Murray N. Rothbard vs. the Philosophers - Ludwig von Mises Institute

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 119
good as Titian. The latter alternatives are absolutely better.
While friendly to religion, Carmichael also sees that the
rational discovery of natural law is just as viable as the
absolute alternative to relativism:
The question as to whether a code of social living
is revealed and established as fixed as a series of
Divine Commandments given to men or discovered
as absolutes of social law by human trial and
error may turn out to be different ways of viewing
the same set of rules. . . . Both the ideas of the
revelation and of the discovery of social and
esthetic values are opposed to the notion that all
such concepts are merely relativistic and changeable
and have no fixed sanction of any kind.
Very well put.
Applying this approach to law, Carmichael sees that new
technology does not render legal principles obsolete. On the
contrary, absolute and eternal legal principles are applied by
judges to the problems of new technology.
The relativist, says Carmichael perceptively, is essentially
a romantic who judges everything by his own subjective emotions
and whimsy; for the romantic, all the rules of life are
simply arbitrary, man-made conventions that he defies at the
behest of his emotions. The absolutist, on the other hand, is
a classicist, who discovers and then adheres to fixed truths,
and is guided, presumably, by reason. Education, then,
becomes vitally the inclination, the passing on, of these
truths in the various fields of ethics, esthetics, etc. Literature
of the past is valuable in discovering how the great men
of the past dealt with eternally human problems and the
rules that they arrived at.
Especially in the latter part of the paper, Carmichael
shows an unfortunate tendency to accept various mystical
rather than rational procedures for arriving at these fixed
truths, but this hardly offsets what I consider to be the great
value of this paper and the general approach that it embodies.