 All right, I think we'll get started now. I should tell you my voice hasn't gotten any louder over the past few days, so let me know if you can't hear. I do remember another story I think is from Noam Chomsky. He once said, anyone who can't hear me, please put up your hand. Then he said that anyone who put up his hand is lying. What I'm going to be talking today, it's a comparison of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard on ethics, mostly on the foundations of ethics. And there'll be rather more of Rothbard than Mises, because Rothbard's position is a little harder to grasp. Mises has a very simple view. It's easier to understand, so I'll be concentrating more on Rothbard. As you, of course, know Rothbard and Mises have very similar views about policy. Both very strongly support the free market. They're against socialism and government intervention in the economy. There is, of course, the difference that Rothbard was an anarchist. He thought we didn't need a government at all. It was dangerous to have one. And Mises wasn't, but the state that Mises accepted was an extremely limited one. I think one reason Mises didn't recognize the possibility of private competing defense agencies was what he thought of anarchism. He was thinking of the anarchism he knew when he was younger, where anarchism was considered very much a leftist movement associated with the overthrow of capitalism. And of course, he was opposed to that. And there are also differences in the conception of property rights, but I'll get to those later. The main differences between Mises and Rothbard have to do with the foundation of ethics. Rothbard, in contrast with Mises, thought that ethics is objective. What do I mean by this? Suppose we say that we ought to promote the free market. If you hold ethics as objective, that's making a claim about what we ought morally to do. It's an absolute judgment that this is what you should be doing, mainly promoting the free market. It isn't making a claim of this kind. If you have certain preferences, say, you want peace and prosperity, then the way to do that is to promote the free market. An objective ethical judgment would be one that's claimed that it's a true judgment. Justice say, we would say, it's true now that you're all in a room at the Mises Institute. That isn't a matter of realizing preferences that you have. Your coming to the lecture might be a good case of realizing your preferences. But the fact that you're here is just a fact. It isn't an expression of preference. It's just the case. So the view that moral judgments are objective would be that moral judgments are true statements about the world. Of course, they're not referring to physical objects. If you say, for example, that killing people for fun is wrong, that isn't wrong. Doesn't refer to a physical object. But nevertheless, if you hold that moral judgments are objective, it's true that killing babies for fun or killing people for fun is wrong in the same sense as factual judgments are true. That, at any rate, is the claim of those who think that moral judgments are objectively true. One of the most important controversies in ethics is whether morality is objective in just this way. As mentioned, most philosophers would understand this question, is the question means can moral judgments be true or false? If you say no, they can't be, that's to accept the subjectivism of some sort. Example, suppose I like vanilla ice cream as I, in fact, do. I'd much rather have some ice cream now than give this lecture. Probably you would rather have ice cream than listen to this lecture, even if, in fact, you don't like ice cream. That's probably still be true. So suppose then I like vanilla ice cream, but you don't. So neither of us is correct or incorrect. It's just you have a certain preference, I have another preference. So subjectivists think that moral judgments are like this. All you can say is this person prefers this. Other people prefer something else. So in the case I mentioned before, killing people for fun is wrong. One hopes that everybody or nearly everybody would accept that. But that would, in the subjectivism, that would just be an expression of preference. You wouldn't be able to say people hold that killing people for fun is perfectly all right are mistaken, it's just you might very well want to stay away from such people. But they wouldn't be saying something that's false in the way that they would be, say if they said 2 plus 2 equals 5, they would just be mistaken about that. So the subjectivists would say people who hold different moral, make different moral judgments from the ones we make are not mistaken. It's just they have different preferences. So we have to see exactly what the differences between Mises and Rothbard about objectivity. Mises thought that there are many judgments people make that have something to do with ethics that are true or false. For example, suppose you say the free market enables people or better consumers to attain their preferences because the producers will have a financial incentive to satisfy. That statement has something to do with ethics because it's saying how people can realize their preferences. But on Mises' account, it's perfectly true. It isn't just a subjective judgment on his part of the free market has that characteristic. It's something that is the case. So what then is the difference between Mises and Rothbard? Why is Mises a subjectivist whereas Rothbard isn't? Mises thought that we can divide value judgments into ones that are judgments about a means to achieve an end and ones that are about ends themselves where there is no further end to which that end is a means. In other