The Missing Link or: Developing Austrian Economics into Austrian Ethics

0:00Ladies and Gentlemen, since strict and unabugest use of terms does more for communication than good intentions do and since, as far as I see, the biological structure itself of Austrian philosophy has never been exposed as a stringent set of axioms, deductions and definitions in a concise, though perhaps simplifying style, I first have to state my use of terms drawn from my understanding of the Austrian, of the structure of Austrian economics and Austrian ethics. And then from that bare structure of two axioms, twelve deductions and ten definitions, I will develop a concept which is a material issue of this presentation. A rationale may be a theoretical revision of the notion of equality.

0:46To start with, a definition here is just a proposition providing a short formula for a denoted complex set of facts. It does not disclose certain content matter of a term and thus provides no additional insight. An axiom is an if-proposition that fulfills the following, to some extent overlapping, five requirements. First, it is self-evident in a reflective way. Second, an axiom is a priori valid. It does not depend on historical evidence. Third, it is irreducible, meaning it does not follow from another proposition. Fourth, it is universally applicable. And fifth, it cannot be refuted without committing a performative contradiction.

1:31I will disregard the experimental and playful concepts of an axiom as a randomly or arbitrarily chosen starting point for a formal construct, as well as the meaning of an axiom just as a basic assumption. Instead, I will follow von Mises, who distinguished from these concepts by talking of the category. For him, human action is the ultimate given. A deduction is a proposition drawn from the logical inference gained from applying one or more axioms on a particular situation. Ethics is concerned with interpersonal interaction. It poses and answers the question of legitimacy and establishes norms that are without alternative. These norms arise from the rational nature of human beings and from the affirmation of the right to life.

2:23The method and form of ethics is cognition, its statements are is statements, and is concerned with objective matters. Morals, on the other hand, are concerned primarily with intrapersonal value hierarchies, but also with those conveyed within society. Their subjective role, they are subjective, arbitrary, conventional, and not necessarily ethical at all. Their statements are odd statements. Economics is the interpersonal relationship of people striving to overcome scarcity of any material or immaterial goods at any level. Methodologically individualistic and rationalistic, economics answers the question of how gold can be attained.

3:10In the process of doing this, it finds that only what is ethically legitimate is also economically effective, meaning aggression doesn't pay. Applying these definitions, a possible and intrinsically logical linear path through the multi-relational thus quasi-spatial structure of the body of thought is the following. The first axiom, of course, is, as Rothbard has it, the nub of praxeology, the fundamental axiom of rational human action of choice, the term for rationing scarce means to the attainment of chosen ends. The first deduction is that the actor must own himself because with his body he constitutes a separate unit that he can command absolute control over his body's resources and thus carry out his freely chosen actions.

4:05Self-ownership precludes control from outside. Assigning this right to control to anyone else, be it in part or in full, is illegitimate. This holds true due to the non-universalizability of the master-slave division in case of full right of control or with partial right of control because it leads to a performative contradiction while attempting to justify the primacy of a multitude. From the axiom of action therefore follows by exclusion unrestricted self-ownership. As this is not irreducible, it is not self an axiom as we often read, for example in Rothbard, who even speaks of self ownership as a fundamental axiom of libertarian theory, it is ethics of liberty, whereas earlier in Man Economy and State, he infers self ownership from the separate units of body and mind that each individual forms.

4:57Because Rothbard also describes the non-aggression principle as an axiom, which clearly is an odd proposition, We are obviously dealing with different concepts of axioms. Instead of wanting to establish what the essence and necessary conditions of freedom are, the Yadai simply postulates that the preliminary assumption of freedom is to do anything achievable with one's own resources. Such action is legitimate as long as the utilized resources are legally obtained, and as long as the action does not either violate other people's rights nor stop me from performing my duties. Then freedom as a first definition can be negatively described as the absence of arbitrary coercion or even more to the point, liberty is a state of non-aggression.

5:48Further definitions are aggression as infringement of property without contractual consent and contract of the voluntarily reached agreement on the transfer of rights and duties. They are followed by the second deduction which is the existence of free will being shown by a choice available only to humans to act rationally or irrationally according to the human or animal aspect of their nature. The next right is defined as the status of ownership that the individual has with regard to his body and the products he has himself homesteaded, produced or exchanged. Emphasis is given to the fact that every right is a property right. Duty as a definition is labor owed under contract.

