially blacks from society. So he says, well, this is assuming that the whole notion of a social contract, the purpose of it is to justify enslaving people of other races or enslaving blacks and he adduces in support that Locke invested in companies that participated in the slave trade and he wrote the Constitution for one of the colonies that talked about what they should do on slave plantation. What I would say there is that may well show inconsistencies in Locke's personal behavior but it doesn't show anything wrong with the notion of the social contract and it certainly seems a legitimate question to ask what rights people have based on a social contract. Also a problem with Mills' argument is that there are a number of places where Locke explicitly condemns slavery for anybody except for, he allows cases where people are taken prisoner in war and then become enslaved in return for not being killed that something found in Hobbes as well. So there really isn't any textual evidence for what Mills said but regardless of whether Mills is correct I think we have to look at what is this new version of natural law that Locke pioneered and that Murray Rothbard accepted and the new version has to do with the political philosophy in Aristotle's ethics, once he's got this notion of flourishing he says that we start off with families and then the families get together and form a city or a polis and he says the purpose of the city is to promote virtue so in the city the government would be taking a very active role of promoting virtue, say would require people to worship the gods of the city and it would be very much a closed community and Locke said no this is wrong each individual should be regarded as having rights independent of society, we start off with individual rights holders and each person owns himself or herself each person is a self-owner and since each person is a self-owner if there are, if since resources start off not owned by anyone each person can acquire resources by what he called mixing his labor with the resources that metaphorical expression means doing something, appropriating them doing something to fence them off from other people of course what you have to do to acquire resources is not something that's really specified it would have to be dependent on particular societies and if the question comes up why if there are all these resources around why do individuals have a right to take them one of the arguments Locke gave is that once we have money introduced into an economy it's not the case that if one person appropriates certain resources that leaves fewer resources for other people to appropriate they won't have a chance to appropriate anything because once money exists it multiplies the available resources to people but no longer is a constant sum game where one person's acquisition is at the expense of everybody else's so this modification of natural law was one that Rothbard accepted I should mention there is one interpretation of Locke which was you find in Leo Strauss' book Natural Right in History and also in the work of the Canadian Marxist C. B. MacPherson called the political theory possessive individualism which argues that Locke really didn't believe in individual rights at all he was just a really utilitarian who was trying to favor he favored institutions that would develop the market economy which was on the rise in the 17th century when he was writing this is rather a Marxist interpretation it might be surprising that Leo Strauss favored this view since Strauss is generally viewed as a right-winger conservative figure but in fact when Strauss was really following the ideas of the British socialist not a Marxist but a British socialist R. H. Tawny Richard Henry Tawny who had this view that the individualism of the incipient market economy displaced the more communal property that had been present early so Strauss was friends with Tawny and he was viewed as he was really in that respect a disciple of him I remember when I mentioned to my great teacher Walter Starkey who knew probably everyone important in England from the 1920s through the 1950s I mentioned Leo Strauss he said oh yes yes he was a friend of Tawny so that was how he immediately identified him so as I say that's an interpretation of Locke but I don't think it's very plausible it depends on Strauss' method was really very often involved the author of a particular text doesn't mean what he appears to mean on the surface there's a hidden or esoteric meaning that one has to dig out and this usually involves denying what the author appears to be asserting that seems like a way you could really say that an author favors whatever you want him to favor you just say there's evidence against it from the text well the text doesn't really mean that doesn't sound like a very good idea although I suppose it has its points and its favor if you want to really argue for something it's a bit underhanded but for some people that isn't a problem might actually be a virtue oh good now we get into another slide yes so this one now I want to talk Mises of course we know as the developer of praxeology and I want to say a little bit on how his approach to praxeology differed from that of Murray Rothbard the way Mises viewed praxeology was we're developing we're asking what is involved in the concept of action and he was trying to draw various consequences of this concept so he was arguing mainly from its rather from the point of view of theory of knowledge it's an epistemological approach it's saying we what is the way of accounting for our knowledge of certain economic phenomena phenomena so he would say exposing we're trying to understand money say we see people exchanging objects for paper money or checks or other types of financial transaction he said unless we had the concept of money we wouldn't be able to understand what was going on we would just see people passing passing pieces of paper we wouldn't understand this so in Mises view we need certain concepts in order to make sense of what is going on in the economy and Murray Rothbard had a rather different view his view was more emphasizing metaphysics meaning the nature of things in the world and what Rothbard said is we can grasp necessities in the world say we see various objects say we see various colors we don't grasp these necessities through our senses say we say I see that something is green like my face so I we say we see this this wouldn't involve any knowledge of necessities but he thought that by abstraction we can get knowledge of what is necessarily the case what must be the case so this is when he said something was known a priori he meant more we know it as necessarily true it's something that we grasp say we say human beings act we grasp that this is part of the human essence to act whereas Mises approach was epistemological how do we know things now one of the contributions Mises made depends on his it really is an answer to a problem raised by his system of ethics now Mises didn't accept natural law at all he thought that ethical judgments are just subjective preferences so people might it might be the case that if I say I something is good that just is an expression of my preference for that so it would seem that that would make it hard to argue with other people about what's good because we would just have one set of preferences against someone else's but Mises thought that everybody or nearly everybody favors peace and prosperity one of his reasons for thinking that is that people who aren't interested in material prosperity will tend to die out so the ones who are left with ones who favor peace and prosperity and then he thought although that preference is subjective we can't say it's objectively good that peace and prosperity are ought to be something that people want people in fact do want these things and then we can ask well how are those things to be achieved so we can have if you want peace and prosperity you should do such and such and Mises thought those ideas were all were something that could be established and he argued that we could show on that basis that the free market ought to be established given that everyone or nearly everyone wants peace and prosperity and the way he did that was that he said well they're only certain they're only really two possible systems of organizing the economy either the market or socialism which is essentially planned economy sometimes in his book on socialism he distinguishes a third system called syndicalism but I won't go into that fact I'm not going to be able to go into much much more so he said there's no third system that third system would be one of interventionism but he said we could show by value free arguments that the interventionist measures won't achieve the purpose of the people favor them they'll just interfere with the market so although Mises had this rejected natural law he thought there could be an argument that would give us support for the free market Rothbard didn't ex-thought that there was a great deal in Mises points but he thought that we needed natural law as well that he thought Mises arguments against natural law were not correct so those are a few of the thinkers who made the West and I thank you for listening to my rather boring comments