words, they're ultimate ends. It ends such that if you say, why do you want that, that can't be answered. That's just it. Suppose, say, I'm in pain. I have a headache. So you say, I don't want to have a headache anymore. So someone said, well, why don't you want to be in pain? I probably wouldn't be able to have an answer to that. I would just say, I don't like pain. I don't want to be in pain. That's it. So what Mises holds is if for these ultimate ends, it doesn't make sense to say that they're objective in the sense that it's true or false, that you should have them. If we say people should want to avoid pain, that wouldn't make sense if you take that as meaning that's an objective matter of fact that they shouldn't want to avoid pain. That's just a preference that people have. Nearly everybody has that preference, but that doesn't make it objective, just as if I give an example. Suppose there are very few people who like the taste of eating dirt. So suppose nearly everybody has that preference. That wouldn't make it, on this objectivist view, an objective statement that people should avoid the taste of dirt. It's just a preference that people have. So Rothbard disagrees with that. He thinks that there are at least some value judgments or objective in the straightforward sense in which judgments about facts are true or false. Of course, in Rothbard's view and the objective view, it makes room for some value judgments that are just subjective, an believer in moral objectivity. Notice I'm being very careful not to call these people objectivists because that's a particular philosophy. So by believers in moral objectivity, I don't believe in, I'm not referring to objectivists. I'll mention a little bit later where the objectivists fit in in this classification. So someone who believes in moral objectivity could accept that there are preferences that are purely subjective. The Spanish philosopher Alfredo Delores once said that everybody prefers either apples or oranges. Someone who thought that was true wouldn't have to say, it's an objective judgment that one is right and the other is wrong. Now, if you take Mises' view, it seems very easy to understand it's something people just have certain preferences, then they would have the question, how do they achieve these preferences? Nearly everybody wants peace and prosperity, according to Mises, so then the main question of ethics is how do we get peace and prosperity and the way we get it is through social cooperation through the free market. That's the principle way we get this. But Rothbard's view is a bit harder to understand because we've wondered, well, how is it that value judgments, ethical states, can be true or false? We can understand, say, how factual judgments are true or false, how we can say, if I say there are more than five people in this room, we could see how that claim is true, how it would correspond to reality. But how can we show, if we claim that ethical judgments are objective, how can we show that they are true? How do they correspond to reality? So Rothbard does this by appealing to natural law. You'll see you can't get away from natural law because in the class on constitutional law that Judge Napolitano is giving now, he talks about natural law, a great deal also. So regardless of which session you went to, you're not going to get away from natural law. That isn't a natural law itself, but it's in fact the case. Now, the version of natural law that Rothbard appeals to is very close to the views developed by St. Thomas Aquinas. So this raises a problem. As you know, Aquinas was a Catholic theologian who argued that natural law was part of divine law. So this raises a question. Does accepting natural law commit you to accepting the claims of particular religion, or at least philosophical claims about God? Because at least on Aquinas' view, natural law was part of divine law. Now, if you know that Rothbard wasn't a religious believer, you'll probably anticipate the answer to the question is no. It doesn't commit you to this. Rothbard points out that even though Aquinas thought natural law was part of God's law, it depended only on human reason. It wasn't dependent on accepting biblical revelation. So here Rothbard is in accord with Aquinas himself because Aquinas said natural law is the part of divine law. You can deduce just by using reason. And we find later on this view was held very famously by the Dutch legal theorist Hugo Groesch isn't earlier by Suarez. Groesch has had a sentence that was quite notorious when he gave it. He said, what we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness that there is no God or the affairs of men are no concern to him. So what Groesch was saying there is if there isn't a God, of course, he believed in God. He was a theologian himself. He was held a variety of kind of variety of counted. He said, if there isn't a God, this natural law would still be whole than that was Rothbard's view. One point Rothbard makes in this connection, I think it's a very interesting one. I haven't seen other writers mention this. He draws an interesting parallel between divine command ethics and legal positivism. Divine command ethics is, at least in certain versions, holds that ethics has no basis in reason. It just consists of commands by God. Say, you got us commanded, we should do this, or avoid doing that. That's all there is to it. So what Rothbard notes is that view that morals consists just of divine commands is very similar to the legal positivist view of law. Legal positivism was a movement that developed in England in the 19th century with the jurist John Austin, Hans Kelsen in the 20th century, who was a great friend