[gerard.casey]

Here’s my simple take on the issue.

Leftists tend to espouse liberty in personal matters but are happy to endorse and encourage legal control of the economy; Rightists tend to espouse liberty in economics matters but look to the state to enforce moral codes. Leftists and Rightists compete with each other for control of the levers of power. Libertarians espouse liberty across the board as a result of which, their concerns cut across the left-right divide at right angles.

Of course, the reality is more complex than this and leftists will differ among themselves as will rightists but the broad picture is, I think, correct.

[gerard.casey]

I know your question is addressed to Dr Woods but I’ll give you my unsolicited two-cents-worth.

My first contact with Mises came through reading The Theory of Money and Credit. Because it addressed my immediate concerns (e.g. the nature of money) I found it gripping. As soon as I had finished I started on Mises’s other works, beginning with Human Action. Again, I found this to be unputdownable.

My general advice, however, would be to start with Human Action and move on from there. Of course, everybody is different and it’s always better to read around your live interests.

Enjoy reading Mises!

[gerard.casey]

You ask: ‘How would you restate the axiom to logically say the same thing as only individual acts?’

Let’s take the axiom in the form in which Rothbard gives it (as in my previous posting) so that ‘Man acts’ =df.‘All human beings act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings’ Let’s put this in proper form. Where H: human beings; and T: beings who act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings. The proposition then is HAT

If we play around with this by eduction, we find this is equivalent to (saying the same thing as):
HET(complement); No human beings are beings who do not act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings
T(complement)EH; No beings who do not act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings are human beings
T(complement)AH(complement): All beings who do not act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings are non-human beings

If we use the square of opposition, we can deduce from HAT that
HET (No human beings are beings who act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings) is false
HIT (Some human beings are beings who act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings) is true, and
HOT (Some human beings are not beings who act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings) is false.

That’s the sum total of equivalences or implications immediately derivable logically from HAT. As you can see, none of these say that ‘Only individuals act’

You write: ‘Also, when you say we must engage in conceptual analysis, then does that mean that we can’t deduce these implications mediately, through the use of a categorical or hypothetical syllogisms, from the action axiom?

You cannot derive any proposition mediately from a single proposition

You write: ‘And we need to use our basic intuitions to understand the implications of action instead?’

Broadly speaking, yes. We ask—what does it mean to say that human being acts? To answer this, we distinguish between, say, sneezing, which isn’t a human act, as distinct, say, from scratching. What makes scratching to be an act? Well, it is something I choose to do rather than something that simply happens to me; it is something that I do for a purpose (to relieve the itching); the relief of the itching is a future state not present now (if it were, I wouldn’t need to scratch). Putting it with a little more formality, we can see that ‘Action is purposeful behavior directed towards the attainment of ends in some future period involving the fulfilment of wants otherwise remaining unsatisfied and involves the expectation of a less imperfectly satisfied state as a result of the action.’

This explication of the concept of action will get you #2 and #4 on your list: action takes time, and action is trying to change an existing situation into a more satisfactory situation.

What about #1: ‘Only individuals act’?

This takes a bit more work. All I can do here is to sketch the broad outlines of how this might be done. We might ask what is being rejected in making this claim? Well, presumably, something along the lines of the proposition that ‘Non-individuals act’, non-individuals being sub-individuals (parts of a human being) or super-individuals (groups, gangs, societies, etc.) We needn’t delay too long on the sub-individual proposition (I don’t know too many who would make this claim). What is effectively being rejected by the claim that ‘Only individuals act’ is any doctrine of group realism which would make a group to be an agent in precisely the same way as ( or in a better way than) an individual. The strategy here has to be to argue that what appears to be group action is, in the end, reducible to and explicable in terms of the action of individuals.

I hope this helps.

Best wishes,

Gerard

[gerard.casey]

Within Aristotelian Logic, there are two types of inference (deduction): immediate (directly from one proposition to another) or mediate (from two propositions to a third).

Since we start with a single axiom—man acts—mediate inference is not relevant. Immediate inference takes you from a proposition to (a) another proposition that is semantically identical to it, or (b) to a more limited or restricted version of the semantic content of the original proposition.

Example:
So, SAP takes you to SEP(complement), by obversion. SAP and SEP (complement) say exactly the same thing, in different linguistic ways.

