Part of a work-in-progress in philosophy of economics, here is the video of a seminar I led on “Economics as a Value Science.” Part of my argument is that there is a large, problematic gap in economic theory about the relationship between economic facts and economic values. Along the way I discuss Friedrich Hayek, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Rudolf Carnap, Richard Rorty, Milton Friedman, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, Aristotle, and Ayn Rand. The table of contents of the seminar are below the video frame.
Seminar contents:
Introduction
Philosophical issues in economics
David Hume
Immanuel Kant
Philosophical dichotomies
Implications for economics
Economic agents
Policy recommendations
Nature of philosophers
Value
Irrational values and biases
Positivism: Rudolf Carnap
Postmodernism: Richard Rorty
Free-market economists on facts and values:
Quote: Human Action, Ludwig von Mises
Quote: The Methodology of Positive Economics, Milton Friedman
Quote: Rules and Order, Friedrich A. Hayek
Dichotomous problems
Quote: A History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter
The Aristotelian approach
Objectivity or subjectivity of values
Objective value thesis
Subjective value thesis
Three-way debate:
Intrinsic value thesis
Subjective thesis
Objective thesis
Values as a species of facts
Biological perspective
Fish example: Facts, Values
Value statements
Human beings: Facts, Values
Value examples
Implications for the subjectivity and objectivity of value
Human valuing
Individuality
Authoritarianism
Free society
Epistemological resources on natural and objective value
Final words
Final credits
More precisely: Who is the most loathsome philosopher in his or her personal life?
Let me set the bar high by naming my top two candidates.
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who fathered several children and had them abandoned to orphanages, and of whom David Hume wrote in a letter to Adam Smith: “Thus you see, he is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness. … The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention, form the whole of the Composition.” (David Hume, letter to Adam Smith, October 8, 1767 [Correspondence, 135])
2. Martin Heidegger, who was a Nazi and who, his lover Hannah Arendt said, “lies notoriously always and everywhere, and whenever he can.”
I am open to other suggestions.
Some follow up questions. When one disagrees profoundly with an intellectual’s philosophy, as I do with Rousseau’s and Heidegger’s, is it legitimate to look for a connection between the philosophical and the personal? Or can deep philosophy vary completely independently of personal behavior? Is ad hominem ever a legitimate argument strategy? One should expect integrity, especially from philosophers — i.e., that they will live what they teach and teach what they live — but we also know that hypocrisy is widespread. Should it matter now that influential philosophers were personally immoral, or do only their ideas and arguments matter now?
William Kline of the University of Illinois, Springfield, is an expert on Hume, and he gave a talk recently at Rockford College on Hume’s ethical theory. Here is my follow-up interview with him:
Dr. William Kline, Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield, gave two talks this month at Rockford College. Here is my follow-up interview with him on the main points of his talk on business ethics (3 clips):
Forthcoming: My video with Professor Kline on David Hume, who, according to a recent vote by contemporary philosophers, is the most influential dead philosopher.
Posted 1 year, 10 months ago at 7:09 am. 3 comments
The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship has announced its four guest speakers for this semester:
Roberto Salinas Leon, Ph.D., on business, education, and philosophy in the US and Mexico.
William Kline, Ph.D., on David Hume’s ethics.
Jeffrey Orduno, J.D., on property rights and the law.
Douglas Rasmussen, Ph.D., on Aristotle and contemporary ethics.
Above is a jpeg version of the flyer. For the pdf, click here. CEE’s announcement is here. For more information, email Chris at CEE [at] CEE [dot] edu, or stay tuned for posts updating times and places.
Kant’s strikingly skeptical conclusions depend upon philosophical assumptions that continue to inform contemporary debates between postmodernists and their foes. Most postmodernists take these assumptions to be solid, and many times their foes are at a loss to challenge them. Yet they are the assumptions that must be addressed if postmodernist conclusions are to be avoided. So it is worth highlighting them for future reference.
The first assumption is that the knowing subject’s having an identity is an obstacle to cognition. This assumption is implicit in many verbal formulations: the critics of objectivity will insist that the mind is not a diaphanous medium; nor is it a glossy mirror within which reality reflects itself; nor is it a passive tablet upon which reality writes. The assumption emerges when those facts are taken to disqualify the subject from awareness of reality. The assumption then is that for awareness of reality to occur, the mind would have to be a diaphanous medium, a glossy mirror, a passive tablet.[18] In other words, the mind would have to have no identity of its own; it would have to be nothing itself, and cognition would have to involve no causal processes. The mind’s identity and its causal processes are thus taken to be the enemies of cognition.
The diaphanous assumption is implicit in the relativity and causality of perception arguments that were part of the background problematic to Kant’s philosophy.
