|
|
||
 |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||
|
Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||
|
Revisiting the Intellectual Heritage of a Free Society (continued)
The Late Modern Period For John-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), natural law underlies economic behavior making it universal, orderly, and predictable. He emphasized the role of reason noting that people tend to be rational, but also that they are not omniscient. Say rejected the labor theory of value and stressed that production is the cause or source of consumption. Production is primary and necessary for a person's existence and metaphysically precedes consumption. He explained that wealth is created by production (not by consumption) and that a man's production determines his ability to demand. Say maintained that there could be no long run glut of commodities supplied because prices in a free market will adjust to bring about proper proportions. He also championed savings noting that they cause subsequent growth in capital and in aggregate output. Furthermore, Say was against taxation and loans to the government because they reduced the wealth that would be exchanged in the private sector. British defender of individual freedom and critic of state coercion, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), believed that inexorable human progress develops naturally when people are free and their moral rights are protected. His law or doctrine of equal freedom declares that a person's freedom is restricted only by the equal freedom of others. When equal freedom is the ultimate principle of justice individuals are happier and more flourishing. Spencer states that happiness can only be attained if a person is allowed to express his right of freedom to do all that his faculties induce him to do. Spencer's case was deterministic and based on Lamarckian evolutionary theory. His notion of universal causation leads him to deny any theory of free will. Spencer maintains that human nature adapts over time to the conditions of social existence and that acquired characteristics are imparted to later generations. He explains that reason is an adaptive mechanism and an apparatus to promote an individual's life-sustaining actions. Spencer says that habitually-repeated live-affirming actions lead to pleasure and become intuitive and that new emotions adapt to new conditions. Spencer explains that social order does not require deliberate design and that evolution leads to differentiation. Spencer thought that individuation was a value generated by the evolutionary process. He envisions change from a homogenous social structure to a heterogeneous one with the highest stage of community life being one of laissez-faire capitalism. Distinguishing between a militant society, in which war prevails and the government controls the lives of the citizens, and industrial society where people produce and trade peacefully, Spencer observes that the state interferes with natural evolutionary processes. He anticipates the development toward a society where conduct is regulated by moral principles and competitive markets. In ethics, Spencer argued for a type of rational egoism. He explains that the evolutionary process is progressive in a moral sense given the appropriate conditions of a free society. Spencer contends there is an innate and evolving moral sense through which men access moral intuitions and from which moral conduct can be derived. This moral sense represents the accumulated efforts of inherited and instinctual experiences. Carl Menger (1840-1921) developed a number of fundamental Austrian doctrines including the causal-genetic approach, methodological individualism, the connection between time and error, and more. Menger incorporated purposeful action, uncertainty, the occurrence of errors, the information acquisition process, learning, and time into his economic analysis. He was an immanent realist who considered a priori essences as existing in reality. As an Aristotelian essentialist, he wanted to investigate the essences of economic phenomena. His goal was to discover invariant principles or laws governing economic phenomena and to elaborate exact universal laws. Menger acknowledged the co-existence of different but complementary approaches to economics &endash; the realistic-empirical and the exact. To find strictly ordered exact laws he said we had to omit principles of individuation such as time and space. This entails isolation of the economic aspect of phenomena and abstraction from disturbing factors such as error, ignorance, and external compulsion. Menger taught that there are objective laws of nature and that goods have objective properties that make them capable of fulfilling men's needs. He states that goods have no intrinsic or inherent value and that value is a judgment made by economizing individuals regarding the importance of particular goals for maintaining their lives and well-being. People have needs as living, conditional entities. The value of goods is contextual and emerges from their relationship to our needs. Subjective value (i.e., based on one's personal estimation) can be viewed as individual, agent-relative, and objective. According to Menger, judgments are subjective but the truth or untruth of them can be determined objectively. The truth requires correspondence of facts with the judgment that is made. Menger thus contends that economic subjectivism is compatible with philosophical realism. The Contemporary Period Building upon the work of Menger, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) reconstructed economics upon the foundation of a general theory of human action. His goal was to develop an edifice of irrefutable, coherent, universally applicable, formal economic theory using logical deduction and the sole axiom of human action without employing any other empirical or analytical assumptions. He says that it is possible to deduce the entirety of the logic of economic behavior from the fundamental undeniable axiom that men act. Mises contends that the concept of human action is universal, intuitive, a priori, and automatically built into each person's mental structure. His action axiom is the introspectively known fact that men act. As a neo-Kantian, Mises sees the category of action as part of the human mind. He contends that all of the categories, theories, or laws of economics are implied by the action axiom. Not only was Mises dissatisfied with Menger's Aristotelian