Example:
SAP also takes you to SIP (by alternation). There are not identical propositions but SIP is a more limited version of SAP.

Example:
The Square of Opposition also allows us to make certain inferences from a single proposition directly to another proposition. So, from the truth of SAP, we can deduce the falsity of SEP (by the rule of contraries)

Now, if we take the proposition—‘man acts’ or ‘persons act’—then we can deduce certain other propositions from it, such as ‘it is not the case that man does not act’ but we cannot deduce from it by any standard rules of logic any of 1-13 below, with the possible exception of 1, if 1 is taken to be simply a restatement of our axiom.

[Now follows your list of putative implications of the action axiom
axiom: persons act.

The implications, which are reflections based on the premise that person’s act. (at least the first 7 anyway).

1. Only individuals act
2. Action Takes Time
3. The future in uncertain (not completely random, but not completely determined).
4. Action is trying to change an existing situation into a more satisfactory situation
5. Means are Scarce
6. Means are allocated
7. Means are economized (different from being allocated because this implication gives a criteria for allocating, which is allocating based on higher-valued ends and using lesser valued means to achieve these higher-valued ends).
8. Value is subjective.
9. Cost is subjective
10. Profit is subjective
11. Value is imputed to means (imputed according to what ends they will serve).
12. The Laws of Utility (First is the diminishing law of marginal utility, and the second is the law of total utility).
13. The allocation of consumer goods (allocate to get the highest marginal utility).

These are the most fundamental implications of personal and interpersonal action, with 12 and 13 being implications in regards to interpersonal action]

What we can do (in this connection (see the last paragraph of my self-citation below) is to engage in the process of conceptual analysis, that is, to ask what action is. If action is a transition from one state to another then we can conclude that it takes time. And so on. This process of conceptual elucidation is perfectly rational but it is not strictly logical either (in the sense of making use of explicitly formal rules of logical deduction) but it’s not il-logical either.

Here is an excerpt from my Murray Rothbard (Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers), Bloomsbury 2013 (2010), pp. 30-32 in which I deal with this issue to a certain extent.

[Excerpt]
‘The theoretical aspect of the field of the most developed branch of praxeology, economics, is constituted for Rothbard by one fundamental axiom and a few broadly empirical subsidiary postulates. The fundamental axiom is ‘Man acts’: ‘All human beings act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings’ (Rothbard 2004, 2). Action is purposeful behavior directed towards the attainment of ends in some future period involving the fulfilment of wants otherwise remaining unsatisfied and involves the expectation of a less imperfectly satisfied state as a result of the action. The objects of human action and the human actions directed towards them are at once manifold and varied and yet ordered or at least capable of being ordered. If the objects of human action are so orderable, so too should the human actions directed towards them. There are many particular goods that can be chosen by us and yet it is important to us – that is, it is itself another good – that the selection of particular goods should be such that they do not clash with one another and cancel one another out. The good is sought in every limited and particular good and yet no particularized good can exhaustively express or contain it. There are always more and other goods necessarily excluded by our particular choices. An agent chooses means from his environment to achieve his ends and economises his means by directing them, in ways he deems (accurately or not) to be appropriate, towards his most valued ends. So, from the seemingly obvious and uninteresting axiom that ‘Man acts’, the most surprising consequences follow. According to Rothbard, ‘Some of the immediate logical implications that follow from this premise are: the means-ends relationship, the time-structure of production, time-preference, the law of diminishing marginal utility, the law of optimum returns, etc.’ (Rothbard 1997c, 104).
‘Why is the action axiom an axiom? For Rothbard, it is simply inconceivable that human beings should exist but not act. Attempts to deny this axiom are themselves instances of human action and so self-referentially incoherent. ‘[I]f a man cannot affirm a proposition without employing its negation, he is not only caught in an inextricable self-contradiction; he is conceding to the negation the status of an axiom’ (Rothbard 1997d, 6; see Rothbard 2004, 2). Rothbard appears to distance himself from Mises in his characterization of the action axiom. He regards Mises as defining the action axiom in neo-Kantian terms as a law of thought, whereas he himself, as an adherent of the epistemological- realist tradition of Aristotle and St Thomas, regards it as a law of reality. In the end, Rothbard betrays a certain impatience with the question of the appropriate labelling of the action axiom, holding that ‘the all-important fact is that the axiom is self-evidently true, self-evident to a far greater and broader extent than the other postulates. For this Axiom is true for all human beings, everywhere, at any time, and could not even conceivably be violated’ (Rothbard 1997c, 105). However one labels the action, it is ‘a law of reality that is not conceivably falsifiable, and yet is empirically meaningful and true’ (Rothbard 1997c, 105). Moreover, ‘it rests on universal inner experience, and not simply on external experience, that is, its evidence is reflective rather than physical . . . [and] . . . it is clearly a priori to complex historical events’ (Rothbard 1997c, 105–6; see also Rothbard 1997f, 32–3).10

