Social Action and Social Norms

solidether / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

Every acting being has a morality, that is, has preferred ends and acts on those preferences. The ultimate end which lies behind every action is that end which is never a means to any other end – this ultimate end can be called satisfaction, happiness or pleasure.

Social norms should not be confused with asocial morality, that is, the correct choice of means to the attainment of the ultimate end. Of course, the majority of the problems associated with attaining satisfaction are social in nature. It is fairly straightforward for Crusoe to build a shelter in order to get relief from the elements which, in turn, will bring him satisfaction. The branches of a tree will never retaliate against him.

But it is more difficult to attain satisfaction through social relations. For instance, think of your parents, friends, spouses, employers, employees, bill-collectors, police, judges, Presidents, and so on. These people are all imposing their will upon you and resisting the imposition of your will upon them. And, unlike tree branches, they have a memory, they can connive and they retaliate or even aggress.

Asocial Action and Right Ends

deflam / Foter / CC BY

It is safe to say that the vast majority of moral rules – explicit or otherwise –concern interpersonal interactions, that is, social behavior. However, it will be advantageous if we can analyze the bare logical structure of moral language and moral behavior without the complexity of social interactions, at least initially. Murray Rothbard recommends the Crusoe thought-experiment for this purpose in his Ethics of Liberty:

One of the most commonly derided constructions of classical economic theory is “Crusoe Economics,” the analysis of an isolated man face-to-face with nature. And yet, this seemingly “unrealistic” model, as I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere, has highly important and even indispensable uses. It serves to isolate man as against nature, thus gaining clarity by abstracting at the beginning from interpersonal relations. Later on, this man/nature analysis can be extended and applied to the “real world.” The bringing in of “Friday” or of one or more other persons, after analysis of strictly Robinsonian isolation, then serves to show how the addition of other persons affects the discussion. These conclusions can then also be applied to the contemporary world. Thus, the abstraction of analyzing a few persons interacting on an island enables a clear perception of the basic truths of interpersonal relations, truths which remain obscure if we insist on looking first at the contemporary world only whole and of a piece.

Murray Rothbard – Ethics of Liberty, ch. 6

Moral Language

chrisnicolson / Foter / CC BY-NC

What is good? What is evil? What should I do? What should I not do? These questions are questions about morality, or ethics. There are at least four levels of connotation at work in moral language:

• A value-laden expression of an individual’s own sentiments about a particular kind of human behavior (distaste or preference).
• A value-free description of prevailing social norms.
• A value-free assessment of the suitability of specific ends to bringing about an individual’s satisfaction (in the technical sense of this term).
• A value-laden assessment of the correct resolution of a dispute

Moral language is complicated by the fact that human language tends to mash together the different connotations in ways that make it difficult to keep track of what exactly is being said.

Consider the proposition: “It is wrong to engage in homosexual sex.”

Suffering and Satisfaction

Sisyphus by Franz Ritter von Stuck

We must consider both the ultimate end and all clear sensory evidence, to which we refer our opinions; for otherwise everything will be full of uncertainty and confusion.

Epicurus – Principal Doctrines, 22

The point where to rest being known, the object of pursuit is then determined; and, that being determined, a calm unperturbedness may be attained to. To that calmness there will succeed a tranquil repose. In that repose there may be careful deliberation, and that deliberation will be followed by the attainment of the desired end.

Confucius – The Great Learning

In his many lectures and books on the subject of Buddhism, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama identifies the four noble truths of Buddhist philosophy as the common foundation of all schools of Buddhist teaching. They are:

• The fact of suffering
• The origin of suffering
• The cessation of suffering
• The path to the cessation of suffering

Notice that each of the four noble truths is concerned with dukkha – suffering.

Thoughts on Violence

The Island

Violence is related to voluntaryism in that we can roughly define choices influenced by threats of violence as non-voluntary. Violence is not a uniquely human experience. In fact, human social interactions are remarkably non-violent by comparison to the rest of the natural world. Violence between biological organisms manifests in every conceivable manner but always has a singular aim: control and use of physical resources for the benefit of the organism and its offspring or other kin.

From the perspective of a Martian scientist, all organisms within Earth’s biosphere are simply heat engines that employ physical resources to convert free energy into work (plus waste energy) with the ultimate aim of reproducing. By the first law of thermodynamics, we know that matter and energy are scarce. Hence, competition over the use of physical resources and access to energy sources is a matter of survival. Free energy is free only in the technical sense used by physicists – it is not available at no cost. All biological organisms stand in contention with one another for use of free energy and other scarce physical resources.

The Fiscal Cliff and Causality

by Ophelia photos / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

Since the election, the DC wonkosphere has been abuzz about the impending “fiscal cliff.” Frank Shostak wrote a Mises daily about the now-famous cliff way back in September. His conclusion? The hubbub about the fiscal cliff is so much nonsense that disguises the real issues.

Walking down the hallway at work last week I overheard the following snippet of a conversation:

“Well, it has to be fixed somehow.”

“Don’t worry about it, the government will pay for it.”

I have no idea what they were talking about but it was the response that really stuck with me – as if government paying for something magically dismisses all concerns about where the resources will come from. I see in this the essence of the role of government finances in scrambling popular reasoning about cause-and-effect. We have trillions of dollars flowing this way and that way. The government borrows from itself to pay itself. Then it borrows from us to pay us. And somewhere along the way, it bails us out with money it prints but which is backed by the full faith and confidence of… us.

Paradise Lost

Foter / Public domain

In the last century, human beings have achieved things that our ancient ancestors would have considered nothing short of miraculous. Humans have built rockets that carry their payloads millions of miles and reach out to touch the Moon and the very “wandering stars” that Ptolemy and the many other ancient astrologers wondered at. And if current science – things like regenerative medicine and metamaterials – is any indication of latent future achievements, even greater wonders are waiting just around the corner.

But for all our achievements, science is really at an all-time low in that it has lost its connection to human ends to a regrettable extent. It has, in many cases, become an end-in-itself. Finding a new fundamental particle or solving a famous mathematical problem is today considered the epitome of progress, despite the impracticality of such achievements. The resources expended to build the Large Hadron Collider could have fed and clothed the world’s poorest for many years or funded many market ventures to reduce the cost-of-living for the ordinary person and meet present needs. The data produced by such expensive research will not likely be practically useful for many decades, if ever. The process by which basic research is funded has unmoored research from any conceivable connection to human ends. As Harold Lewis put it in his famous resignation letter to the American Physical Society, “Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands)…”

The Central Planner: What Exactly Does He Explain?

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Aristippus has written here on the deep roots of Hayek’s Fatal Conceit in Western philosophy. I think we can make an argument that positing central design in the face of an already-sufficient emergent explanation is a violation of Ockham’s Razor: “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.”

For example, consider an anthill. An untrained observer stumbling upon such a miracle might falsely assume that its overall design is directed through messaging from a “grand architect ant” to its underlings. This understanding would be false. Ants do have a diversity of roles. But no single ant – or even a small group of “ant elites” – is responsible for the phenomenon of the anthill. Bit-by-bit, the anthill has been constructed from nothing more than lots of ants, each following its own innate tendencies, blind to the scope and sweep of the work of its compatriots or the collective outcome of their efforts.