In the relativity-of-senses argument, the diaphanous assumption plays out as follows. We notice that one person reports seeing an object as red while another reports seeing it as gray. This puzzles us because it draws our attention to the fact that our sense organs differ in how they respond to reality. This is an epistemological puzzle, however, only if we assume that our sense organs should have nothing to do with our awareness of reality—that somehow awareness should occur by a pure stamping of reality upon our transparent minds. That is, it is a problem only if we assume our senses should operate diaphanously.
In the case of the causality of perception argument, the diaphanous assumption is involved if we are puzzled by the fact that consciousness requires that one’s brain be in a certain state, and that between that brain state and the object in reality is a causal process involving sense organs. This is puzzling only if we have previously assumed that awareness should be an unmediated phenomenon, that one’s brain being in the appropriate state should just somehow happen. That is, the causal process of perception is a puzzle only on the assumption that our senses should have no identity of their own but rather be a diaphanous medium.[19]
In the arguments based on the relativity and the causality of perception, the identity of our sense organs is taken to be the enemy of awareness of reality.
Kant generalized this point to all organs of consciousness. The subject’s mind is not diaphanous. It has identity: it has structures that limit what the subject can be aware of, and they are causally active. From this Kant inferred that the subject is prohibited from awareness of reality. Whatever we take our mind’s identity to be—in Kant’s case, the forms of sensibility and the categories—those causal processes block us. On the Kantian model, our minds’ structures are seen not as existing for the purpose of registering or responding to structures that exist in reality, but as existing for the purpose of imposing themselves upon a malleable reality.
The question to return to is: Is there not something perverse about making our organs of consciousness obstacles to consciousness?[20]
The second key assumption of Kant’s argument is that abstractness, universality, and necessity have no legitimate basis in our experiences. This assumption was not original to Kant, but had a long history in the traditional problem of universals and the problem of induction. Kant, however, following Hume, declared the problems to be in principle unsolvable on the realist/objectivist approach, and he institutionalized that declaration in the subsequent history of philosophy. In the case of abstract, universal concepts, the argument was that there is no way to account for their abstractness and universality empirically: Since what is given empirically is concrete and particular, abstractness and universality must be added subjectively. The parallel argument in the case of general and necessary propositions was that there is no way to account for their generality and necessity empirically: Since what is given empirically is particular and contingent, generality and necessity must be subjectively added.
Institutionalizing this premise is crucial for postmodernism, since what has been added subjectively can be taken away subjectively. Postmodernists, struck by and favoring contingency and particularity for a host of reasons, accept the Humean/Kantian premise that neither abstractness nor generality can be derived legitimately from the empirical.
References
[18] This is exactly Rorty’s key conclusion in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
[19] The diaphanous assumption is sometimes but not necessarily assisted by a lingering mind/body dualism in two ways. In one way, dualism encourages us to conceive of the mind as a ghostly, pure substance that somehow magically confronts and comes to know physical reality. In another way, such dualism posits a non-physical mind that is distinct from the physical sense organs and brain, and so immediately leads us to conceive of the physical senses and the brain as obstacles standing in the way of contact between mind and reality.
[20] See Kelley 1986 for an extended analysis and response to the diaphanous and Kantian theses.
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Kant began by identifying a premise common to both empiricists and rationalists. They had assumed that knowledge must be objective. That is, they took for granted that the object of knowledge sets the terms and that therefore it was up to the subject to identify the object on the object’s terms. In other words, the empiricists and the rationalists were realists: they believed that reality is what it is independently of consciousness, and that the purpose of consciousness is to come to an awareness of reality as it is. In Kant’s terms, they assumed that the subject is to conform to object.[7] Kant then noted that the realist/objectivist assumption had led repeatedly to failure, and—more strikingly—that it must necessarily lead to failure.
To demonstrate this, Kant proposed a dilemma for all analyses of knowledge. The first premise of the dilemma is given at the beginning of the Transcendental Deduction. Here Kant states that knowledge of objects can come to be in only one of two ways.
There are only two possible ways in which synthetic representations [i.e., what one experiences] and their objects can establish connection, obtain necessary relation to one another, and, as it were, meet one another. Either the object alone must make the representation possible, or the representation alone must make the object possible.[8]
The terms of the dilemma are crucial, particularly for the first alternative. If we say that “the object alone must make the representation possible,” then we imply that the subject must have nothing to do with the process. The implication is that the subject can have no identity of its own, that the mind must not be anything in particular, that consciousness must be, to borrow a phrase, a purely “diaphanous” medium on which or through which reality writes itself.[9] In other words, Kant assumed—as had most thinkers before him—that objectivity presupposes naïve realism’s metaphysics of an identity-less subject.
But clearly that metaphysics of mind is hopeless. This was Kant’s next premise. The knowing subject is something: its processes are causal and definite, and they shape the subject’s awareness. In Kant’s words, when we experience “we always remain involved in conditions,” conditions that make our experiences a “finite synthesis.”[10]
This is why naïve realism has been an impossible project. The knowing subject is not a blank, identity-less tablet, so it cannot be that the object alone makes knowledge possible. Given its finite identity, the knowing subject is implicated in producing its experiences, and from the limited and conditioned experiences that are produced the subject cannot read off what is really real.