of Lord of Van Mises, held this view where law is just the command of the sovereign. There isn't any basis for it other than what the legislator has decreed. So all there is are decrees of the legislator that that's it. There isn't any law. If you could hold, on the positivist view, you could hold various ethical judgments you want about the law. But they wouldn't be law themselves. Law is just command. And the natural law view is different. Natural law view is that laws have to conform to the dictates of reason. So it's quite a different view. Incidentally, if you're interested in Kelsen, there is a lecture on YouTube that he gave at Berkeley. You can hear him lecturing. He had been a professor at Berkeley. He came there after he was a refugee from the Nazis. And he's taught at Berkeley for a long time. You can hear him lecturing. He had a very dramatic lecturing style unlike the present lecturer. Sometimes I remember one person wrote about my lecturing style. I sound like a droopy dog on sleeping pills. So I won't say what some of the other people have said. Never mind that. Now, if you take this view of natural law that they're supposed to be claiming that ethical judgments are objective, how is it supposed to show this? Well, how do you do that? Rothbard appeals to notion of an essence. What do we mean by this? Well, you can divide the properties of an object into two classes. One class is the essential characteristics of the object. What the characteristics of the object needs in order to be that object if it didn't have this characteristic, it wouldn't be that object. For example, water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. If you have some liquid that tastes a lot like water but isn't composed of hydrogen and oxygen, it isn't water no matter how it tastes. So being composed of hydrogen and oxygen is an essential characteristic of water. Whereas, say, something like having a salty taste might be true of particular samples of water, but it wouldn't be an essential characteristic of water. So it's not an essential property. So we have then notion, objects have essential properties. Now, Rothbard, following natural law tradition, says that we can determine the essence of human beings just as we can for other things. So it's not only that water, other substances, have essences with salty human beings. Of course, the essence of human beings wouldn't consist entirely of being composed of hydrogen and oxygen, all that would be included. So you might say, well, isn't there an objection here? Wouldn't this try to determine what the human essence is? Wouldn't that be a task for anthropology or one of the other sciences, just as, say, determining what the essence of water is would be a matter of chemistry? What does this have to do with ethics? How would it tell us what we should do if, say, we could find out, here are the essential properties of human beings? How would that tell us what people should do? Rothbard answers this question by appealing to the concept of flourishing or happiness, where this is to be understood not as a subjective feeling. Doing certain things will make you feel good, but it's an objective view. These things are required by the human essence in order for someone to flourish. You need certain things in order to flourish that is dictated by human nature. So far, we're exactly parallel to mesas, although mesas doesn't use the language of essences, because what we're saying is, if you want to flourish, you should do such and such. This is very much like mesas' claim. If you want peace and prosperity, you should favor the free market. It's a hypothetical judgment. If you want this, then you should do that. And then mesas said, well, in fact, everyone, or nearly everyone, he has one phrase, everyone except for a few anchorites, which are hermits, want peace and prosperity. So therefore, you should favor the free market. So we haven't really gotten a difference yet between mesas and Rothbard. But here's the key difference is Rothbard doesn't take human flourishing just as a mere hypothetical. It's objectively true that this is a good, you should want to flourish. So if you don't, you're wrong about it. If you say, well, I just don't care about flourishing. I don't care about what you say is flourishing. You're wrong. You're making a mistaken judgment according to Rothbard. Here Rothbard is differing with a fume philosophy called usually called Hume's Law. And it's called Hume's Law because Hume was the one who wrote about it. That seems quite a good reason to call it Hume's Law. I'm glad at least some people laughed at that. So Hume said from the particular judgments about matters of fact, nothing follows about what ought to be the case or not. Say, what would be an example? Suppose we say smoking causes lung cancer. So does it follow that you shouldn't smoke? Hume would say, no, that doesn't follow because that's a judgment about what ought to be the case. You shouldn't smoke. But from the factual claim, smoking causes lung cancer, nothing follows about what you should do. Rothbard thinks it follows that at least we ought to want what would make us flourish. We can see some intuitive plausibility to Rothbard's claim. Would it make sense, say, for someone to say, well, even though smoking causes lung cancer, I don't care about getting lung cancer. It might very well make sense for someone to say, I'll take the risk of getting cancer because I just like smoking so much, but would it make sense for somebody to say, I just don't care about getting cancer? It would at least seem, maybe it doesn't, it did remind me of a joke about, when in the 1940s and 50s, when studies were coming out about the