Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

A brilliant article by George Reisman.

Notes. 1) Reisman writes:

Other people’s means of production, other people’s capital, are the source both of the supply of the goods one buys and of the demand for the labor one sells. The greater is other people’s accumulation of capital, the more abundant and less expensive are the products available for one to buy in the market and the greater is the demand for the labor one sells in the market and thus the higher the wages at which one can sell it.

The increase in the demand for labor is due to the greater relative scarcity of labor as opposed to capital. The more capital is invested per worker, the less each additional unit of capital is useful as versus an additional unit of labor. In other words, investment in capital goods is subject to diminishing returns; on the other hand labor becomes more valuable and more in demand which causes nominal wages to rise until the marginal increase in wages furthers production as much as a marginal increase in the investment in capital goods (that is, until the marginal value product of labor is equal to the marginal value product of capital).

Now, of course, labor becomes more productive mostly due to investment in capital. Even non-capital-intensive industries compete for workers with industries that are capital-intensive and must raise the wages of their workers in order not to lose them. (For example, a butler will benefit from economic progress, because his master will fear losing him to capital-intensive projects in which he will be very productive and therefore earn more money. The butler’s wages, too, must rise along with the wages of other workers.) Now it is true that if firm A has invested heavily into capital goods, and firm B has not, then only A’s demand for labor will increase. However, we are talking about the economy-wide capital accumulation. It is when we look at the economy as a whole that we see that wages are bound to rise given a general increase in capital available for production. Once wages have caught up, new technologies and increased savings again make creating capital goods profitable. Money flows into “labor-saving” machines. Yet this makes human labor relatively cheap and eventually boosts demand for it. This cycle goes on forever and results in constantly increasing real (though not nominal, barring inflation) wages.

2) He goes on:

For example, $1 million expended by grocery stores in buying produce at wholesale will show up as $1 million of such cost within days. However, $1 million expended in the construction of a new building with a depreciable life of forty years will show up as a cost of production to be deducted from sales revenues only after the building is fully completed, and then at the rate of just $25,000 per year, as per its forty-year depreciable life.

What he means is that the rate of capital consumption differs in the case of groceries and the new building. Groceries are bought wholesale, then sold retail and are eaten by the consumers within days. There you have it, a million dollars worth of capital (wholesale groceries) has been used up, having been transformed into life energy. But a building is consumed much more slowly: only $25,000 of it disappears into the abyss every year. Hence capital consumption is smaller, but if revenues from the building are the same as from the groceries, then overall profits in the economic system are much higher.

Now investing into longer production processes from the point of view of an individual firm is possible due to lower interest payments. The costs of doing business over time are lessened. That is, the cost of time during a boom is lower than consumers prefer. Investing into more durable capital goods is one way to benefit from lower interest rates, because you lose less money from buying such goods — the money which could instead have been loaned out and earned interest. In other words, suppose you are trying to decide whether to purchase a new building or to put the money on a CD. The interest on $1,000,000 over 40 years can be quite large, but if interest rates are low (whether naturally or artificially), then the profits obtained from using the building even given the yearly maintenance expenditure of $25,000 have a better chance of outweighing the counterfactual interest return. (We are not guilty of double counting here: if you maintain the building, then at the end of 40 years you will be able to sell it for $1,000,000; if you don’t maintain it, then in 40 years it will collapse. Either way, you’ll have spent $1,000,000 + interest foregone.)

1. Pure utilitarianism is act utilitarianism, and it can succeed only by making interpersonal utility comparisons, assisted by its disinterested benevolence and intimate knowledge of each individual.

2. How does utilitarianism respect people’s autonomy? By presupposing that people know what they want and merely enabling them to achieve their ends. The ends themselves are not judged by any outsider including the impartial spectator, though they can be judged insofar as they themselves are means to the ultimate end which is happiness. Generally, utilitarianism rains truth on the good and evil alike (Mt 5:45), though if a utilitarian is in a position to deceive an evil person and thwart his plans, he can legitimately do so.

Is there a contradiction between this deference to autonomy and utilitarianism’s social approach to ethics? Not at all. The latter means that each individual’s desires and well-being are given equal weight in moral calculations. The former means that value judgments are taken as ultimate givens. Both principles can without trouble co-exist.

3. A prudent person tries to figure out not the right thing to do but the best thing to do. If doing the “right” thing is interpreted as doing what is permissible, then there are numerous right things to do in any given situation. If it is interpreted as doing your duty all things considered, then this duty is ultimately an outcome of rule utilitarian calculations.

4. Teaching the truth about the actual means-actual ends connections is itself a means towards securing general happiness. Are there other means? Assuredly; for example, producing a means is conducive to happiness. One could produce such a means for another out of charity, having sized up the utility of sacrificing his own good for the sake of his beneficiary. But, of course, that won’t work as a general way toward abundance of means. Prosperity results from capital accumulation, insofar as capital goods are means to or way stations within production processes of consumer goods. But in order to induce this process of saving and investment, all that is necessary is to teach people economics, which explains how people can use each other most efficiently in striving to achieve their own private goals. Again, we see that teaching the truth is the most crucial task of anyone who wishes to measure up to the strictures of utilitarian ethics.