Thus we arrive at the second alternative, the one that Kant proposed as being true—namely that the representation makes the object possible. And thus we have part of the motivation for Kant’s “Copernican” revolution in philosophy, announced in the Second Preface.[11] Given that the knowing subject has an identity, we must abandon the traditional assumption that the subject conforms to the object. Accordingly, the converse must be true: the object must conform to the subject, and only if we make that assumption—i.e., only if we abandon objectivity for subjectivity—can we can make sense of empirical knowledge.
The second part of Kant’s motivation was attempting to make sense of necessary and universal concepts and propositions. Neither the rationalists nor the empiricists had found a way to derive them from experience. Kant again faulted their assumption of realism and objectivism. Those assumptions made the project impossible. “In the former case [i.e., the object alone making the representation possible], this relation is only empirical, and the representation is never possible a priori.”[12] Or putting the point in language Kant had learned from Hume, passive experience will never reveal what must be, for such experience “teaches us that a thing is so and so, but not that it cannot be otherwise.”[13]
So again we must infer that the converse is true: Necessity and universality must be functions of the knowing subject, not items impressed upon subjects by objects. If we assume that our identity as knowing subjects is implicated in constructing our experiences, then we can assume that our identity will generate certain necessary and universal features of our experiences.[14] Accordingly we have Kant’s central project in the first Critique of tracking down fourteen such constructive functions of the subject: space and time as two forms of sensibility, and the twelve categories. As a result of the operations of those constructive functions, we can find necessary and universal features within our experiential world—because we have put them there.
Now for the payoffs and trade-offs. The first payoff is that the phenomenal world of experience now has necessary and universal features built into it, so we get a nice, orderly world for science to explore. Science is rescued from the unintended skepticism that the empiricists and rationalists had reached, and its aspiration to discover necessary and universal truths is made possible.
But there is also the Kantian trade-off. The objects that science explores exist “only in our brain,”[15] so we can never come to know the world outside it. Since the phenomenal world’s necessary and universal features are a function of our subjective activities, any necessary and universal features that science discovers in the phenomenal world have application only in the phenomenal world. Science must work with experience and reason, and on Kantian grounds this means that science is cut off from reality itself.
[E]verything intuited in space or time, and therefore all objects of experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings, or as series of alterations, have no independent existence outside our thoughts.[16]
As for what has independent existence outside our thoughts, nobody knows or can know.
From Kant’s perspective, that is a trade-off he was happy to make, for science’s loss is religion’s gain. Kant’s argument, if successful, means that “all objections to morality and religion will be forever silenced, and this in Socratic fashion, namely, by the clearest proof of the ignorance of the objectors.”[17] Reason and science are now limited to playing with phenomena, leaving the noumenal realm untouched and untouchable. Having denied knowledge, room was made for faith. For who can say what is or is not out there in the real world?
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
I will be giving a talk next week to a graduate philosophy class at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The theme of my talk is: What Philosophers Need to Know about Economics.
Over the past generation BGSU has developed one of the country’s strongest programs in applied ethics and political philosophy, so it will be an honor as well as a pleasure. Thanks to Professor Fred Miller and Professor Pam Phillips, the course’s instructors, for the invitation.
I will be discussing philosophy’s contributions to the debates over economics as a social science. What is a science? Since economics is about valuing, how does one (or can one) bridge the is-ought gap in ethics? Since individual economic agents can be irrational in their values, how epistemologically can there be a science involving such agents? Great issues that take us to landmark influential philosophers in conflict with each other — e.g., Hume versus Aristotle, the Logical Positivists versus the Postmodernists — and landmark influential economists in conflict with each other — e.g., the neoclassicals versus the Austrians.
Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 10:44 pm. 4 comments
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who fathered several children and had them abandoned to orphanages, and of whom David Hume wrote in a letter to Adam Smith: “Thus you see, he is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness. … The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention, form the whole of the Composition.” (
2. Martin Heidegger, who was a Nazi and who, 
Kant generalized this point to all organs of consciousness. The subject’s mind is not diaphanous. It has identity: it has structures that limit what the subject can be aware of, and they are causally active. From this Kant inferred that the subject is prohibited from awareness of reality. Whatever we take our mind’s identity to be—in Kant’s case, the forms of sensibility and the categories—those causal processes block us. On the Kantian model, our minds’ structures are seen not as existing for the purpose of registering or responding to structures that exist in reality, but as existing for the purpose of imposing themselves upon a malleable reality. 
Over the past generation BGSU has developed one of the country’s strongest programs in applied ethics and political philosophy, so it will be an honor as well as a pleasure. Thanks to Professor Fred Miller and Professor Pam Phillips, the course’s instructors, for the invitation.