6:36Thus, a contract containing duties has an effect on the future, as the world cannot In order to withdraw from a contractual duty must be possible, therefore any contract of that kind explicitly or implicitly entails an alternative way of fulfilling an assumed duty which goes beyond simply annulling and reversing the transaction of the contract. Labor as a definition is just a specific so typical case of freely chosen action. The second universally accepted axiom in contemporary libertarian philosophy is diversity. The resources found naturally in our own bodies and now in our environment are scarce and unevenly distributed.

7:24This proposition's epistemological status as an axiom is based on the fact that it is neither a banal definition nor deducible from what is already known. Instead, it is a description in a reflective and universally valid form of a primary phenomenon, that is to say, the discovery of the world as living space. The attempt to logically refute diversity would, in claiming to be based on a better and therefore different insight, immediately result in self-contradiction. The following deductions are 3. Property of alienable things by homesteading, work and title transfer 4. Exchange 5. Injustice 6. Sanctions against the breach of contract resulting from the reduction in the perceived value of future services offered by the party in breach of contract 7. Insurance against damages due to breach of contract, injustice and risk can be stipulated contractually Hoppe has demonstrated in particular that in the field of security, the insurance solution is always superior in terms of productivity and that it has a systematically civilizing effect, what is here phrased as deduction number eight, the price of the insurance reflects one's observance with regard to the contract.

8:43Deduction No. 9 is that legal proceedings can be freely agreed upon, namely between competing assurers, which is a decisive element of civil law society. Subsequently, values defined No. 7 as a position on the hierarchical ordinal scale of preferences up to which an individual is prepared to have his freedoms and rights limited in order to acquire a certain thing as a property. Things, including material and non-material entities, make up the definitions No. 8 through 10, indicating that they all can be placed in everyone's hierarchy of values, thus lining up economic goods, freely available conditions and mental states. The three last deductions for the moment are No. 10, the division of labor increases productivity and thus the sum total of wealth of each and every participant.

9:37Number 11, that any good to which contract parties agree upon is a possible medium of exchange. And number 12, that expressions of self-ownership, namely labor and property, are alienable, whereas the subject of self-ownership, consisting of the physical body and its free will, is inalienable. Deduction Number 13 deals with the right to evaluate as follows. If our lifetime and our health last forever, it would be neither necessary to choose between goals nor to ration any means because at some point all means will be required to accomplish every goal. As neither The two bodies can be in the same place at the same time.

10:24No, one body can be at two places at one time. The only a priori limitations would be time and space. The constant valuations, however, we are continually obliged to undertake under conditions of limited lifetime health, ultimately refer precisely to this prime ordeal, scarcity of self-ownership. The source and reference point of all of our valuations is what Hoppe has called body time. This is what we each align our valuations to, which are manifested in our actions. The valuations being non-material entities, therefore our property, which means we have a right to our valuations, that is, as self-owners, we have the right to value it. The third axiom, the equal right of inalienable self-ownership to value it, has interpersonal equal rank.

11:17Think of this kind of a conflict situation. A single primary threat can affect the self-ownership of several bearers of the right to evaluate. To name some striking examples, a current attack on a state or society by a state, or a state embodying ruling power, a wildfire, a hostage situation in an airplane, or in particular threatening to use weapons of mass destruction. The effect of the secondary action taken against such collective dangers can again be collective. Even if according to each situation they may be individually planned and executed, we will call them individual secondary actions. For those who are actually or allegedly primarily threatened in their self-ownership, it is possible to arrive at different judgements regarding the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of various such possible individual secondary actions of prevention, defense or containment without thereby getting involved in any ethical conflict.

12:17Those who are collectively threatened might, however, disagree with the assessment of the potential danger to self-ownership which the secondary individual measures themselves pose to them and others. Insofar as neither those dangers to life and health arising from primary attack or threat Now, those arising from secondary defense can actually be allotted to individuals who have a fundamentally different conflict situation, one that cannot be sufficiently described by solely using the two accents of human action and diversity and deductions thereof. The attacker remains responsible for his attack, even if an attempt to defend may have aggravated him in the eyes of a tactical appeaser, or if an inadequate choice impeded an alternative and more effective measure of defense.

13:07However, the collective danger emanating from an act of defense itself will only be justified by those who rate this danger lower than the one arising from the primary attack. This class of conflict emerges only where dissenters are endangered or damaged by the second act of defense, who would rather have accepted the danger of the primary threat or would have preferred an alternative but not concurrently possible defense. In that case, some action against the rightful valuations by self-owners and thereby an infringement of self-ownership is inevitable. This obvious dilemma raises the question of the interpersonal value of competing rights. As interpersonal exchangeability cannot be assumed, equal value of self-ownership as a reference point of equally rightful valuations cannot be deduced but only postulated to be autonomous.