5. Since the work of prudence consists of finding the most profitable course of action, one must also consider whether he has the ability to use a particular means for the satisfaction of an end he has. In other words, the considerations of power are included in prudence.

6. Is one required by pure utilitarianism to jump on a grenade to save his buddies? Since disinterested benevolence is assumed, the answer is yes, unless more sophisticated calculations show otherwise. Once again, this blithe conclusion is a sign not of the absurdity of pure utilitarianism but of its being only 1/4 of the general theory of ethics. Note that pure utilitarianism will calculate the consequences in every case anew; rule utilitarianism (which is only 1/2 of the total ethical theory) will ask whether a rule in which a soldier is supposed to sacrifice his life for the sake of the lives of N of his fellow soldiers is a good one. (E.g., you may be harmed by taking a risk that in your trench you will be closest to the grenade and will therefore incur a duty of dying to save others; but you benefit by enjoying the possibility that you will not be closest to the grenade and will be saved by another soldier. If on average 10 soldiers are saved per 1 soldier who sacrifices himself, the odds are in your favor that you will survive a grenade.)

7. Disinterested benevolence is the form charity, the greatest of all virtues, takes for NTs.

Reposting this with an update… I think I should have used standard permalinks to make reposting easier.

The source for the reason why God is masculine is Peter Kreeft’s speech “Women and the Priesthood.” He says that God is masculine, because He “impregnates” the soul from the outside with grace. I add that there are reasons why each person of the Trinity could be called masculine.

The first person, because (1f) He as Creator and in His capacity as a perfect agent or pure act created matter and imbued it with form, and that which acts is masculine, while that which is acted upon is feminine; and (2f) as Father He rewards and punishes those He loves, an activity which properly belongs to the father not the mother (or at least, to the masculine part of every human being).

The second person, because (1s) as Redeemer it belongs to the man to sacrifice himself for his bride rather than to the woman for her bridegroom; and (2s) Jesus was male (of course, this only shows the sex of His human nature not His divine nature, but it would be odd indeed if the divine Daughter was incarnated as a male).

The third person, because (1h) as Sanctifier, as Kreeft states, He gives grace which bears fruit, etc.

Update. I just realized that I already spoke on this question in my Questions About God… And Answers which seems to have aged well. I also found another reason about which I completely forgot:

Look at Gen 3:16: “To the woman he said, ‘… Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’” That, of course, is how it works in families, normally. But God is ruled by no one but rules everything. Hence it would not be consistent with human experience to imagine God to be feminine.

Finally, Just as God is the creator of both form and matter, act and potency, so He did not need a Mother which stands for “matter” to beget a Child. His goodness and power were sufficient. But the Child is a perfect image of the Father and is therefore a “boy,” the Son.

It is written:

When he arrived at the other side in the region of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men coming from the tombs met him. They were so violent that no one could pass that way. “What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”

Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.”

He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. (Mt 8:28-32)

Was Jesus at fault for violating the property rights of the pigs’ owner? It seems that it was the demons who violated the owner’s rights not Jesus. Jesus merely allowed them to enter the pigs. But why would He listen to the demons’ request? Are they not morally pure evil? Well yes, but before “the appointed time” demons are part of nature, and they have a purpose, namely to torment, tempt, etc. humans, and therefore have certain “rights.” Being useful (to God and even to men) is a kind of good. Insofar as the demons were good, they deserved consideration.

The problem with all the approaches to ethics I’ve seen so far is twofold. First, they fail to realize that there are 4 complementary ethical theories, corresponding to the 4 temperaments. Second, they fail to consider each theory in its pure form, undiluted by the other 3 theories, each one at the same time quite inadequate on its own as a complete ethics and yet also essential and correct. Let’s consider therefore pure utilitarianism, the NT Rational theory.

Utilitarianism corresponds to the virtue of prudence, to satisfaction of desires whatever they are, to truth and ethical calculation. The first condition for utilitarianism is disinterested or detached benevolence. The second is impartiality. In deciding what to do, each person is an unbiased spectator, considering everyone’s interests and desires without privileging any particular person including oneself. You dissolve within society, become anonymous, nobody special, a dot on the disk of the totality of society. Yeager discusses “impersonal cooperation,” “the anonymous Great Society,” “common sentiment extending to all mankind.” This is obviously as anti-NF as it gets. And yet it is a crucial component of the full-featured ethical system still to be developed. Therefore, it is wrong, in considering pure utilitarianism, to argue that “[i]ndividuals can and should favor their own interests within the bounds of morality and law”; or that “[i]n intimate groups… the attitude of solidarity and altruism… are more appropriate.” (Ethics as Social Science, 193ff) These NF corrections, sensible as they are, contaminate pure utilitarianism and make it unintelligible.

The NT and SJ ethics share a property of being social; they speak not to individuals but to society as a whole. In conjunction with the SJ ethics we get rule utilitarianism, a far more robust theory than pure act utilitarianism.

