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