14:04Such an assumption rightfully claims reflective evidence. Otherwise, the requirement that every ethical regime should apply equally to everyone would obviously make no sense, because this very demand of universal applicability describes the principle equality of all humans with regard to the conditio humana. This, however, one understands it, is based on the affirmation of life, that is an equal status of ownership of one's body, and thus on equality of self-ownership, as otherwise would be a conditio dominis eviquae. Taking into account the fact mentioned, that due to the lack of intra-personal and inter-personal exchangeability, the term value, as stated in the seventh definition, is not applicable here.

14:52We will instead use the terms of weight, validity, and especially the interpersonal equal length of barrels of equal rights. The statement thus phrased, the autonomous equal length of interpersonal equal rights to evaluate, is intellectually self-evident, universally applicable and valid a priori, and moreover, it is not deducible. Yet the final criterion for attaining axiom status is a self-contradiction in which its antithesis must inevitably become entangled. This antithesis would have to justify why the scale of value of one bearer of the right to evaluate should rank higher and why it is therefore ought to be adopted by another non-consenting bearer of the same right.

15:40It could do this first and foremost by taking the autonomy of the equal rank. It would have to justify the primacy of society over the individual, and thereby get lost in the self-contradiction indicated earlier. A second approach of denying the equal rank of rights to evaluate is a claim that one's own scale of value is more suitable and that this can be measured in an objective way. For instance, by majority vote, academic credentials, theoretical stringency, or historical experience, including one's own economic success. Whoever frames the argument this way would be renouncing his old scale of values because he claims the existence of an objective scale of values that overrides all others, including his own.

16:27He would no longer argue as I, that is, as an actor, but would have to rely on some non-material idealistic entities. In that case, the self-prediction seems to take this form. I know that I know nothing, but I know this for certain. Whether or not these are the right antithesis and whether or not the second one really is self-contradicting has to be left to further consideration, for that the axiomatic character of the statement of the equal rank of the rights to evaluate can for the time being only be assumed. The 14th deduction, the exit option. The bearer of the right to evaluate, who descends from an inevitably individual foreign action affecting self-ownership, has the option to exit.

17:16This is the only solution in such an inevitable and territorially limited case of conflict, by which an infringement of self-ownership can be avoided. However, a question that is perhaps altogether impossible to answer satisfactorily in various such hypothetical situations is, who must leave allegedly dangerous territory if need be permanently? More generally speaking, can any collective choice be legitimate? A still greater problem is likely to arise from situations in which a territorial limitation is not sufficiently plausible, and in which the exit option therefore does not exist. Human action, which contrary to the viability of natural situations is an ethical category, has with the progress of technology achieved an increasing and global reach, and so has secondary individual action.

18:12It looks as though the theoretical structure of Austrian school is reaching a limit here. The scope of racial ethics seems to have been delineated by the statements made so far. All relevant interpersonal and non-aggressive actions with regard to alienable and inalienable property have been categorically listed and sketched in outlines, using an extended structure of axioms and deductions. The further deductions and definitions following logically from this constitutes a particular is the subject of the science of economics. Seen this way, the logical structure described here should be approached as rational ethics. At the same time, it constitutes the foundation of economics.

18:59What implications the expansion of the axiomatic structure may have for economics remains to be seen. Although economics is concerned with alienated property and the equal right of self-owners to evaluate is concerned with inalienable property, it is to be expected that economic implications can no result due to the situationally inseparable involvement of both spheres of property. What can be gained from all this? Outside the Austrian tradition, the more or less pre-conscious motive of defending perceived equality has led to bizarre twists in thinking. Recognition of their own species is part of the established behavioral pattern of all higher developed animals. The attempt to transpose this biologically given equality into philosophical terms has obviously led to careless equations.

19:51These in turn have come into conflict with empirical data and thus fall short of cumulating universal ethics. On the other hand, Austrian analysis of equality does not seem to have drawn too much attention, even if John Locke actually had stated a similarly concise concept of equality and diversity, As has been pointed out to the notion of equal rank in this presentation, it would be about time to be repeated after 323 years. As a consequence, I suggest to replace the contradictory odd propositions of liberty and equality with the bold logical is propositions of self-ownership and of the autonomous equal rank of self-owning bearers of the right to value it.

20:39Since this is highly inelegant, I would not mind the last definition for the day. Let's name it the human rank. Thank you for your attention.