Bob Murphy objects:

The fundamental problem with utilitarianism is this: Despite a succession of ingenious proponents, its advocates have yet to explain why the individual should behave morally. The fact that we are all better off if we all behave morally is utterly true and utterly irrelevant. (Such an argument violates the cherished Austrian precepts of marginalism and individualism.) The truly difficult moral issues resemble the familiar Prisoner’s Dilemma; regardless of everyone else’s behavior, the individual does better by exploiting others. It is true that a society suffering from widespread theft would be intolerable, even from a thief’s point of view, but any individual robbery has very little impact on the overall level of crime.

This objection fails to acknowledge the social focus of utilitarianism. A pure utilitarian has little to say to any individual on why he should not be a thief. But it does recommend a social policy of catching and punishing thieves. According to pure utilitarianism, one would not want exploit others, because he risks being caught and fined or imprisoned. The utilitarian idea is to structure the incentives of the legal system to minimize the total amount of violence people (including the state) inflict on one another. Utilitarianism counsels rewarding and encouraging good deeds and discouraging behavior that harms social cooperation. And that’s it! It thus addresses itself to society and its agent, the state.

But Murphy has another argument up his sleeve.

Moreover, if everyone agreed with Yeager and other utilitarians that it were foolish to sacrifice oneself in these rare instances, an element of doubt would arise in all social interactions. Although pangs of conscience might be a wonderful evolutionary byproduct, it would be in the interest of everyone to steel himself against such “irrational” feelings (while still behaving in accordance with them under normal circumstances). One’s very life might one day depend on it.

Here there is a truth-digging game going on between society and individuals. Individual soldiers will want to hide their cowardice and merely pretend to be willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause (thereby getting paid for doing no work), while society has an incentive to detect their cheating and punish them for it or, at least, refuse to hire them. Utilitarianism addresses itself not to the soldier who is contemplating whether to sacrifice himself for the greater good but to the general choosing the soldiers who, in his estimation, are most likely to follow orders even unto death. It does not say to the soldier: “Sacrifice yourself.” Rather, it says to the general: “Pick self-sacrificing soldiers.” And it is an empirically true statement that people do not always behave selfishly, carefully hiding their egoism until the time comes when they are put to the test, and then to everyone’s consternation they up and do their own thing. Sometimes society wins; other times individuals win unjustly and wickedly at the expense of society. A soldier may indeed be directed to sacrifice himself but not by utilitarianism but by the contract he must have signed with the military before going off to war. He is duty-bound to act as his contract stipulates, including sacrifice himself in certain situations.

Murphy goes on:

Utilitarianism seems to rob the words good and bad of their specifically ethical character. The utilitarian cannot make a distinction between guilt and simple error. The person who robs a bank to achieve happiness has made a mistake in qualitatively the same sense as a person who overcooks a steak.

Once again, we don’t care about whether a thief acted virtuously or not. All that pure utilitarianism commands is that the police try to deter and minimize bank robberies as much as possible consistent with other goals. The rule according to which robberies go unpunished results in an unhappy society, despite the benefits to the robbers. (It is true that it is better to suffer than to inflict suffering. The robber does not realize that he is doing and being evil. But pure utilitarianism takes values as given. This fact is evidence not of our theory’s bankruptcy but merely of its incompleteness.) It follows that we as a society must calibrate the legal system and other methods of apportioning praise and blame so as to promote general happiness. As David Friedman writes, contrasting the economic approach to law with other approaches, “An economist points out that if the punishments for armed robbery and for armed robbery plus murder are the same, the additional punishment for the murder is zero — and asks whether you really want to make it in the interest of the robbers to murder their victims.” (Law’s Order, 8) As to the fate of the robber’s eternal soul utilitarianism is silent, unless never committing a sin is what the divine gift of counsel commands.

Pure utilitarianism teaches people how to attain their goals (which may include the goals of others toward whom they feel benevolent). On the level of the individual utilitarianism collapses into the virtue of prudence-in-act. (Of course, utilitarianism does not lose its character as social even here, because this is merely a limiting case wherein the society consists of a single individual.) On the level of society it also teaches people how to hinder the goals of those whose actions would destroy social cooperation if left unchecked. A utilitarian thus seeks to educate the public about the actual means to their actual ends, enhance their practical wisdom or prudence and their strategic intelligence. Utilitarianism does not consider people to be placeholders of utility; in teaching them the truth it respects people’s autonomy (the source of NT self-respect) and presupposes that they know what they want, though it is aware that prudence can be used for evil ends. In the final analysis utilitarianism attempts to spread the virtue of prudence far and wide.

If the severely mentally handicapped have (negative) rights, why not animals? It seems to me that the former have rights, because we share a common essence, humanity, and, though their intellectual virtues are on the low side, these virtues are accidents. It is dangerous to split mankind into groups, some of which will have rights, and others will not. It worsens the tone of society; it is a slippery slope; it undermines respect for human life in other situations; etc. On the other hand, animals and plants belong to different species. It might be argued that we share with them “animality” or “life,” but we can counter by saying that merely being an animal or being alive without being human is not enough for having rights. It may seem like an arbitrary cutoff point, and some religions command one to care even for insects, but this point “works.” I mean, cats usually care for kittens not puppies. Wolves hunt in packs, helping each other, but harming and killing their prey. Love and consideration seem to be limited to one’s own species. Of course, there are instances of symbiosis, such as when humans keep pets. So, my cat may be said, perhaps somewhat metaphorically, to have rights against being killed (by anyone other than me). At the very least, I have a right not to have my property, the cat, damaged. However, the cat has these rights only because I love him, i.e., this particular cat. If I were to throw him out, he would cease to be protected. On the other hand, human orphans scratching a living on the street have rights independent of whether anyone loves them, i.e., these particular orphans.

