Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1764

Pencil notes for a letter to Dr. F.A. Harper re Mises

December 1960?

Dear Baldy

     Anent (belatedly) your note to Spencer and me carrying a criticism of Von Mises’ relativistic ethics, I have not read the particular Mises “paper” to which this criticism is addressed by, as I suspect, our fine friend, Bob LeFevre, but its points seem to me well made. For von Mises, like most of us, has no ultimate criterion or unassailable guiding star by which to set the course of ideal human action, no final standard by which to guide it towards the good — and thereby away from evil. I think he is too little of a Benthamite to take happiness, either as freedom from pain or as gratification of mere animal needs and desires, for the final human blessedness.

     So he accepts the idea that there needs to be an ethic, a morality, a negative discipline for suppression of the primordial depravity (original sin) which is the heritage of the mere animal nature in man and against which all kinship groups at least set sanctions arbitrary and more or less condign. Von Mises doubtless sees this in all its manifold variety according to circumstance and environment, with no uniformity to bespeak any unchanging absolute at its core. So, for want of any recognition of the creative capacity, the spiritual nature of socially and thus voluntarily functioning mankind he accepts this relativistic ethics as the only recourse of socially functioning and thus regenerate men.

     All men are finite and relative to their environment and one to another. Hence there can be no absolute behavior (or government) among them. But they can have an absolute even though not completely attainable ideal, not as a chosen end or goal but as a progressive guide towards ever widening dreams, more real, and thus more enduring, goals.

     Man, in his animal nature has no immortal dream, but the regenerate man, the creative and thereby spiritual man aspires to and in free and reciprocal relations with his fellow man aspires to and moves onward towards a higher and ever more abundant life and length of days as dreamed of old.

    Thus life itself, creative, advancing and immortal life is the absolute ideal, never to be fully attained in our relative interdependence but always to give direction towards ever more enduring …