bad effects of cigarette suggestion, how should cigarette companies counter that? And one suggestion was they should have an advertising campaign, cancer is good for you. So this doesn't really make sense. So this is an illustration of how this is an illustration of a natural law of you that given certain facts about human beings, we do get objective judgments about what's good or bad for them. So we have then the question, what suppose you accept humans' law, how is it supposed to follow from the fact that we need to do certain things to flourish that we unconditionally ought to do these things? Most people certainly want to flourish, but what if you don't? Suppose somebody responded to Rothbard and said, well, you're right, if you want to flourish, you should do these things, but it's up to you to make that choice. This, as I mentioned a number of times before, this is Mises position and it's also Ayn Rand's view, but it isn't standard natural law theory. What Rand held in here, I'll make good on my promises, I rarely do make good on my promises, but this is one exception where I said I'll show how Rand objectivism fits into this scheme of classification. Rand held their objective truths about what's good for you, but each person has a fundamental choice of whether he wants to live. If you want to live, meaning by that, live as a rational being, then you have to do certain things, but that choice is up to you. So that's a very different position from classical natural law theory. So in the natural law theory, what you ought to do isn't dependent on your choosing something, you simply ought to do it. That's it. So again, to go over this one more time because it's a very essential point to note is if you have a choice, then morality consists of hypothetical imperative. If you choose to live, you should do this, but standard natural law theory isn't satisfied with it. So how then, as I say, it seems like the hypothetical view is quite easy to understand because if we have this preference, this is what we should do, but non-hypothetical odds rather harder to grasp, how do we get these non-hypothetical odds? Rothbard notes that living things have certain tendencies. For example, a normal colt will develop into a horse, say a colt that didn't do that would be defective. So a good horse would be one that developed normally or we could have all sorts of other examples, say a tree that grows the way trees do, the way trees do when it isn't stunted would be developing normally a tree that didn't would be defective. So an animal or a living organism should, in quotation marks, develop according to its tendencies. This is what should means in the natural law of view is to develop in accord with your natural tendencies and we should, on this view, want to flourish someone who didn't want to flourish would be abnormal. So you can see how Rothbard in the natural law supports avoid counter-Hume's law. Remember, Hume says, well, just from judgments about what's factually the case, we can't derive odd judgments and the natural law of view is yes, you can because you're defining odd in a certain way as following certain tendencies so then you can derive the odd from the is because the tendencies are a matter of fact and they define what following these tendencies defines what should or odd judgments consist of. Now there's a famous objection to this style of argument which was advanced by G. Moore in his famous, in his book, Principia Ethica, which came out in 1903. This is what's called the open question argument. Suppose we ask ought we to do what we need to flourish? Remember, that's what the natural law supporters say, we ought to do what we need to flourish. Well, if ought means what we need to do to flourish, the question would make no sense. It would be like saying ought we to do what we ought to do. But according to Moore, the question does make sense. We could say, well, why ought we to do what we need to flourish? The question makes sense. So Moore said, if the question makes sense then we can't say that that's just what ought means. That shows that there's some, the meaning of ought can't be defined. Actually, what Moore thought was the meaning of good can't be defined but I'm just modifying the argument here to make it more relevant to this case. So go over this point one more time. It's perhaps a bit difficult. Suppose we say, well, a triangle is a three-sided plane figure. So suppose we say, well, this is a three-sided plane figure but is it a triangle? Asking that wouldn't make sense because that's just what a triangle is. So Moore said, for any proposed definition of good or ought, you can ask that question. It does make sense. So that shows you've got the wrong definition or the term can't be defined just because asking that makes sense. So I guess the answer with natural, the various answers of people who support natural law could make that in fact the question that we just claimed would just show people aren't familiar with the correct definition but it wouldn't show that the question fact does make sense. It would just be say people don't realize the truth of natural law theory. Now that's an explanation of more of the foundational issues involved in Rothbard's conception of natural law. Now in Rothbard's own work in ethics, he confined himself pretty entirely to political philosophy, which in his view concerned only parts of ethics. In Rothbard's view, political philosophy is confined to delimiting permissible use of force where we can include fraud there also. So ethical issues that don't involve force aren't covered and political philosophy consists of what people's rights, establish what people's rights are that