methodology, he was also critical of Menger's value theory. He said Menger's value theory was not consistent enough and that it retained elements of the objective value theory of the classical economists. Mises' sense of value is formal and indicates nothing about whether an end is, in fact, valuable. He speaks of nonnormative, personal, and subjective acts of valuation. His subjective view of value takes human ends as the ultimate given. All action is therefore viewed as rational. For Mises, economics is a value-free science of means rather than ends. Mises' utilitarianism proceeds from the method of axiomatic reasoning from true premises &endash; his utilitarianism is a priori. He deduces that division of labor and social cooperation are more effective and more efficient than social conflict as a means of attaining one's self-interest. Social cooperation is voluntary, contractual, maximizes individual free choice, and results in greater prosperity in society. Mises views social cooperation and coordination as a proxy for happiness which is similar to the Aristotelian notion of human flourishing. He says that although economics is value-free and apolitical, it is still the foundation for a free polity. Mises explains that value-free economics leads a person to form a free society because the achievement of one's goal is far more likely when people are left free than when they are not. He maintains that it is by means of its subjectivity that praxeological economics develops into objective science. Mises, the praxeologist, takes individual values as given and assumes that individuals have different motivations and prefer different things. The philosophy of Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is a systematic and integrated unity that is founded on the axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness. Rand explains that knowledge is based on the observation of reality and that to attain knowledge a person employs the processes of induction, deduction, and synthesis. Her epistemology transcends both apriorism and empiricism. She contends that it is possible to obtain objective knowledge of both facts and values. Rand says that the essential characteristics of a concept are epistemological (she really means contextual and relational) rather than metaphysical. Rand maintains that values are epistemologically objective when they are discovered through objective conceptual processes and that they are metaphysically objective when their achievement requires conforming to reality. She argues that man's life is the ultimate value and the standard of value for a human being &endash; a creature possessing volitional consciousness. Her naturalistic value theory states that it is the concept of life that makes the concept of value possible and that reason is a man's only judge of value. Rand states that it is possible for a person to pursue objective values that are consonant with his own rational self-interest. According to Rand, ethics is rational, objective, and personal. Her rational egoism is based on the Aristotelian idea that the objective and rational end of a human being is his flourishing and happiness &endash; egoism is a virtue because nature requires it. A person has the natural right to initiate his own conduct in line with his own judgment. She views rights as the link between a person's moral code and society's legal code. Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) did not accept Mises' neo-Kantianism, but still argued that the action axiom is true-he says that a person becomes aware of action through experience in this world. Rothbard, working within an Aristotelian or Thomistic tradition, maintains that the action axiom is a law of reality that is empirical rather than a priori. Rothbard contends that economics as a science is value-free and that economics and ethics are separate disciplines. He does go beyond economics to formulate a metanormative objective ethics that affirms the essential value of liberty. Rothbard explains that liberty deals with matters of private property, consent, and contract. He maintains that liberty supplies a universal ethic for human conduct and provides a moral axiom &endash; the nonagression axiom which holds for all persons no matter their location in time or space. Rothbard derives a radical dualistic separation between political ethics and personal ethics. He distinguishes between the metanormative sphere of politics and the normative domain concerned with moral or ethical principles of one's flourishing &endash; there is a huge difference between having natural rights and the morality or immorality of the exercise of those rights. He considers nonaggression to be an absolute principle prior to any foundation for personal morality. An individual's personal moral values are separate from, but dependent upon, the existence of a liberal social order. Being morally neutral regarding various individuals' values and goals, Rothbard ended his ethics at the metanormative level. Considering the state to be a totally evil coercive institution, he was an anarcho-capitalist who advocated natural order with competing security, defense, conflict resolution, and insurance suppliers. Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) was concerned with the nature, scope, limits, use, and abuse of reason and formulated a largely antirationalist theory of a free society based on the inevitable ignorance and fatal conceit of intellectuals who think that they can design an economy better than what would result from the voluntary interactions of individuals. Developing an elaborate attack on constructivist rationalism, Hayek explains how little men know about what they design. He says that bureaucrats, whose fated conceit is their undue faith in reason, have no way to make intelligent decisions with respect to deliberately designing or planning an economy. Hayek observes that centralized policy leads to the suppression of creativity, growth, and progress. He argues that relevant knowledge cannot be centralized in the hands of a person or a group who make such policy. Seeing a very limited role for reason, Hayek says that any person's knowledge is limited, incomplete, and uncertain. He, therefore, favors concrete practical knowledge and institutions and social order that are the product of human actions but not of human design. Emphasizing the importance of decentralized decision making, Hayek explains that markets employ knowledge beyond what could be acquired by a central