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

LAW AND NATURE IN THE WORK OF MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 15
CRITICISM OF THE SUBJECTIVISM OF VALUES
THE CRITICISM OF MISES is paradigmatic. Rothbard distances
himself from the praxeological and value-free defense
of the free market that Mises proposes, and instead supports
the need for political philosophy to find universally
valid basic values for life in society. Mises bases his own liberalism
on the subjectivity of values and ends, but for Rothbard
this makes Mises an “ethical relativist;” and, in his
opinion, ethical relativism is the “great defect in this paper.”
What I have been trying to say is that Mises’s utilitarian,
relativist approach to ethics is not nearly
enough to establish a full case for liberty. It must
be supplemented by an absolutist ethic—an ethic
of liberty, as well as of other values needed for the
health and development of the individual—
grounded on natural law, i.e., discovery of the
laws of man’s nature. Failure to recognize this is
the greatest flaw in Mises’s philosophical worldview.
20
The subjectivism of ends and values, and the defense of
the free market from a praxeological point of view are correct
procedures in the context of praxeology, but they do not
satisfy the Rothbardian need for ethics to have a rational
basis. Praxeology, the science of human action, tells us that
the free-market economy is the best way of achieving the
widest possible well-being and the whole variety of human
ends—ends that are subjective, as are the values that underlie
them. The subjectivity of values and ends is the nodal
point of Misesian thought and the basis for an open society.
Mises follows Hume’s assumption that it is impossible to
derive values from facts. Since the economy is concerned
with facts, it cannot have any direct implications for ethics.
For Mises, value judgments merely express preferences of a
20 Ibid., p. 103 in this volume.