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1. Libertarian Ethics, Lecture 4
Daniel James Sanchez
Mises Academy
November 18, 2011

2. Review: 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

3. 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)

4. 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)

5. Additionally: The Malthusian
Law of Population
The Utilitarian Doctrine Restated: The essential teachings of utilitarian
philosophy as applied to the problems of society can be restated as follows:
Human effort exerted under the principle of the division of labor in social
cooperation achieves, other things remaining equal, a greater output per unit of
input than the isolated efforts of solitary individuals. Man's reason is capable of
recognizing this fact and of adapting his conduct accordingly. Thus social
cooperation becomes for almost every man the great means for the attainment
of all ends. An eminently human common interest, the preservation and
intensification of social bonds, is substituted for pitiless biological competition,
the significant mark of animal and plant life. Man becomes a social being. He is
no longer forced by the inevitable laws of nature to look upon all other
specimens of his animal species as deadly foes. Other people become his
fellows. For animals the generation of every new member of the species means
the appearance of a new rival in the struggle for life. For man, until the optimum

6. Malthus, continued
Those whom we may call the harmonists base their argument on Ricardo's
law of association and on Malthus' principle of population. They do not, as
some of their critics believe, assume that all men are biologically equal.
They take fully into account the fact that there are innate biological
differences among various groups of men as well as among individuals
belonging to the same group. Ricardo's law has shown that cooperation
under the principle of the division of labor is favorable to all participants. It is
an advantage for every man to cooperate with other men, even if these
others are in every respect-mental and bodily capacities and skills,
diligence and moral worth-inferior. From Malthus' principle one can deduce
that there is, in any given state of the supply of capital goods and
knowledge of how to make the best use of natural resources, an optimum
size of population. So long as population has not increased beyond this
size, the addition of newcomers improves rather than impairs the conditions

7. ● “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

8. Mises on Consumer
Sovereignty
●Consumer welfare as public welfare
●“Producer’s Policy”
●The issue of homesteading

9. 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

10. 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

11. Hazlitt
●The “Instrumental Ought”
●Not Against Hume’s Law
●Falls for “Parachuting Ethicist” Fallacy
●Common Law vs. Social Rationalism
●Though the World Be Destroyed
●On General Rules
●On Property
●On Distribution Theory

12. 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?

13. Rothbard’s Preface
●Economic “unfortunate consequences”. (MES)
●“Economics can supply much of the data for a
libertarian position.”
●The book “does not try to prove or establish the
ethics or ontology of natural law… Natural law has
been ably expounded and defended elsewhere by
ethical philosophers.”

14. Ethics, Chapter 1
●“…all entities of the world, each with its
own nature and its own ends.” Is
Rothbard expanding teleology to the
natural world, or using a different sense
of “end” in his ethics?
●Leo Strauss: “…we ought to choose
attainable ends”. If an end is sought, by
definition, it is thought to be attainable.

15. Ethics, Chapter 5 & 6
●“…as soon as anyone makes any policy
suggestion… an ethical judgment… has
willy-nilly been made.”
●“Proper ends” of isolated man, contra
Hoppe’s ethics.
●“Affirming life” (proto-Hoppean
argument): only for the present, not for
the future.

16. 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.”