Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

My upcoming lectures at Universidad Francisco Marroquín

From November 3 to 6, I will be giving an invited series of lectures and seminars (nine hours worth of them!) at the Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala.

My general themes will be entrepreneurship, ethics, philosophy, and political economy.

The times titles of my various talks are as follows.

Open Lecture (Thursday, November 3): “Entrepreneurs and Philosophers: Why a Philosophy of Freedom Matters.”

Luncheon Seminar (Friday, November 4): “Economics as a Value Science.”

Full-day Seminar (Saturday, November 5): “Philosophy for Economists and Economics for Philosophers.” Sub-units for the day:

1. Philosophy and the Evolution of the Mixed Economy

2. On the Best Arguments against Free-Market Capitalism
“Socialism is moral even if it isn’t practical.”
“Wealth is a social creation.”
“We live in a world of scarce resources.”
“The free market is dog-eat-dog.”
“Humans are too depraved for freedom.”
“Humans are too incompetent for freedom.”
“Value is not of the material world.”

3. Ethics and Political-Economy
Entrepreneurship and Virtue Ethics
Objective, Subjective, and Intrinsic Value
Egoism, Altruism, and Predation
The Entrepreneurial Life

4. Government in a Free Society
What government is—the what and the how
Legislating morality

5. The Case for the Free Society
Moral and Economic Arguments for Freedom
Empirical Data and Theoretical Principles
“What” and “How” Arguments
Integrating Friedman, Hayek, and Rand
The Positive and the Negative Cases for Freedom

6. Freedom and the Meaning of Life

Thanks to UFM’s Centro Henry Hazlitt for sponsoring my visit.

Talk at BGSU

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.