‘The subsidiary postulates that are to be employed in the theoretical structuring of economics are few in number and even though empirical, functionally unfalsifiable. They are (1) the variety of human and natural resources (this gives rise to the division of labour and the market), and (2) leisure as a consumer good. Rothbard believes that only these two postulates are actually needed to complete the essential framework of theoretical economics. From the fundamental axiom and the two subsidiary postulates, economics can deduce the essential elements of Crusoe-economics, barter, and the monetary economy. ‘Once it is demonstrated that human action is a necessary attribute of the existence of human beings, the rest of praxeology (and its subdivision, economic theory) consists of the elaboration of the logical implications of the concept of action’ (Rothbard 2004, 72). He adds, a little later, that ‘Praxeology asserts the action axiom as true, and from this together with a few empirical axioms – such as the existence of a variety of resources and individuals) [sic ] are deduced, by the rules of logical inference, all the propositions of economics . . .’ (Rothbard 2004, 75).
‘Praxeology is presented by Mises and Rothbard as an axiomatic system with one axiom (the action axiom) providing its foundation and with ordinary verbal logic providing its rules of derivation. But it is difficult to see how anything can be validly deduced by standard logical means from a single axiom that isn’t that axiom stated in another way or simply a more restricted version of that axiom. Rather than think of praxeology as a strict axiomatic system on the model of Euclidean geometry, it might be both more insightful and give fewer hostages to fortune to conceive of it as the systematic conceptual exploration of a web of concepts that mutually imply one another, with the concept of human action ranking first among equals.’

I’m not particularly happy with this formulation but I haven’t been able to work out anything more satisfactory. I know that Dr Peter Preusse has also done some work in this area and his writings might be worth looking at.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Travis,

I am reasonably familiar with Austrian Economics, though not with Professor Herbener’s presentation of it. The question you raise is a fundamental and difficult one but one to which, I think, I have some kind of answer, even if not the most satisfactory kind. I need access to a document that I have on my UCD computer which I cannot access until next Tuesday, 5th May, so I hope you won’t mind waiting a few days.

In the meantime, if you were able to post the 13 implications of the action axiom as per Professor Herbener, that would be of assistance to me in responding to your question.

[gerard.casey]

Dear Matthew,

For Mill, state and government come to pretty much the same thing. Government is what the state does and what the state does is to govern. What Mill has to say about the state is contained, for the most part, in his Considerations on Representative Government. For Mill, government is something we must have and government is a, or rather the, function of the state; anarchy is not an option.

I’ve summarised what I think are the main points that can be gleaned from Mill’s account of government; government as the preserver or order; as the generator of social progress; as that which is best done by experts, supervised by our representatives.

From his utilitarian perspective, Mill adopts the position that the function of government (or state) is to preserve order, and bring about some measure of social progress and human development. Of the two functions, Mill is inclined to rate the second higher than the first, something with which Kant would violently disagree. Given his perfectionist tendencies, Mill want government not only to take on standard task of creating happiness, or at least the conditions for happiness; he also wants it to become responsible for encouraging the greatest degree of mental cultivation in its citizens.

A standard problem for political philosophy has been to justify the gap between rulers and ruled. If our rulers can be in some way identified with us, then there is no possible tension between a ‘them’ and an ‘us’. There is no principled obstacle to a government’s having popular support. But only some forms of popular government are conducive to the active participation of citizens, something that is desirable in any society, which has learned the virtue of obedience.

Much of the Considerations on Representative Government is devoted to developing the details of a scheme for representative government. It is not necessary to give or to grasp a blow-by-blow account of the details of Mill’s scheme which are of a very familiar kind apart, possibly, from his development of the role of the expert.