give the claims they have that it's permissible for them to use force to defend. This separation of political philosophy in this way from other parts of ethics where we say political philosophy is concerned with force, threats of force, separate issue was developed by John Locke and Rothbard's view was that Locke had extended classical natural law theory in important ways and this was one of the main ways. And the German 19th century German idealist philosopher Fichte also held this view of political philosophy at least at some stages in his career. So according to Rothbard, we use reason to determine what we need to flourish. And here's one difference from Rothbard and Friedrich Hayek and Henry Haslett that Haslett and Hayek place a great deal of stress on custom in determining what to do. Say in Hayek particularly, the fact that something is a long established custom would give you substantial, although not insurmountable reason to support that, that something is established by custom so that gives you good reason to support that. Rothbard tends to be more suspicious of custom he would think the precepts of political philosophy have to be deduced by reason and say if something was a common law tradition that wouldn't be enough to support it, you would still have to evaluate it by reason. So just the fact that something is a long established custom doesn't give it a presumption of true. Now, what do we need in order to flourish? Rothbard thinks everybody needs to be a self owner. Each person has the right to decide what to do with his or her own body. Say, for example, would be supposing, we have this kind of case, someone needs a kidney transplant. You have two kidneys and you could get by with one. This person really needs the kidney. So does this give him a claim on your kidney? After all, if he doesn't get it, he's going to die and you can get along with just one of your own. Rothbard tends to be, no, you have the right of disposition over your body. It's your body that's all there is to it. Now, some people try to make self ownership into a philosophically problematic concept, but it really isn't. All it means is that each person should be in control of certain decisions about his own body, such as the example of the kidney donation or say another example would be having to give blood to the people. There are philosophers, David Miller is an Oxford philosopher, thinks it's perfectly all right to have compulsory blood donations, but this is a very anti-Rothbardian view. And so in what ways it seems pretty unproblematic, but some people say, oh well, self ownership implies that the mind is separate from the body and owns it, but this isn't what self ownership means. It doesn't suggest any view about the relationship between the mind and the body. It's simply a statement that each person should be in control of his own body. So the self in self ownership is reflexive, say we say somebody lacks self esteem. We don't mean that the person's self lacks esteem for something else, name of the person's body. We just mean that the person himself doesn't regard himself very highly. So in like fashion, a self owner controls certain aspects of himself. But if you don't like the term, some people will say, well, ownership involves a separation between owner and what's owned and you can't separate yourself from your body in this way. So I think, so they don't like the term self ownership. Well, it's perfectly all right if they don't want to use it. They don't have to, but I find this an odd objection because self ownership isn't a thing in the world. It's a term invented for our convenience unlike water or human beings of the natural law. You was right. Self ownership doesn't have an essence, it's just a term people have introduced. So Rothbard makes the claim for self ownership by contrasting it with alternative principles such as slavery in which some people own others or a system in which certain persons own parts of everybody else. So in arguing against slavery, he takes it as obvious that slavery's wrong. Well, if you just think about slavery, you'll see that he's wrong. So Rothbard in this way is somewhat of a moral intuitionist. He thinks we can grasp the truth about certain moral claim just by immediately say just the way you say it's wrong to kill babies for fun. If somebody asked why is that true, he would really be missing the point. So given self ownership, Rothbard proceeds to develop an account of how persons acquire property where land and other resources start out unowned and people own their labor and when they mix the labor with unowned land or do somehow do something to the unowned resources, they acquire this and the property rights leave no room for a legitimate state. Now, Mises also thinks we need a legal system that gives people stable property rights. He says the free market couldn't function without property rights, but it doesn't follow from this that Mises view that rights have to be acquired through homesteading, as Rothbard says, any stable system that permits the free market to operate will suffice. So Mises doesn't take the reject Zalachian account. And in his view, he thinks, well, property tiles can't be traced back to their original appropriated. So in Rothbard's and Mises view, the real owners of productive property, the masses of consumers who are spending decisions determine gains and losses for these owners. So a Misesian could support a homesteading system as the best option, but unlike Rothbard, a Misesian himself wouldn't say people have a natural right to property. So those, I think, are some of the basic differences and similarities between Mises and Rothbard on ethics. Thank you. Thank you.