| | Heidi, thanks for your excellent and thoroughly researched article.
Years ago I read and reread about everything Mises had published. I retain the idea from this reading that Mises did not think that values could be proven to be objective.
As you point out, the purpose of economics is to observe and explain regularities in market behavior, as deduced from the action axiom. The content of an actor's values, or considerations of which values an actor ought to pursue, are not relevant to economics. All that matters is the fact that man acts and the logical implications of that fact.
Mises did not think that values could be proven to be objective, a conclusion that flows from his embrace of Kant's idea that existence consists of irreconciliable realms: the neumenal and phenomenal, or the "ultimate" and "perfect" realm of forms and ideals, forever detached from experience and understanding; as opposed to the "imperfect" and "lower" realm of experience and matter. Anyway, my impression is that Mises like Kant affirmed that moral objective values belong to the neumenal realm, beyond man's ability to understand or prove. As such, any attempt to prove objective values was to Mises "unscientific." To Mises, who was an athiest, morality was the province of religion or myticism or subjective belief.
As Tibor Machan explains carefully in his great book "Capitalism and Individualism: Reframing the Argument for a Free Society", most free market economists including most Austrians are latter day Humeans. Hume, of course, was a reductive materialist who believed that man reduced to matter-in-motion. This view of man, which I understand to be integral to many Austrian and other neo-classical economists, leaves little room or scope for volitional consciousness. For the idea that man acts in response to felt uneasiness approaches determinism. Further, even if Hayek or Mises stood up and announced to the world that they thought human beings were volitionally conscious, this volition would have little importance. For if moral values are non-existent, then no one--including Mises and Hayek-- can logically criticize or discrimminate between value choices, all of which are logically interchangeable. But if no standard for objective choice exists, then the fact of choice (or volition) is not important. One could embrace determinism and uphold Austrian economics as I think Mises and Hayek seemed nearly to do.
This observation does not detract from the great importance of the insights of the Austrian Greats. Most of Austrian ideas stand intact, but they need to be repositioned within a philosophical framework that eschews scientism, defends reason and volition, and proves moral values. As a result of such repositioning, perhaps economics would be studied as a branch of ethics: namely, the study of the optimal social/political conditions necessary to the achievement of a particular moral value: material well-being.
However, as Dr. Machan explains in "Capitalism and Individualism", the scientism of neo-classical economics undercuts libertarian arguments for the objective value of individual liberty. For this scientism in economics stands on a view of man as eternal utility-maximizer that responds automatically to his experience of dissatisfaction. This view logically precludes moral values and moral choice. Moreover, this view of man is held to be imperial, which means that only this concept of man is thought to accord with "science"; only this concept of man is thought to be proper to the study not only of economics, but to all intellectual disciplines that study man. This explains the source of that peculiar field known as "law and economics". This accounts for why economists use their methodology to explain the behavior of politicans and housewives (public choice), and why most Austrians are agnostic as concerns the source and nature of moral values and the broader philosophical context of economics.
This world view undercuts what has been the frontline defense of individual liberty, which is free market economics, because politics comes down to disagreements about ethics. As Murray Rothbard argued, the defense of individual liberty must ultimately be a defense from ethics. Perhaps this prevalent ethical-skepticism explains why free marketers have made little headway in their fervent attempts to defend individual freedom. For most of them beg the central question, which is: how does one prove that individual liberty is valuable to all men?
George Reisman, who integrates the ideas of Rand and Mises in his great book "Capitalism", has recently written that the differences between Rand's and Mises' outlooks are easily resolved and trivial (in an article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies that I have not yet read). From the standpoint that Mises' denial of objective values does not invalidate or detract from his profoundly important insights, the differences are of little consequence. However, when one considers that the main defense of individual liberty by free market economists has been from a platform of non-normative scientism, the distinctions are important.
I never got around to reading Menger, who apparently viewed ethics and perhaps epistemology differently than did Mises. However, my concern is with the broad sweep of neo-classical economics, including most of Austriansim, that emphasize scientism and man as an actor in a world supposedly void of normative principles and volition.
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