Science and the Culture of Salutary Dissent

As Mises saw it, the task of metaphysics, philosophy, and religion was to slake the unquenchable human thirst for knowledge and certainty. He remarked:

Those divines who saw that nothing but revelation could provide man with perfect certainty were right. Human scientific inquiry cannot proceed beyond the limits drawn by the insufficiency of man's senses and the narrowness of his mind.¹⁴

And even more clearly, a few years later:

The human mind in its search for knowledge resorts to philosophy or theology precisely because it aims at an explanation of problems that the natural sciences cannot answer.¹⁵

There were questions to which science had not yet provided an answer (“What determines the behavior of atoms?”); and there were questions to which science could not give any answers (“Was there a beginning of time?” “Does the soul die?”). Science could give answers only to the extent that it could rely on ascertainable facts. There was a scientific interpretation of social and economic evolution only to the extent that there were ascertainable facts that warranted this interpretation. And even then, there were basic assumptions underlying any scientific analysis of facts that could not themselves be demonstrated:

It is contradictory to expect that logic could be of any service in demonstrating the correctness or validity of the fundamental logical principles. All that can be said about them is that to deny their correctness or validity appears to the human mind nonsensical and that thinking, guided by them, has led to modes of successful acting.... There is no deductive demonstration possible of the principle of causality and of the ampliative inference of imperfect induction; there is only recourse to the no less indemonstrable statement that there is a strict regularity in the conjunction of all natural phenomena. If we were not to refer to this uniformity, all the statements of the natural sciences would appear to be hasty generalizations.¹⁶

Now Mises did believe that metaphysics, philosophy, and religion also relate to reality in some way, but the problem is that their interpretation of reality cannot be verified by reason and observation. Therefore they cannot be demonstrated as a scientific proposition can be demonstrated. And the espousal of a metaphysical or religious doctrine therefore cannot be grounded on such a demonstration, but must rely essentially on a value judgment. And Mises insisted that value judgments and ultimate ends are “beyond any rational examination.” They could only be examined by applying some standard of evaluation, but as soon as one applies such a standard, the end under consideration would no longer be an ultimate end; rather, it would become a means for the attainment of the proposed standard. It follows that truly ultimate ends could not possibly be demonstrated by reason and observation:

The characteristic mark of ultimate ends is that they depend entirely on each individual's personal and subjective judgment, which cannot be examined, measured, still less corrected by any other person. Each individual is the only and final arbiter in matters concerning his own satisfaction and happiness.¹⁷

Even the venerable idea of justice, interpreted as an ultimate end, cannot be demonstrated. One has to rely on intuition and interpretation of one's inner voice—yet how can disagreements between different intuitions and different inner voices be settled? Moreover, and most importantly, justice is not an ultimate end; it is a means for the attainment of social cooperation:

All these ethical doctrines have failed to comprehend that there is, outside of social bonds and preceding, temporally or logically, the existence of society, nothing to which the epithet “just” can be given. A hypothetical isolated individual must under the pressure of biological competition look upon all other people as deadly foes. His only concern is to preserve his own life and health; he does not need to heed the consequences which his own survival has for other men; he has no use for justice. His only solicitudes are hygiene and defense. But in social cooperation with other men the individual is forced to abstain from conduct incompatible with life in society. Only then does the distinction between what is just and what is unjust emerge. It invariably refers to interhuman social relations. What is beneficial to the individual without affecting his fellows, such as the observance of certain rules in the use of some drugs, remains hygiene.

The ultimate yardstick of justice is conduciveness to the preservation of social cooperation. Conduct suited to preserve social cooperation is just, conduct detrimental to the preservation of society is unjust.¹⁸

This raises an important practical problem for all systems of social organization that, because they cannot be built on scientific demonstration, must rely exclusively on value judgments. The problem appears as soon as one raises the question: How do the members of such systems deal with dissenters? This question concerns in particular the members of different collectivist systems of social organization. Their starting point is the moral postulate that the collective takes precedence over the individual:

If a man assigns a higher value to the concerns of a collective than to his other concerns, and acts accordingly, that is his affair. So long as the collectivist philosophers proceed in this way, no objection can be raised. But they argue differently. They elevate their personal judgments of value to the dignity of an absolute standard of value. They urge other people to stop valuing according to their own will and to adopt unconditionally the precepts to which collectivism has assigned absolute eternal validity.¹⁹

What happens though when individuals are reluctant to espouse the collectivist agenda? Mises emphasized that the collectivists depend on violence to solve this problem:

There is, of course, but one way to make one's own judgments of value supreme. One must beat into submission all those dissenting. This is what all representatives of the various collectivist doctrines are striving for. They ultimately recommend the use of violence and pitiless annihilation of all those whom they condemn as heretics. Collectivism is a doctrine of war, intolerance, and persecution. If any of the collectivist creeds should succeed in its endeavors, all people but the great dictator would be deprived of their essential human quality. They would become mere soulless pawns in the hands of a monster.²⁰

Again, the basic problem of all collectivist schemes is that in their argument they willy-nilly have to rely on value judgments, and value judgments cannot be proven to be right or wrong. In contrast, the facts of science are ascertainable by all people. Anyone can check for himself the veracity of what the scientists say. He can convince himself that one course of action is feasible while another is not, or that one course of action leads to a desired outcome while another one fails to do so. Science has nothing to say about ultimate ends or value judgments, but it does provide knowledge about the earthly means to attain earthly ends. It is therefore the foremost tool for men to find a minimal agreement for cooperation in the world, despite their differences in beliefs and value judgments. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims might not agree on theological questions, but all of them can check for themselves that a greater division of labor is more productive than a smaller one, or that money prices are needed for economic calculation. It follows that a free society can work even if its members do not share the same ultimate value judgments.

The characteristic feature of a free society is that it can function in spite of the fact that its members disagree in many judgments of value. In the market economy business serves not only the majority but also various minorities, provided they are not too small in respect of the economic goods which satisfying their special wishes would require. Philosophical treatises are published—though few people read them, and the masses prefer other books or none—if enough readers are foreseen to recover the costs.²¹

A few years later, Mises went beyond this defense of dissent to a position of advocacy. Not only is dissent compatible with the functioning of a free society, it was actually the driving force behind the cultural and economic development that culminated in the nineteenth century:

What transformed the stagnant conditions of the good old days into the activism of capitalism was not changes in the natural sciences and in technology, but the adoption of the free enterprise principle. The great ideological movement that started with the Renaissance, continued in the Enlightenment, and in the nineteenth century culminated in Liberalism produced both capitalism—the free market economy— and its political corollary or—as the Marxians have to say, its political “superstructure”—representative government and the individuals’ civic rights: freedom of conscience, of thought, of speech, and of all other methods of communication. It was in the climate created by this capitalistic system of individualism that all the modern intellectual achievements thrived. Never before had mankind lived under conditions like those of the second part of the nineteenth century, when, in the civilized countries, the most momentous problems of philosophy, religion, and science could be freely discussed without any fear of reprisals on the part of the powers that be. It was an age of productive and salutary dissent.²²

This culture of salutary dissent was ultimately the product of freedom of thought and speech, but its more proximate cause was the discovery and dissemination of economic science. The “development and practical application” of this new discipline, concluded Mises, “was the most spectacular event of modern history.”²³