Update. Inspired by Danny Shahar.

Beversluis seeks to diffuse the C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, Lord” trilemma.

The first argument our author makes is that the Bible and Gospels in particular are unreliable. Well, blow me down. If the New Testament narratives “incorporate later recollections, interpolations, embellishments, fictionalizations, and ascriptions of deity,” then the implications of this go far beyond the obscure fact of the failure of C.S. Lewis’s argument. Are we even sure that Jesus existed? Is Christianity “based on a myth, mass hallucination, and even outright lies”? Forget C.S. Lewis; given Beversluis’s argument we probably have an intellectual imperative to abandon the Christian faith altogether! In other words, that the Bible is not to be trusted is an immensely strong claim which lays waste to the religion of billions. To call it controversial is hardly to do justice to it. So, it is entirely reasonable to dismiss this argument as proving too much. We must evaluate C.S. Lewis’s trilemma on the condition that the Gospels are accurate. I mean, who can doubt that Lewis himself would agree that if the Gospels recount events that never took place, then he has no case?

Lewis claims to be an expert in literary criticism and asserts that the Gospels don’t feel to him like a myth. Beversluis dismisses Lewis’s statement by saying that his expertise is irrelevant: Lewis is deluded into falsely assuming that “wide reading in a particular genre necessarily makes one’s judgment more reliable than narrow intensive reading in the same genre.” Yet earlier he thinks nothing of referring to “the opinion of mainstream New Testament scholarship generally” and to psychiatric experts. Does our author remember what he says from one moment to the next? Is being an expert valuable or not?

Beversluis goes on to claim that Jesus may in fact have been insane, since he allegedly had moral failings. Jesus curses the fig, he orders the demons to enter and drown the pigs, he takes a colt without permission, he condemns the Pharisees, he claims that wanting to commit adultery is a sin (isn’t it?), etc. Now I think that there is a reasonable explanation of these behaviors, and it is certainly not madness. But I just don’t see how anyone who falsely claims to be the omnipotent immortal God, “the way and the truth and the life,” who created the universe could be any kind of teacher, let alone a great moral one.

In order to forgive sins, Beversluis argues, Jesus need not have been God; he only needed to have been something like a Catholic priest who had the authority to forgive sins. Now if Jesus had this authority, he must have received it directly from God, for no one else could ordain him — he was the first priest. But (1) the Bible does not relate to us any story of such ordination; on the contrary, Christ says he builds his Church, that is, the Church in which he, Jesus Christ is to be worshipped; and (2) God would not favor and empower a lunatic or a fiend to be the founder of what would later become a worldwide religion. There is a much more serious problem with this, however. The Incarnation has altered the relationship between men and God. It effected a genuine change in the cosmic order of things. It is only after Jesus’s mission was completed that forgiveness of sins became possible. The Law condemned the world of sin; nobody had the right to forgive except the Father, but He was not willing, and the Son had not yet taken ownership of the world from his Father. If Jesus was not God, then he could not have been a sin-forgiving priest either.

But Beversluis makes two good points. Jesus’s moral teachings are good regardless of who he is; they stand or fall on their own. Consider, however, that Jesus taught a lot of things that dealt with heavenly affairs and divine truths. If he was merely “a man who believed that he was God (or the Son of God), but was not,” then the articles of faith revealed by Jesus have no authority, because there was no way Jesus could know them — unless God revealed them to him, which He wouldn’t, because, again, He would not have chosen a crazy man or a fiend to deliver the revelations. Second, the key to Christianity is not moral teachings; moral teachers are a dime a dozen. Once again, it is the change in the relationship between mankind and God.

His second point is that numerous controversies on the nature of Jesus animated the Church Fathers. It was not immediately clear that Jesus had two natures, fully human and fully divine, in one person, etc. Many hypotheses were entertained, and these had to be settled by extensive discussion. It follows that concluding that Jesus was God was not so trivial a matter as C.S. Lewis would have us believe; otherwise why had so many people been confused before the official doctrine was finally promulgated? Ah, but you see, we don’t know the process of reasoning by which the early Church came to what are now orthodox doctrines. Perhaps it took them so long to arrive at the truth precisely because they did not have access to the C.S. Lewis’s argument. In other words, if C.S. Lewis had lived in those days, Adoptionism and Arianism and so forth might never have arisen, so cogent his argument would have seemed to the Church councils.

So, it seems that C.S. Lewis’s trilemma is alive and well.

See also: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord; The Argument for Christianity from “Martyrdom”.

I have written on the contrast between fortitude and prudence. It remains to consider the contrast between fear of the law and justice.