Which form of government is best for a given society is related to that society’s stage of development. He writes, ‘the proper functions of a government are not a fixed thing, but different in different states of society; much more extensive in a backward than in an advanced state.’ [Considerations on Representative Government, §II, 2, 2!7]

Mill says, ‘the ideally best form of government is that in which the sovereignty, or supreme controlling power in the last resort, is vested in the entire aggregate of the community; every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of that ultimate sovereignty, but being, at least occasionally, called on to take an actual part in the government, but the personal discharge of some public function, local or general’, a kind of democracy, if you will. [Considerations on Representative Government, §III, 7, 244] He points out, as Rousseau does too, that genuine popular government, however, is possible only in very small states. On the other hand, the benefits of advanced civilisation are only available in very large states. Is there some way to combine the benefits of popular government with the advanced civilisation that comes with large size? Yes. The answer lies in representative democracy.

Is democracy the best form of popular government? Mill is prey to conflicting tendencies. On the one hand, he is inclined to widen suffrage but then, the problem of mob rule rears its head. Should the people be given what they say they want or what their betters know to be really good for them? His utilitarian upbringing inclined him to the former; his perfectionist tendencies inclined him to the latter. Democracy has dangers, one of which is ‘the danger of class legislation; of government intended for (whether really effecting it or not) the immediate benefit of the dominant class, to the lasting detriment of the whole.’ [Considerations on Representative Government, §VI, 19, 299] If representative government is to work, the people as a whole must be prepared to receive it, to preserve it, and to shoulder the burdens which it imposes upon them. [see Considerations on Representative Government, §IV, 2-3, 257]

One of the most distinctive things about Mill’s is the importance he concedes to the expert. Mill believes that the core areas of government—legislative, judicial and executive—require a level of competence beyond the capacity of the man in the street and also beyond the capacity of his representatives. Such governmental competences belong only to the expert. It is not the function of the citizens’ representatives to govern; rather, it is their task to control the experts who carry out the actual government. For the time in which he was writing, this was a new and significant twist. Mill writes, ‘while it is essential to representative government that the practical supremacy in the state should reside in the representatives of the people, it is an open question what actual functions, what precise part in the machinery of government, shall be directly and personally discharged by the representative body….There is a radical distinction between controlling the business of government, and actually doing it. The same person or body may be able to control everything, but cannot possibly do everything; and in many cases its control over everything will be more perfect, the less it personally attempts to do.’ [Considerations on Representative Government, §V, 5, 271] If this sounds familiar that is hardly surprising, since this is more or less the orthodox current understanding of how our representatives should function. Of course, because of what is known as the agent/principal problem, it is very far from how they actually do function but this is just another example of the divergence of reality and ideality. As Mill himself admits, ‘The natural tendency of representative government…is towards collective mediocrity…’ [Considerations on Representative Government, §VII, 13, 313]

Is there not always a danger that a supposedly popular government will descend into factionalism? Yes. Mill is rightly suspicious of government by faction, however large that faction might be. ‘If democracy means government of the whole by a majority which alone has representation, the ends of democracy are bound to be frustrated, for the minority, having no representatives, has no assurance that its rights will be protected, and the majority will be in a position to pursue its sinister interest. (In this context, one might call to mind the history of the government of Northern Ireland for much of its existence, and of many African countries since they have become independent.) Mill fears, for example, that a representative body representing the interests of the working class will jeopardize the property rights of the wealthy, and thus undermine the economy of the nation.’ To ensure that everybody was in fact represented, Mill proposed a complex system of proportional representation. History has shown that Mill was right to fear government by faction. Practical politics in most democracies is a contest between various gangs fighting to determine which of them can get its hands on the tiller of the ship of state. History has also shown that Mill was wrong to think that his proportional representation system would solve his problems. This wasn’t because there was some particular flaw with his system but because there is a basic flaw with the whole notion of representation to begin with.

I hope this helps,

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Matthew,

Thanks for the post and for the email. Good luck with the material.

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Andrew,

Some forms of utilitarianism (consequentialism) are more subtle than others. In Act Utilitarianism, the morality of each act is to be judged by balancing the utility (good) produced against the disutility (evil). If the good outweighs the evil, then the act is good; if evil outweighs good, then the act is evil. There are many well-known problems with this way of looking at things, not least, how to compare different outcomes, what standards of utility one employs (some crude Utilitarians use pleasure, but even that is not unproblematic), and how far one is to consider consequences which could, in theory, be infinite in extent and in time. Rule Utilitarianism attempts to circumvent some of these problems by focusing, not on individuals acts and their outcomes, but on types of acts and the types of outcome that, as a rule, those acts have. This goes some way towards solving some of the more egregious problems but not all the way.

