ethics & temporal causality

8/13/2019 Ethics & Temporal Causality.

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Agent Causality

Mans primary faculty of survival is reason.Reason is the tool which man uses to arrive at truth, and to

discard fallacies and contradictions. As a rational creature, he must consciously navigate his

environment through a series of decisions implemented into physical reality in the form of actions.

Action has 3 stages that take place through time. By using technical know-how, man develops recipes

of means and ends. The first segment of action is devising the end one wishes to accomplish. Second,

using the aforementioned recipes or technical knowledge about the world around him, he implements

some means aimed at the satisfaction of his end. Third is the result of his action, hopefully for him

observing the end he chose, but not always. Man can make incorrect judgments about what means will

accomplish some established end.

But running through all of this is the notion of Temporal Agent Causality, that is, causation effected by

actors through time. The concepts of the Misesian actor and of causal and moral agency all have some

interrelated aspects.

The Misesian actor takes on the traits described above. The term rational actor in this sense simply

refers to the fact that human beings act within a means/ends paradigm.

The moral agent is one who is deemed responsible for their actions, one whose actions are open to

moral evaluation.

Causal agency is simply the bare fact behind moral agency. Moral agents are open to moral evaluation

becausethey consciously effect change into reality, becausethey inflict causality into the world througha rational process of devising means and ends through time (cause and effect areby necessity time-

reliant).

So if mans actions are open to some sort of evaluation regarding what choiceshe made as a causal

agent, this would be deemed the realm of ethical philosophy. Causation is no longer simply a mechanical

physical process in nature. That very nature has produced beings that possess rationality and thus are

able to consciously, purposefully, effect causation as agents. Our consciousness has developed to a level

that allows introspection, for metacognition, for abstracting concept from the concrete, for planning.

This is a fundamentally unique trait to human beings. Its not that other animals simply have lessof it;there is a taxonomic, categorical difference here. Note that I am not saying that it is conceptually

impossible for some other creature to attain rationality. I am saying that there is some point when the

mind turns in on itself and becomes rational, obviously taking place on a species-wide scale over some

arbitrary and incredibly long period of time. Though the human mind may have vestiges of instinct hard-

wired into his physiology, he is the only creature able to overcome and disregard them upon his own

whim.


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Once this attainment of rationality occurs, it is a phenomenon, there are now entities that can refer to

themselves, that have identity, language built on conceptual abstraction, etc. I think most would be

hard-struck to say that rational consciousness is in the same category as the consciousness, say, of a dog

(though I am at times pressed to revise the latter claim and to make exception for certain individuals

[HA!]).

As in other areas of the discovery of truth, the rules of logic and non-contradiction should as well apply

to the evaluations of moral agents.

Scarcity

We have discussed much about causality and about the nature of a rational agent thus far. I feel it is

important to now bring in the economic concept of scarcity and the material requirements for

mankinds survival, on a conceptual level.

Scarcity is a fact of nature. Material goods, as they are known to human beings, are not super-abundant.

A large percentage of goods are rivalrous, meaning only a certain number of actors can use them at

once. Scarcity in this sense just means there is not infinite stuff, rather than the more common usage

meaning shortage or something along those lines.

But even if there werehypothetically a super-abundance of material goods, called into our possession at

our command, completely built and furnished, we would still find scarcity in time and place. You can

only employ one action and can be in only one place at any given moment.

Human beings are not self-sustaining entities. We require material sustenance from the world around

us. Since the rational nature of our existence requires choice, we must take an active and conscious role

to maintain our life, by finding and eating food, by seeking shelter, by forming mutual associations with

others. These things do not occur automatically for us, we arent born with innate knowledge of these

things. Through experience, we continually develop and change our recipes or our means for

accomplishing our limitless ends or goals.

Due to scarcity, it is integral to man that he must find and extract from the raw state of nature material

subsistence. He must make this material exclusively his own. For material as basic to life as food, upon

ingestion he quite literally makes it a part of himself, his body absorbs it.

This concept of employing private ownership over scarce material resources, of exclusivepropercontrol,

is an embedded part of mans nature; something he must do in order to maintain his life, as he himself is

indeed scarce. It is the source of our understanding of property.


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Property & Conflict

With the previous mention of scarcity in mind let us examine how one comes to acquire property.

Homesteading is the act of taking a good from nature and making it ones own, of bordering it in some

objective way to properly announce to others that this is now a privately owned good, no longer part of

the raw wilderness.

The libertarian homesteader ethic relies on a temporal relationship between actor and object.

Individuals, through their unique interaction with some scarce resource, make claim to it as property. If

another were to come later and dispute that the good were indeed his, we could objectively determine

who is justified in retaining the property; the first-comer with the unique tie to the object which nobody

else could possibly claim, even conceptually. There can only be one first-comer, but endless late-comers.

So through his causal nature, man effects change into the world, this is how property-acquisition takes

place. Trade necessarily follows since property implies the jurisdiction to alienate (if possible, as it is not

with the body).

What about the violation of these property norms? The libertarian Non-Aggression Principle indicates

that the first-comer aggressor is the unjustified. As with homesteading, although opposite, the first

aggressor has made through his actions some unique tie to physical reality, he establishes himself as an

aggressive invader of boundaries and that he does not respect your justifiable claim to property, nor

your value as a rational human being who can never truly be owned by another despite the aggressors

attempts to do so. As also with the first-comer, there can only be 1 initiatorof force between 2 agents.

