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1. Libertarian Ethics, Lecture 2
Mises’ Ethics
Daniel James Sanchez
Mises Academy
November 3, 2011

2. Two Sides of Mises’ Ethics
●Negative: What cannot be said
concerning ethics (based on
philosophy)
●Positive: What can be said concerning
ethics (based on praxeology)

3. What Can’t Be Said About
Ethics
●Embraced Hume’s Law: “There is no such thing as a
scientific ought”
●Existential Propositions vs. Value Statements:
“Propositions asserting existence (affirmative existential
propositions) or nonexistence (negative existential propositions)
are descriptive. They assert something about the state of the
whole universe or of parts of the universe. With regard to them
questions of truth and falsity are significant. They must not be
confounded with judgments of value. Judgments of value are
voluntaristic. They express feelings, tastes, or preferences of
the individual who utters them. With regard to them there cannot
be any question of truth and falsity. They are ultimate and not
subject to any proof or evidence.” (TH 1)
●Wertfreiheit

4. Mises’ Theory of Society
●Law of Association
●Division of Labor
●Manifoldness of Nature
●Social Cooperation
●Social Bonds and Social Order
●“The Fundamental Social Phenomenon”
● “If and as far as labor under the division of labor is more
productive than isolated labor, and if and as far as man is able
to realize this fact, human action itself tends toward cooperation
and association; man becomes a social being… in aiming at an
improvement in his own welfare.” (HA 8.4)
●The Function of Social Bonds and Social Order

5. Codes of Conduct
●The Function of Moral Codes: “The notion of right and
wrong is a human device, a utilitarian precept designed to make
social cooperation under the division of labor possible.” (HA
27.3)
●Property
●Justice
●Law
● “Law and legality, the moral code and social institutions … are
of human origin, and the only yardstick that must be applied to
them is that of expediency with regard to human welfare.” (HA
8.2)
● “All moral rules and human laws are means for the realization of
definite ends. There is no method available for the appreciation
of their goodness or badness other than to scrutinize their
usefulness for the attainment of the ends chosen and aimed at.”
(HA 27.3)

6. The Private Property Order of
Liberalism
●Rivalrous goods
●Permanent self-ownership
●Homesteading
●Perpetual ownership
●Distant ownership
●Alienability
●Ownership of products

7. The Power of Public Opinion
●Social Order and Ideology: “any concrete order of social
affairs are an outcome of ideologies” (HA 9.3)
●The Public and Living Standards
●The Power of Praxeology
● “Because man is a social animal that can thrive only within
society, all ideologies are forced to acknowledge the preeminent
importance of social cooperation. They must aim at the most
satisfactory organization of society and must approve of man's
concern for an improvement of his material well-being. Thus
they all place themselves upon a common ground. They are
separated… by problems of means and ways. Such ideological
antagonisms are open to a thorough scrutiny by the scientific
methods of praxeology and economics.” (HA 9.2)

8. ● “The singular tendency of capitalism is to provide for individuals the
satisfaction of their wants according to the extent of their contribution to
the satisfaction of the wants of others. Through the market process, the
consumers tend to reward each producer according to his contribution to
consumer satisfaction. Capitalism therefore encourages individuals to, in
their own interest, ever adjust their choices of roles and actions so as to
ever increase their contribution to the satisfaction of human wants.
● The relative importance of some consumers' wants are greater than that
of others in this process. But the relative importance of any given
consumer's wants, insofar as that relative importance has been
determined on the market, is a function of how much he contributed to
satisfying the wants of other consumers in his role as a producer.
● Thus, under capitalism, human choices, through their interplay,
coordinate each other so as to provide for human welfare as bountifully
as possible.
● Every state intervention into the market nexus — every tax, regulation,
redistribution, or expansion of bureaucracy — only slackens the ties
linking contribution and income, thereby hampering the instrumentality of
the market by making producers less responsive to consumers, and thus
The Utilitarian Superiority of
Capitalism

9. Why Liberalism?
●“If you were convinced that (a) complete
adherence to the natural right of property
necessarily engenders untold poverty,
suffering, and death, but (b) the tiniest
imaginable abrogation of the nonaggression
principle, would necessarily engender
prosperity, happiness, and long life for
virtually everybody, which would you choose,
complete adherence or the tiny abrogation?”

10. Value-Free Rule Utilitarianism
and “The Parchuting Ethicist”
Fallacy
● “Utilitarian liberalism does not say, "You want B, but you should
really want A." Rather, it says, "You think B will result in Y,
which you want. But it will not. Instead it will result in X, which
you do not want. However, if you adopt A, you will get Z, which
you would like best, but did not even know was possible."
● And it says this, not with regard to particular choices considered
in isolation, but with regard to the systemic consequences to be
expected of general rules. Furthermore, it says this not in order
to persuade each individual in every concrete choice in their
daily lives, but so as to effect a revolution in public opinion
concerning social expediency, which in turn will necessarily
engender a revolution in the prevailing moral code.”

11. Mises on Natural Law
● “From the notion of natural law some people deduce the justice of the
institution of private property in the means of production. Other people
resort to natural law for the justification of the abolition of private
property in the means of production. As the idea of natural law is quite
arbitrary, such discussions are not open to settlement.” (HA 27.3)
● “Long before the Classical economists discovered that a regularity in the
sequence of phenomena prevails in the field of human action, the
champions of natural law were dimly aware of this inescapable fact.
From the bewildering diversity of doctrines presented under the rubric of
natural law there finally emerged a set of theorems which no caviling
can ever invalidate. There is first the idea that a nature-given order of
things exists to which man must adjust his actions if he wants to
succeed. Second: the only means available to man for the cognizance
of this order is thinking and reasoning, and no existing social institution
is exempt from being examined and appraised by discursive reasoning.
Third: there is no standard available for apraising any mode of acting
either of individuals or of groups of individuals but that of the effects

12. Thoughts Raised by Dr.
Gordon’s Lecture
●Anarcho-capitalism and Minarchism
●Hazlitt and Mises
●Hoppe and Hume’s Law
●Rothbard and Hume’s Law
●Sport-Killing
●The Words “Arbitrary” and “Whim”
●Prichard and Mises

13. Happiness and Flourishing
● “Praxeology is indifferent to the ultimate goals of action. Its
findings are valid for all kinds of action irrespective of the ends
aimed at. It is a science of means, not of ends. It applies the
term happiness in a purely formal sense. In the praxeological
terminology the proposition: man's unique aim is to attain
happiness, is tautological. It does not imply any statement about
the state of affairs from which man expects happiness.” (HA 1.2)
● "While praxeology, and therefore economics too, uses the terms
happiness and removal of uneasiness in a purely formal sense,
liberalism attaches to them a concrete meaning. It presupposes
that people prefer life to death, health to sickness, nourishment
to starvation, abundance to poverty.” (HA 8.2)
● Rothbardian “Flourishing” Independent of Social Cooperation
and the Greater Productivity of the Division of Labor

14. Hazlitt
●The “Instrumental Ought”
●Not Against Hume’s Law
●Falls for “Parachuting Ethicist” Fallacy

15. Hoppe’s Intro
●“…integration of… economics and
natural-law political philosophy into a
unified science of libertarianism”.
Without utilitarianism, what does
economics have to do with
libertarianism?
●Why the universalization principle?