authority. He says that knowledge is a product of trial, error, and adaptation resulting in unplanned evolutionary progress. For Hayek, all knowledge is essentially tacit existing in the habits or dispositions of people to act in a rule-governed manner. He views social institutions and rules of conduct as vehicles of knowledge. According to Hayek, moral conventions are not objective, invariant, or immutable and they are a part of the evolving and spontaneous social order. He states that moral conventions frequently are unable to be articulated. His evolutionary epistemology and ethics emphasize the socially-constructed nature of man &endash; norms are ingrained in the biological and social structure of men and their markets. Hayek contends that people develop ideas passively and intuitively. Hayek does not defend free will &endash; he says that free will is a phantom problem. As a post-Kantian, he believes that the categories of men's minds evolve. Hayek has a mechanistic and evolutionary concept of science and does not acknowledge natural laws or natural rights. He does say that society requires rules of conduct that are minimal and spontaneously generated. Hayek distinguishes between two types of law &endash; general rules of justice (i.e., general principles of conduct) and rules concerning the internal operations of government. Despite this, he ultimately accepts some form of welfare safety net. In the end, Hayek was not a consistent thinker and he failed to complete a systematic political and economic philosophy. The neo-classical Chicago School economist, Milton Friedman (1912- ), did not provide a philosophical case for a free society. Instead, he relied on skepticism, ethical subjectivism, the notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, and the results of detailed empirical studies of government intervention. Friedman explains the errors of statism, skillfully refutes interventionist arguments, and applauds the coordinating mechanism of the free market, but has little to say about the nature of man or the ethical basis of capitalism. His highest ethical principle is the absence of coercion &endash; he explained that political freedom could not be attained without economic freedom including private property. Friedman attempts to demonstrate the superiority of a free society on purely empirical grounds. Friedman's major achievements occur in the fields of monetary history, monetary theory, and consumption analysis. His economics is actually somewhat Keynesian in that it is macro-economic and demand-focused. Friedman's positive economics says that a theory is useful if the theory allows individuals to predict occurrences of some phenomenon. He desires accurate predictions and simplified assumptions. Friedman rejected introspection and the realism of assumptions. He even applauds the virtues of descriptively false assumptions and has said that wildly inaccurate representations of reality in assumptions are acceptable if accurate predictions occur. Friedman is a falsificationist who states that confirming a proposition does not add to the probability that a theory is true. For him, abstraction involves a theory in which many actual characteristics are disregarded as absent in the theory. Friedman views any theory as deficient and false when it does not specify all of the characteristics of reality including all irrelevant, non-explanatory, and extraneous ones. Public Choice economist, James M. Buchanan (1919- ) has analyzed the nature, workings, and failings of governmental, political and bureaucratic processes. Expanding economic analysis to politics, he built upon contractual and constitutional foundations in his theory of political and economic decision making. Buchanan's methodology includes rational choice, individual utility maximization, contractarian rights, and politics as exchange. Buchanan employs deductive logic and conjectural history to discover how a constitutional order could have come about. He states that a legitimate social structure must ultimately stem from individual choice. His proceduralist contractarianism uses the Hobbesian model when he deduces contractarian consent for limited government as an alternative to anarchy and lawlessness. Buchanan's social contractarian approach repudiates the possibility of natural law, natural rights, and objective moral values. Although Buchanan's hypothetical state of nature is somewhat Hobbesian, he also believes that man has Lockean characteristics &endash; Buchanan is not as pessimistic as Hobbes. Buchanan's contract theory of the state explains that people agree to a social contract because of their desire to survive. He observes that men make constitutional decisions under a veil of ignorance or uncertainty and that under this veil unanimity is both conceivable and likely. He argues strongly for the principle of unanimity at the constitutional stage of collective choice. Buchanan states that constitutional-level law places restrictions on individual freedom that permits people to progress. It follows that a coercive agency, the state, originates by necessity to enforce the social contract. Buchanan discusses two levels of public choice &endash; the first or constitutional level establishes the rules of the game and the second or post-constitutional level deals with playing the game within the rules. Constitutional politics sets boundaries for what ordinary politics is allowed to do. According to Buchanan, ordinary political decisions are often made by majority voting &endash; the unanimity principle is not feasible at this stage. Buchanan wants a new constitution that requires much higher than majority agreement at the post-constitutional level in order to make it more difficult to fund government activities. Harvard philosopher, Robert Nozick (1938-2002), tried to justify the state and to dismiss anarchy. Nozick begins by merely assuming the existence of Lockean individual rights &endash; he makes no attempt to derive them from a philosophical examination of human nature. He sees natural rights as limits to action or as boundaries that circumscribe the "moral space" around an individual. Unfortunately, his moral space doctrine and Lockean natural rights are not underpinned by a convincing moral theory. Nozick's sole reason for his theory of rights is a deontological appeal based on intuition. As a Kantian deontologist, he has also said that there exists no unambiguous concept of human nature that always defends individualism. As many have