It would be wrong to seek the difference between our two virtues in “law” and “exceptions from law.” For fear of the law covers all rules, whether more particular or more general and determines when exceptions to a lower law should be made in order to obey a higher law. Thus, common law may be overridden by a statute which itself must be constitutional, while even the Constitution is not “a suicide pact,” to use that much abused phrase, and can be overridden in some cases. So, fear of the law is sensitive to numerous interactions between various laws and to how to adjudicate conflicts between them.

Now in ST, II-II, 57-120 Aquinas deals with justice in society instead of justice within an individual, a grievous error. Justice is first and foremost truth to oneself, authenticity, integrity, never betraying who one is, self-hood, identity. If science is abstraction from experience, and science is the domain of NTs, then NFs deal with whatever cannot be abstracted, the unique aspects of human experiencing. Clearly then, you cannot enmesh your life entirely into laws. There are things which no law tells you to do or not to do. You must look into yourself and see if you want to do it. Now this process may be governed by the law “do whatever makes you happy,” but this law does not specify what makes you happy. It’s your own unique character and unique self which determine your desires, identity, and destiny. Just as fear of the law presupposes authority, justice often inveighs against authority, if it is perceived as suffocating to one’s individual personality.

Just as Artisans and Rationals should normally stay away from each other (while Guardians do naturally stay away Rationals; and Artisans, from Idealists, having little to contribute to each other) and cooperate only with theory meets practice, so Guardians’ traits should not contaminate Idealists, and vice versa. Fear of the law insists on obedience or on being true to the external law; justice insists on obedience or on being true to one’s own unique qualities.

Happiness is virtuous use of one’s own powers. This covers both acting-toward-rest and acting-while-at-rest, as both presuppose a power in some righteous act. But I want to consider a particular kind of happiness, namely happiness in active life. This happiness depends crucially on the four cardinal virtues. Its first part therefore is living according to (sophisticated) rule utilitarianism. One must (1) fear and follow the law created (4) prudently, in the service to producing best consequences. Its second part may be called true-to-oneself opportunism. One must (2) be a master tactician and adapt to change but do so (3) without compromising but rather in order to enhance his integrity.

The SJ Guardian weapon is contempt; the NF Idealist weapon is temptation. In competent hands they are deadly. Of course, they can be used for evil as well as good. If used for evil, we can summarize them in the character of the devil who is a

In considering when these weapons are used for good, punishments is normally the wrong place to look. For example, in deterring offenses we do not lie; on the contrary, we carefully structure punishments to minimize overall crime (that is, violence, including the violence inflicted by the state on the criminals, and fraud), and we make them known to everybody. (But it is surely admissible to lie in order to deter a criminal for the sake of his victims from even trying to stray.) Similarly, in attempting to rehabilitate an offender we do not, at least at first, tempt him to commit further crimes; on the contrary, we supply noble goals for him to achieve. (But if a thief is thinking about stealing a car, then stealing is a temptation to him. If he overcomes it and refuses to go along with his criminal inclinations, then he will become a better person and maybe even hang up his thieving gloves for good. Here temptation is used legitimately.) In using their weapons for good, then, we can summarize each temperament’s strategy as follows:

There are four theories of punishment, but only the Artisan theory inflicts violence on a person, condemning him to greater or lesser extent. Each “weapon” can be used judiciously for its one corresponding purpose out of four.

Just as violence is an SP Artisan weapon, so deception is an NT Rational weapon. Just as self-defense is permitted violence, even given the libertarian non-aggression principle, so lying is, too, a form of self-defense. Theoretically, deceiving can even work as punishment, as you watch the person punished fail at his projects. Just as in martial arts it is best to avoid fighting altogether, and when forced to fight, damage the opponent only to the extent sufficient to neutralize him, it is the best policy always to tell the truth. But some people do not deserve the truth. Thus, a murderer seeking his victim can be legitimately misled as to the victim’s location. Just as a person becomes a good fighter through rigorous training, so one presumably can become a good liar by practicing in safe environments. Again, lying is a skill that ought only to be used in legitimate defense of oneself or another. However, I expect that just as some people have adopted pacifism as their philosophy, so others will swear never to utter a lie.

Now utilitarianism seeks to promote happiness, but the best way to do so is to teach people how to accomplish their own goals. As I have mentioned numerous times in my posts on religion, not even God can dispense with our own strivings. We must make ourselves and earn our own glory or shame. Paternalism is not a way to happiness. So, before filling a society with happiness, one must needs “fill it with truth” and enable people to make their own decisions through knowledge of this truth. Consider that the price system is means of conveying truth to market participants on the supply and demand of goods and services. Socialism destroys this truth-telling system. As I write here, “A socialist country does not have an economy; its central planners operate in the dark, unaware of how their actions affect other human beings.” The planners are blind; they have no information on how to choose rationally. As such, socialism is profoundly immoral, because people in it can’t tell when their self-interested undertakings, if successful, are going to be in the interest of the common good. Further, it is certainly in the interest of general happiness to help most people achieve their goals, but, since the punishment theory peculiar to NTs is deterrence, it is equally in this interest to hinder criminals’ attempts to achieve their goals, and potential evildoers who are contemplating some criminal act must be carefully manipulated and steered into choosing more productive ways of earning a living.

