Commentary: Morality, Justice and Markets

0:00I want to thank all the four authors of the papers for very interesting comments, and I also want to thank the various authors for sending me their papers in advance of the session. I must say this is the first time that's happened in the 17 Austrian Scholars Conference that I've attended. Now, we began with Professor Bedelford's paper, and I must say, although the idea of comparing Adam Smith and von Mises is a very interesting idea and very important, his was the paper I found myself most in disagreement with.

0:51At one point he says following Glenn Morrow that Adam Smith had abandoned strict methodological individualism in his moral theory in that the realm of morality exists apart from the individual. But it seems to me Smith's theory is still quite consistent with methodological individualism in that it rests on acts of sympathetic identification with others, the impartial spectator, so the realm of morality is built up out of individuals' reactions or feelings about the actions of others.

1:44That's quite in line with methodological individualism. Methodological individualism doesn't say there's nothing but individuals and their actions, but that social institutions can ultimately be analyzable in terms of individuals. Even somewhat later in his paper, he says about that utilitarianism is an ethically empty theory and the argument for this was that each individual will be acting to try to achieve whatever he considers will make him the happiest and so you can't, if that's So it's just you would just have each individual trying to act as whatever way he thought best and there would be no judgments possible about what was good or bad we would just have each individual would be doing whatever he wanted.

2:47Now it seems to me there were confusing there's a confusion between Bentham held both psychological hedonism and ethical hedonism. He thought people actually were motivated by trying to achieve the greatest happiness which we took for the greatest pleasure, balance of pleasure or pain at all times, and that they ought to do this, but neither position implies the other, so it's quite consistent to say that even if it's true, each individual is aiming at what he takes to be, give him the most happiness that a utilitarian could say, well, some individuals are wrong about what will best achieve happiness for the whole group. Utilitarianism is usually taken to be maximizing happiness for a whole group. So it's quite consistent to say individuals are making mistakes about it, even if each individual is trying to do whatever he thinks will attain his own happiness. So if utilitarianism is an ethically empty theory, I don't think the argument in this paper is sufficient to show that. Then at another place, it was suggested

4:10that Mises endorses an invisible hand account, and the passages quoted in support of that had to do with a passage where Mises speaks about the benefits of social cooperation. He said in one such passage that many people can think that in the economy it's based on antagonisms between people, they confuse the economic cooperation, the economic system and with ones of fighting with wars and in fact people had mutually beneficial interests and another passage quoted Mises on Ricardo law of comparative cost which Mises extended into general law of association but is quite right to say those were very important notions for Mises but they were not ones where that show Mises had an invisible hand explanation because to show that, you would have to show that Mises held that people had come into the market not by conscious intent but as a result of other actions which had led to the existence of the market and he doesn't particularly emphasize that.

5:32To the contrary, he's more of a social rationalist as Joseph Salerno has pointed out in an important ," he tended to think that people had consciously entered into the market. So the very good point that the market is a realm not of antagonism but of social cooperation doesn't at all show that Mises was engaged in an invisible hand sort of explanation. Now turning to Professor Mr. Weigler's very erudite paper, I have very little to comment on that. I would only suggest there then discussion of Grotius in the part of the, this didn't come out in the oral presentation. He emphasizes that Grotius developed natural law as something just dependent on reason. He quotes the famous sentence where Grotius says that the natural law would hold even if God didn't exist. Now, I don't say he's wrong to take that view, but there is a competing view of Grotius in the literature, for example, in the writings of Oliver O'Donovan that claims that Grotius had a more theological content to natural law, that there isn't this sort of strict separation

6:58that some people have claimed for Grotius when he quotes that famous sentence from Suarez.

7:08That was the only point I had on that paper. Now, turning to Jared Casey's paper, that was the one I found myself, I really found the most interesting one, the one that coincides with a lot of my own interest, I was most interested in reading that. And I think he's arguing on entirely the right lines that we do have to take. It's very important to take property as unowned rather than claim that people have pre-existing rights to property. And the only points I would have on his paper are he started off with a very valuable discussion of Soraydi's The point of which was to say that even though we don't have, there's no in a continuum situation, there's no exact cut-off point that still we can get, we know at least within a certain zone of indeterminacy where the one thing changes into another, say we can say certain people are tall, we know certain people are tall and certain people are short.

8:22even though we can't say exactly when, where the point of division is or that there isn't an exact point of division, but we can still know that some people are tall and other people are short. I think we could say that his point follows even if we accept the minority position on sororities. It's been argued by Timothy Williamson in his famous book, Vagueness, where he says, there is an exact cutoff point, we don't know what it is, and he argues for that somewhat counterintuitive point of view on various technical grounds and logic. But even if you accepted that view, I think what Professor Casey said would still hold that we would still be relying on our common sense judgments to delimit where the boundary was.

9:16Now the only other point I would comment on his paper is there's a footnote where he's talking about the view that everyone owns things in common and he raises an objection that many people have raised that view. Well, wouldn't you have to get everyone's permission if you wanted to do anything? Say, if everybody owns everything, then if I wanted to pick up something, I'd have to get everybody to approve and everybody would die because before I could get that approval. But I think there it isn't evident that that view strictly follows from the common ownership position. I mean, one could hold views that you can do something unless someone to common property, unless somebody objects to it. So I don't think there's any strict logical implication there, although it's certainly an interesting objection to that theory. But I don't think it's strictly logically required. And I found the last paper a very, I found that a very convincing argument on how government action crowds out private

10:28of a Charity. And the only comment I had on that was in, one thing again wasn't in the oral presentation, but in the discussion of theology, which is far outside my area of knowledge, whatever that's supposed to be, And Father Walker and his co-authors quoted the statement of Jesus, my kingdom is not of this world, and they argued that this was a limit, this expressed a limit to political power. And it's not evident to me that that's the case, although one could certainly imagine The Theory of Money and Credit

11:39It would be a good idea to add to the paper exactly how that passage is supposed to be taken to limit political power. So I want to thank again all the authors for their very valuable papers. Thank you very much.