Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1763

Penned draft on notepad paper for a letter to F.A. Harper.

December 1960?

 

 

Dear Baldy –

I have kept up poorly my acknowledgments of your various remembrances and enclosures.

The one by an unknown critic (Bob LeFevre, I suspect) concerning the “relative ethics” of our great friend, Von Mises, is interesting indeed. The critic, I am glad to say, does not gainsay the competence and value of Von Mises in his own special field of economics, but only in the field of moral standards where he is under the widely prevailing handicap /of/ a blind empiricism — whatever is, the custom, in any time or place is right. The vice of the moral (mores) point of view is

/Page of the originals missing/

…their uniquely human and spiritual potentials their common and united motivation is mutual and proceeds from within instead of being compelled from without. It liberates men physically and thereby metaphysically, giving them facility to gratify their non-conflicting needs and desires and the freedom from coercion by another whereby, without conflict and in mutual aid, to pursue the inspiration of their dreams. On this level gradually attained the motivation towards good conduct instead of moral, based on fear, becomes esthetic, based on a feeling for things conceived as beautiful, of loveliness dreamed and desired.

Not to ward off deficiencies and disabilities, whether of body or of mind, but to reach out serenely towards ever unattainable ideals as the mariner is guided by his heavenly stars.

The test of virtue (vitality and strength) in any act is not in the customs that prevail at any time or place but this: Does it serve life? And here the esthetic motivation is supreme both for the individual and for the whole. A commonplace prudence, even fear, may save the drab life merely of being, but the life of becoming is saved only by the free outreachings of the spirit towards its ideals.

To be more specific:  The criterion for any precept or code of

To take mere custom as the criterion of any code or precept as Von Mises seems to do, leaves one with no standard at all…./leaves/ one bogged in the indeterminate relativism of which the critic complains and may well deplore.