Sumitra Shah wrote:
>He called the a posteriori method of "great
>value in moral sciences, namely, not
>as means of discovering truth, but of verifying it, and reducing to the lowest
>point the uncertainty....arising from the
>complexity of every particular case."
>Mill made the behavioral assumptions of: 1) desire for wealth, 2) aversion to
>labor and 3) present enjoyment of costly indulgences as suitable for what he
>termed the economic department of life. And he
>was meticulous in recognizing the
>cultural difference among groups of people when
>he wrote about the complexity of
>social phenomena and "disturbing causes". Too bad the trajectory of economics
>since his contributions took the formalist,
>deductive path and ignored some of his
>most valuable ideas.
You do well to cite Mill in this regard, and
could have, with equal validity, cited any one of
the 19th century encyclopaedists, who believed
that all knowledge, including the knowledge of
ethics, could be brought under the domain of
"positive science" (whatever that is). But as a
practical matter, it won't work. As evidence of
this, take the following "ethical" proposition,
one that has great economic import:
"God (or nature) has decreed that a few men shall
be masters and the mass of men shall be servants, serfs, or slaves."
Now, vast amounts of evidence could be adduced
both for and against this proposition. It was
certainly a widely held view throughout history
and, if practice be taken as evidence of belief,
it is still widely held today, or at least some
version of it. But regardless of how one comes
down on the issue, there are only two fundamental
attitudes towards it, only two types of
"evidence." On the one hand, one will regard it
as a question of economic science, and judge it
true or false on the basis of some set of
"natural laws," laws viewed as impervious to
ethics as would be a discussion on the orbit of
Venus. Or else one will judge it true or false on
the basis of some ethical content, which content
is determined by the "natural law" of human
flourishing, that is, by the ends and purposes of
human beings and their societies. Both sides,
note, will invoke "natural law," but will mean
something entirely different and incompatible.
The result is that those from one fundamental
attitude will have no way of convincing, or even
talking to, those who hold the opposite attitude.
The two views are simply incommensurable, and no
third set of terms, common to both views and by
which both views could be judged and compared,
can be found. But it gets worse. Even within the
fundamental attitudes, incommensurate views will
be found. This is especially true of the
"positivist" view, where it will always turn out
that different statements will be made axiomatic
(since that is the word du jour), and these
axioms will only permit certain kinds of evidence
to be introduced, evidence that will be entirely
different for different axioms. So even within
the confines of the positivist view, you run the
danger of having not a dialogue but a pure
cacophony. This danger also exists within the
ethical attitude, but is somewhat mitigated by
the realization from the beginning that what is
being compared is beliefs about man and his end,
and so there is at least agreement that the argument is teleological.
To take another issue, one you actually brought
up, Mill (following Hume) takes it as axiomatic
that man is averse to work. But is this really
true? Indeed, the evidence would seem to be on
the other side: when a man gets home from work,
he starts working on his hobby. What Hume and
Mill are more likely noting is that man is averse
to toil (the resistance nature offers to our
efforts) and to the degrading and dehumanizing
work that is found in many work places,
particularly in the day of Mill's mills. But left
to his own devices, man will find something to
do; only with the arrival of television do we see
the emergence of the couch potato as a social
norm. So, has Mill located a real economic axiom?
Or are alternative views possible?
John C. Medaille
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