The first step to becoming a good utilitarian, then, is to know yourself and avoid any and all self-deceptions. The second step is to communicate your knowledge to others by teaching them the truth about whatever area you have mastered. The third step is to know when to tell the truth and when to lie, and if you choose to lie, do it with deadly consequences for your enemy, just as gun experts normally recommend shooting to kill in a dangerous confrontation with an aggressor, though if one is very good at shooting, he can try to minimize the damage to his enemy. The final step, if you are called to it, is to rule prudently not only yourself but others, as well.

Yeager considers a case of evil preferences, such as that “Mr A would relish gloating over an enemy’s misfortune, which in fact has occurred. Is it desirable that A should learn about it and reap his enjoyment? One might answer ‘no’ on the grounds that A’s malicious pleasure will impair his character and his capacity for future enjoyment, or that it will worsen the tone of society. A is about to die, however, so harm to his character is irrelevant. Furthermore, no one else will learn of his malicious pleasure. Wouldn’t his having it then add to the sum total of happiness?” (Ethics as Social Science, 142) Further on he gives another typical example: “A mob is bent on massacring blacks to avenge a murder supposedly committed by an unknown black man. The sheriff is sure he can pacify the mob and save many lives by framing and executing one innocent victim.” (148) What is to be done?

The fundamental problem then is that breaking a rule utilitarian (RU) commandment even to further an end consistent with act utilitarianism (AU) sets a bad example for both the rule-breaker and the general public. It tells the common man that he, too, may need to evaluate at least some acts directly on how well they promote utility, a task at which he is manifestly incompetent, as opposed to following RU rules blindly which is normally his duty. An enlightened AU elite might be able to pull this trick off more or less successfully, but a common man will just be confused. “We cannot force ourselves to consider each individual case in complete isolation from each other. We can hardly help thinking that in general and on average, a readiness to take pleasure in others’ misfortunes will promote misfortune … It would be an either vacuous or downright unacceptable ethical code that prescribed, in each individual case considered by itself, whatever actions seemed to promise the best results on the whole. An ethical code hardly counts as a code unless it prescribes, instead, general rules of behavior, principles of character development, and criteria for appraising institutions and choosing policies. Rules or indirect utilitarianism does not recommend the actions, types of character, and institutions and policies that give ample scope for Schadenfreude.” (143) For example, Mr. A may have enjoyed his final victory for free, but he must have made himself the kind of person who would gloat over another’s misfortune by numerous prior acts of such gloating, and that was bound to make him a miserable creature. The sheriff may get away with framing an innocent man to save a whole village for a while, but the truth has a way of getting out, and furthermore it may embolden the sheriff to manipulate the mob to his advantage and forget all about AU. There is no easy solution. Thus, “[o]ne must accept guilt for one action or another, and in accordance with one’s own moral character, but without brooding excessively about it. A moral person will accept the guilt without letting it destroy him.” (152)

Still, wouldn’t it be a valuable character trait to know for certain when breaking a utilitarian rule will lead to greater happiness than following it? Wouldn’t intense training in ethics to become more discerning be of use to people? Isn’t it true that the more prudent a person is, the more he will plot and plan to maximize utility while paying attention to the rules only insofar as following them actually benefited him and his? Rule utilitarianism is a practical concession to the limitations of our intelligence. But shouldn’t we strive to teach people how to calculate well for an arbitrary group of people arbitrarily far into the future? Or is it an empirical fact that the difference in the power of ethical reasoning between a Nietzschean superman and the regular Joe is sufficiently trivial for it not to be worth worrying about AU at all?

I look at this guy and see the terrible busyness and burden of managing the economy and society like some Soviet central planner. He must see all and know all. His yoke is far from easy, and his burden is far from light. A single mistake, and something terrible will happen. Yet he performs his duty with complete devotion and perfect determination to guide the economy towards success.

So, this great man, a humble servant of the people, a near-omniscient manager of the entire US economy is… a fraud. He knows nothing. It’s all smoke and mirrors. So, he exists, because we enjoy deluding ourselves that central planning can work. It can’t, even in such less known markets as the market for time, that is, the market in which those who restrict their consumption and save are paid for advancing present goods to entrepreneurs with future goods. He is a fraud and statist extraordinaire, continuously monetizing the government debt.

Knowledge is about all the a posteriori causes and effects. Its other name is “science.” I have speculated that, like wisdom, knowledge is quadriform. So, it may encompass more than the mere “knowedge how.”

Know-how deals with means and ends and is practical, presupposing speculative knowledge, and it describes the various ways in which one can attain a particular end, “if one wanted to” — that is, in the abstract.