Generally speaking, for utilitarians, intentions count for nothing, The outcome is all. For deontologists, on the other hand, it can sometimes appear that intent is everything and consequences count for nothing. While deontology captures some of our ethical intuitions, leaving consequences out in the cold has its own counter-intuitive appearance.

So, do the ends justify the means for consequentialists/utilitarians? In a word, yes.

All the best,

Gerard

[gerard.casey]

I am glad that you found the courses enjoyable – thank you for the compliment!

Like many terms in philosophy and the social sciences generally, the terms ‘consequentialism’ and ‘utilitarianism’ are contested. (To make matters even more complex, philosophers distinguish between ‘act utilitarianism’ and ‘rule utilitarianism’) However, I think it fair to say that, in essence, they come to pretty much the same thing: ‘consequentialism’ emphasises that what matters morally are the consequences of one’s actions, while ‘utilitarianism’ emphasises that the purpose of human action is the maximisation of utility. I suspect that I may well have used the terms interchangeably.

[gerard.casey]

Yes, by all means. It won’t do any harm to take a look at it. However, I would suggest that it would perhaps be advisable to go all the way through the LC course first to avoid any possible confusion caused by different methods of presentation.

Like all logic books of that period, Jevons’s is essentially a presentation of Aristotelian logic which is what I’m doing in my course. You could looks at sections VIII, IX, X, XV, XX and XXI to provide some supplementary reading to material I cover.

The book is available for PDF download from the Mises Institute at http://mises.org/library/elementary-lessons-logic so that, unless you’re uncomfortable reading online, there would be no compelling reason to buy it in hard copy.

Best wishes,

Gerard

[gerard.casey]

I’m glad that you find the lectures enjoyable. I undertook the research in part to fill some yawning gaps in my own knowledge and to re-read and re-understand material I’ve been familiar with for a long time. There’s an old rule-of-thumb in the teaching profession that the best way to learn anything is to teach it!

Best wishes,

Gerard

[gerard.casey]

Dear joshua_78:

I’m afraid my response is going to disappoint you. I know of Jacques Ellul only in connection with his views on anarchy and Christianity. I’m not aware of his other works (or, at least, I wasn’t until you brought them to my attention) – so much to read, so little time! However, I’m very glad to have the referral and I’ll look them up and consult them as soon as I can.

You ask me to remark on other philosophers who have embodied similar views of the struggle of the individual vs collectivism: The lectures on Liberty’s Progress are my attempt to do just that in a broad historical context.

Please do revert to me if you would like to continue the conversation. If you add anything to the Forum, send me an email alert so that I can respond quickly. Write to gerard.casey@ucd.ie

Thank you so much for your kind remarks on my contributions. Because recordings are, of necessity, not live, one is always afraid that one is not connecting with one’s audience

[gerard.casey]

If I was forced to answer this question, I would say that what are today called ‘representative democracies’ are elective oligarchies. Our rulers constitute a distinct sub-class, and we have an occasional and limited capacity to choose between one set of them and another, but we have no real capacity to reject them as a whole. Our rulers jockey for position by serving the interests of their clients, whether those clients are corporate welfare recipients [banks, big business, the military] or social welfare recipients.

[gerard.casey]

Dear David,

You must have been wondering why I’ve been ignoring you all this time! I’ve only just seen this post! I check my two course blogs fairly regularly but the general discussion one only sporadically.

What I actually. have is not so much a finished paper or essay but a collection of notes towards an essay which I have never completed. It’s been some time since I used this material so I’m going to have to root it out. If I can find it, I’ll send it to you later this week but, remember, it’s not a finished product and it’s pretty rough.

[gerard.casey]

The appeal to authority is an informal fallacy, which is to say, it’s not always wrong. It’s wrong when you appeal to someone who is not an authority in respect of the subject matter under discussion: “Now’s a good time to invest in commodities.” ‘Why?’ ‘My dentist told me so.’

Rhetorically, it makes perfect sense to associate your claims with people whom you can reasonably expect your intended audience to respect. Assuming the association is legitimate, it doesn’t, of course, just by itself establish the truth of your claim but it should ensure it a more respectful and considered hearing for it.

[Author]

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