observed, there is an incoherence, inconsistency, and incompleteness in Nozick's body of thought. Nozick says that in the state of nature, a man may enforce his own rights by defending himself. He contends that it is from this state of nature that rational and rights-respecting behavior will lead to a limited government form of political order. He attempts to show how a state would arise from anarchy through a process involving no morally impermissible actions. Nozick explains the emergence of the state, as dominant protection agency, through self-interested choices of people in the state of nature. He says that a monopolistic defense agency will arise and agree to supply protection to all those who have contracted with smaller protection agencies that it drives out of business. Many critics have commented that, if force had been used to establish the state's monopoly, then the state may have come about immorally. Nozick's entitlement theory of justice emphasizes just acquisition of property and is based on Lockean ideas. He explains the role of the government is to protect natural rights including property rights. Nozick also defends the idea of process equality which means equal treatment before the law. Nozick wants people to be free to voluntarily join together in the pursuit of a good life. He has said that the minimal state should go no further than enforcing the most basic level of ethics required for peaceful cooperation &endash; a state limited to protection against force, fraud, and theft and concerned with enforcing contracts is justified. According to Nozick, only negative rights (i.e., the ethics of respect) should be coercively enforced by the state. The ethics of respect requires voluntary cooperation to mutual benefit and its principles mandate the respect of another's life and autonomy. He says that the ethics of respect is the foundation that should be compulsory across all societies &endash; all other ethical levels are optional and concerns of personal choice. Nozick emphasizes that there is a duty not to interfere with another individual's domain of choice. Thomas Sowell (1930- ) draws from Hobbes, Smith, Hayek and Friedman in developing his constrained or tragic vision of man and society. Accepting the realities of the human condition, Sowell sees trade-offs but no solutions. He explains that a man's personal knowledge is far less than organized systemic knowledge and that markets economize on the knowledge needed by any one individual &endash; no one has to possess complete information in order for the economy to convey relevant information through prices. Championing the supremacy of systemic rationality, Sowell states that knowledge consists largely of the unarticulated experiences and rationality embedded in traditions, customs, and systemic processes such as markets, families, and languages. He maintains that individuals lack the intellectual and moral ability for deliberate comprehensive planning based on intentional rationality. Sowell views freedom as a process characteristic and rights as boundaries or rigidities that limit the exercise of government power and establish areas for individual discretion. A leading Catholic social theorist, Michael Novak (1933- ), relies on he work of Aristotle, Aquinas and the Scholastics, Tocqueville, Maritain, Locke, Smith, and the Austrians to develop his concept of democratic capitalism which consists of a market economy, a limited democratic government, and a pluralistic moral-cultural system. Novak particularly heralds the Austrian School of Economics for its contributions to the restoration of economics as a field worthy of study by moral philosophers. He views personalism as described in Catholic papal encyclicals especially Pope John Paul II's view of the human person as subject, to be consonant with Austrian economic theory. Novak is thus concerned with "the acting person." Novak explains that the human person is free, self-responsible, and accountable before God. He says that the right of personal economic initiative fulfills the image of God inherent in every person because each one of us is capable of insight and love. Concerned with the moral virtue of creativity, Novak maintains that people need a social system to enable them to create wealth in a systematic and sustained manner. Explaining that the human mind is the cause of wealth, he describes human economic progress as the capacity to create more in a lifetime than one consumes. Novak sees the free market and private ownership leading to positive-sum transactions in which each party benefits. Skeptical of state power, Novak sees the limited state and the rule of law as man-made means of securing liberty and justice for all men. He espouses the principle of subsidiary, freedom of association, and the importance of mediating institutions. Novak has done much to improve upon and update the teachings of Aquinas and to bring the Catholic Church ever closer to embracing capitalism. Lessons Learned This brief review has shown that throughout history thinkers have held a range of perspectives with respect to the theoretical defense of a free society. We can learn a great deal from a survey of political and economic thinkers. We can draw from and integrate the teachings of many of them in our efforts to construct a conceptual foundation and edifice for a free society. My next essay will see what we can use to elucidate a theory of the best possible political regime on the basis of proper conception of the nature of man, his actions, and society. Such a paradigm for a free society will address a range of issues in metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, economics, ethics, and so on in a systematic fashion. We will find that many of the ideas employed have had origins deep in the history of political and economic thought. There are a number of contemporary thinkers whose writings, I believe, agree with most of what I will present in my next essay. Among the most prominent are Tibor R. Machan, Douglas B. Rasmussen, and Douglas J. Den Uyl.
|
|||||||
|
Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Book... Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Magazine...
|
|||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
|
||
|
|
||
[Homepage] [Newsletter] [Search] [Support the Academy] [Link to Us] [Contact the Academy] [Citing Articles from Our Website] [Privacy Policy & Disclaimer]
Copyright 1998-99, 2000-01, 2002-03, 2004-05, & 2006 by The Radical Academy. All Rights Reserved.