Prudence is moral reasoning, such as calculation of the consequences of one’s actions or balancing and “considering all things in” duties. “A prudent man is one who sees as it were from afar, for his sight is keen, and he foresees the event of uncertainties.” He foresees and predicts. Prudence is thus concerned with the best actually available means to satisfy actual ends that people have, such as to maximize benefits and minimize costs, that is, to profit as much as possible. It is concerned with choice, the value of the ends, and the disutility of acquiring and using the means. Discernment of spirits is part of prudence, as it, along with charity, enables a person to make, perhaps crudely, interpersonal utility comparisons. Since morality is fundamentally intersubjective, prudence deals not only with one’s own happiness but with the general good of a community.

While prudence normally counsels the course of action that will yield the highest profit — whether psychic or monetary — it still obeys the mean, as do all moral virtues, insofar as it neither advises to choose what is worse than the best nor seeks impossible satisfactions.

Since prudence is a moral virtue, it offers an imperative that the perceived best action be actually performed. It is precisely prudence which is responsible for that aspect of morality which commands one to do his duty as has been determined by moral reasoning.

There is no prudence in sinners, because they act contrary to their own rightly understood self-interest. They lose rather than profit from their actions. A sinner may be a “prudent robber” (false prudence) and even a prudent “businessman” (true but imperfect prudence) without being prudent generally, with respect to his life as a whole (true and perfect prudence).

Knowledge is concerned with universal laws; prudence must of necessity deal with particular circumstances and singular things.

Wisdom is a speculative virtue, unlike prudence which is practical; wisdom is concerned not with “right” and “wrong” in merely human affairs, as prudence is, but with “good” and “evil” (again, keeping in mind its own quadriformity). And it considers good and evil absolutely, dealing potentially with the highest causes, such as God.

Danny Shahar believes that they are to extent legitimate.

Suppose you are facing a choice between A, B, and C, and you have ranked satisfaction C higher than B, and B, higher than A. The question is, is it ever legitimate to say that the “distance in happiness” between C and B is greater or lesser than the distance in happiness between B and A?

You would measure the distance by feeling it, by sort of introspecting and asking what you want and how much you want it. Obviously there is no way to assign precise numbers to utilities, but one might be able to do a rough-and-ready gauging of distances. How about this: I would be much happier if someone gave me $1,000,000 as opposed to $2, but only a little bit happier, as in my life wouldn’t really change, if someone gave me $2 as opposed to $1. On the other hand, it’s much more difficult to measure someone else’s distances. I suppose a father can decide which of his children will enjoy a present more. But great insight into a soul, whether your own or another’s, is required.

Rothbard argues that “there is no way whatever of measuring the distance between the rankings; indeed, any concept of such distance is a fallacious one.” But he adds in a footnote: “We might, in some situations, make such comparisons as historians, using imprecise judgment. We cannot, however, do so as praxeologists or economists.” (MESwPM, 258) In other words, it may be true that in daily life we make such comparisons all the time. We may even be good at them. But economists do not spend their time peering into people’s souls. One must construct economic theory without making attempts at comparison of distances between ranked satisfactions and at interpersonal utility comparisons. I think I’m satisfied with that response.

Note that the puzzle is that utilitarianism seems to sanction or even mandate genocide. Yet utilitarianism is a respectable moral theory. So, what goes wrong? Here are several suggestions:

1. That genocide of “inferior” people is legitimate is a dangerous rule. It is a distinct possibility that the people of Ruritania may themselves split into hostile groups (such as the redheads and the redheads-haters), such that it will be demanded that one group (”we”) exterminate the other (”them”), too. Logically, this process of mutual slaughter need not stop until only one person remains.

2. In particular, the rule that the smart can rightfully kill the stupid is easily generalized into the permission or even duty for smart Ruritanians to kill stupid Ruritanians. This is ominous, as it entails also that the smartest Ruritanian has the right to liquidate everyone else in Ruritania.

3. We can accuse the philosopher of not knowing the law of comparative advantage / association. On the free market the “strong” or “smart” do not prey on the “weak” and “stupid”; the strong will benefit from dividing labor with the weak even if he is better that the weak at the both or however many tasks being divided.

4. Violence need not be involved in the process of colonizing Waldavia. If the land and resources are unowned, as would likely be the case with only hunters-gatherers inhabiting Waldavia, then Ruritanian businessmen can exploit its land without asking anyone’s permission. If they are owned, then they can be bought from the Waldavian tribes, possibly cheaply, and, again, developed without violating anyone’s rights to life and property. And, once again, killing to steal is a bad and decivilizing rule, as it habituates the aggressors to do the same with their fellow Ruritanians, as well. In fact, it is likely that the Ruritanians have achieved their level of civilization precisely by scrupulously adhering to universal moral laws. If they had been predatory, then they would not be “smart” as the puzzle postulates.

5. Whose welfare do we care for? Utilitarianism takes benevolence as a given. Whatever the group (which may be everyone in the world) we love, (rule) utilitarianism recommends institutions, practices, character traits that will maximize general happiness over that group. It may thus be objected to the philosopher’s argument that we value the happiness of the present occupants of Waldavia, as well. Hence killing them will be contrary to his own moral theory.

6. If it is replied to (5) that the disutility of removing the Waldavians will be outweighed by the utility (experienced perhaps by as yet unborn people) of colonizing their land for reasons described, then we may refer back to (1)-(4). But in addition, if the Waldavians really are stupid, then they will enjoy lessened income in the integrated Ruritania-Waldavia economy. (Though the Waldavians will still benefit tremendously from being part of social cooperation.) Therefore, given also their small numbers, their claim on social resources will be vanishingly small. There is therefore no need to wipe them out even from the Ruritanian philosopher’s point of view; the market economy will naturally assign to the Waldavians a lower place in the social hierarchy, such that they may be quite invisible to the Ruritanian common man.

This puzzle can be rephrased in a stark way. Let A be the actual world, and P be an actual person within A with IQ / virtues / happiness equal to some number n, assuming contrary to reason that these things can be measured. Now let W be a possible world which is exactly like A except that P is replaced with Q whose IQ / virtues / happiness are equal to 2n. (Of course, replacing even a single person is bound to upset and reconfigure the entire existing society and production structure. So, the differences between A and W may be far greater than it would seem at first glance. But let’s put that point aside.) Two questions need to be considered here. First, is W better in some sense than A? Second, if W is indeed better, can we get from A to W by killing P and having some couple have another child who will grow up to be Q?

I think the answer to the first question is yes, and to the second, no, for two reasons. First, more sophisticated utilitarianism will not argue that utility can be increased in this manner. Some of the reasons why not I outline above. Second, suppose you have a kid who is, say, 15 years old or even a pet cat you’ve had for awhile; and let someone offer you a deal: he will kill your child or your cat and give you instead a better (in some sense) one. Would you accept? Of course not! You love that child, that cat for what they are. They are genuinely irreplaceable. So, if even utilitarianism commends charity and love for our fellow men, we cannot start killing people we love to replace them with better versions of themselves. That would devalue our love, substituting for it a kind of eugenics program, wherein we do not value people for their own sake nor think of them as subjects but seek to satisfy some aesthetic view of society, e.g., by allowing only “beautiful people” to live, thinking of people as mere objects, means to ends.

In addition, the problem of replacing people in this manner with regard to total (though not average) happiness could only arise in practice when the human population is at its optimal level, such that either to increase it or decrease it would yield less (overall) utility. But that limit has not been reached and will not be reached for a long time (if ever), given our commitment to freedom and capitalism.

Let there exist two countries or territories bordering each other, Ruritania and Waldavia. Let the Ruritanians be “smart” and let them have developed a high civilization. On the other hand, let the Waldavians be “stupid” and remain primitive hunters-gatherers.

Finally, let a Ruritanian philosopher (and there are philosophers in Ruritania, so sophisticated its culture has become) publish an article in which he advocates a wholesale genocide of the Waldavians, which he justifies on the following grounds. The Waldavians, he says, are a miserable people; for goodness’ sake, they walk around practically naked in their forests. They are barely rational and therefore barely human. They should be ashamed of themselves and of their own disgraceful way of life. Let us, that is, the Ruritanians, put them out of their misery. It may naively be objected that it is wrong to commit murder. But, our philosopher counters, once the Waldavians are gone, the Ruritanians can take their land, develop it, and consequently civilize it. The glory of Ruritania will be spread far and wide. Most important, the Ruritanians will colonize the land and have many children, until the total population becomes equal to what the combined total of the Ruritanians and the Waldavians was prior to the genocide. The population will then be the same, but the total and average happiness will be far greater. Being a good utilitarian, the philosopher argues that it is our (the Ruritanians’) duty to wipe out the Waldavians.

Where is he wrong?

Update. Since a modern capitalistic society can support far more people than a primitive one, after awhile there will be many more Ruritanians in Waldavia than there were Waldavians in it before the war, boosting total happiness even more.

Suppose you are an act utilitarian (AU). You strive to maximize happiness, and one day you notice that your actions follow a pattern; they are lawlike. You can be said thereby to be a rule utilitarian (RU), such that the rules describe what you actually do.

Now suppose you are a RU. This time you prescribe rules which, if followed, will result in the greatest (total or average or some combination of the two) utility. You can be said to be an AU, insofar as you don’t indulge in rule worship but rather order the rules to achieving the greatest good for the greatest number.

On the other hand, if the acts in AU do not obey any regularities, then it is an impossible ideal. No man can calculate the consequences of his actions in a Godlike manner. And if the rules in RU do not maximize utility, then it is not a true utilitarianism. Thus, AU and RU are two sides of the same coin, or had better be, for otherwise a utilitarian is in deep trouble.

The following solutions were submitted to Innocentive’s “ChangeNow4Health — Innovative Health Care Ideas.”

Part 1.
Part 2.

“… people who heed the Biblical behest to turn the other cheek can actually harm decent people by letting predation be seen to pay off. Righteous indignation, conversely, can serve a social purpose.” (Ethics as Social Science, 66)

I once read someone’s opinion that Jesus’s counsels, such as to turn the other cheek and “if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, [to] let him have your cloak as well,” (Mt 5:39-40) were suitable in a society where the legal system was primitive and obtaining enforcement of laws and judicial verdicts was difficult. (Also, e.g., “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.’” (Mt 18:21-22)) Today, the author argued, he’d simply call the cops.