A causal agent is his own decider, he has unique exclusive dominion over how his body is controlled, any

attempt by an invader to homestead the use of an agents body will necessarily be unjust, illogical, and

contrary to the nature of human consciousness, that is, freely functioning.

For an invader to exercise his free will in making the decision to levy force, to violate established

property borders, he is making conscious use of hisestablished borders to do so. He could not logically

argue against the use of defensive, retaliatory, force being used to repel him since hefirstinitiated the

violation of established borders.

Once he shows his disregard for property borders, he is stepping outside the realm of reasonablediscourse; he is showing himself to be one who does not care about or respect boundaries set by agents

through their actions, nor about rationality or the nature of every agent as having a legitimate dominion

over himself.

For establishing property borders, andfor violating them, then, requires man as a rational actor to

devise means/ends and to employ them in the form of actions through time, enacting objective cause


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and effect into the world.

When two agents come into direct conflict over the use of some scarce resource, either their bodies or

other external resources, an insurmountable problem is reached; only one person can get exactly what

they want. Assuming neither will back down, they have only 2 options: they can abandon their respect

for causality and for rational agency and attempt to physically overcome one another to gain possession

of this good, or they can employ their reason in attempt to negotiate in the form of argumentation, each

trying to justify his claim on the resource.

What could possibly justify a claim to a scarce good? As mentioned above, the first-use of that scarce

good. No other agent can possibly BE the first-user, it is a totally unique tie to an object and it is

completely related to the fact that an agent effected objective causality into the world and that good, at

a time PRIOR to the late-comer.

The only justifiable position is that of the first appropriator.

Ethical philosophy only exists because agents have free will, because we effect real change into the real

world based on our conscious decisions. Due to the law of scarcity, and due to the fact that agents must

make use of external resources to survive, the potential for conflict is ever-present wherever more than

1 rational actor exists.

There is no reason why one must abide by any sort of explicitly formulated ethic other than the fact that

he values rationality, justice, and human life. One may take up a life of crime at any time, may disregard

all justified property claims made over scarce goods, including bodies. Fundamentally, man is a decider,

and must consciously choose to have respect for such things.

Aggression

Aggression can be defined either as a hostile attitude, or as an invasive, forceful action. In this case we

will consider the latter, though the former does play a role when discussing threats and intimidation.

Although aggression is essentially a continuum, degrees of force are to some extent, objectively

ascertainable. A slap is less than a punch, but how many slaps make a punch? We cant know in a

numerically precise way, but we surely can see that there is some proportionality and varying levels offorce.

When making claim over some scarce resource, or homesteading, one must, implicitly or explicitly,

acknowledge their status as a self-owner, a rational agent who consciously directs their own actions

based on their own ends. When one becomes an aggressor, when one attempts to make claim over the

use of another against their will, his status as an acknowledger of his own self-ownership remains


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unchanged. He is therefore committing a performative contradiction, recognizing his own status as a

self-owning, self-directed, conscious and sentient agent by virtue of being a human; yet he decides to

arbitrarily deny this status to another, disregarding the fact that their fundamental nature as a rational

being is one in the same.

We must distinguish between directand indirectcontrol over the body. Each actor has directcontrol

over their own body. In order for one actor to try to indirectlycontrol another, he must first make use of

his own body directlyusing his own means and ends. As Hans Hoppe explains, this has a temporal

relationship between actor and his ability for control. The direct type of control takes precedence for

essentially the same reasons as the aforementioned first-comer ethic.

It is here at the moment he exerts forceful invasion that he, to a degree, relinquishes a rightful claim

over his own body, thus giving the victim the right to make use of it to repelhis invasion. As was

mentioned above, the proportionality does have some relevance. For if a young woman were to slap a

man, and he were to break her arm, that sort of self-defense would in itself constitute as an act of

aggression.

One could not rightfully shoot a child for trespassing on their front yard. This should be quite obvious,

but many have sought to critique the strictness of the libertarian property rights theory by levying the

charge that it allows people to use ridiculously disproportionate amounts of violence against small and

menial offenses. Since aggression or force cant be pinned down by a number, we cant precisely say

exactly what constitutes as a solid criterion for the proportions of aggression, except by somewhat

arbitrary and possibly exaggerated accounts of witnesses and the victim(s).

But this doesnt affect the principle, men have imperfect knowledge, that is, men cant knoweverything

at once, the fact that aggression isnt something to be perfectly defined in regards to proportionsisnt

reason to argue that there is noproportionality whatsoever. There clearly is, some of the variables are

perfectly measureable, but the factors of fear, intimidation, context, history, perception, etc. are all

somewhat inter-subjectively incomparable. This is the sort of thing that we would refer to legal scholars

for; the philosophy has a pretty clear-cut principle, fleshing out how it can be applied in any specific

incident is in the realm of legal theory.

Rationalism & Causality as A Priori

In summary of what has been said here; man must make use of his reason in order to navigate the

objective, knowable world around him, to attain material nourishment, and to sustain his life. Because

he is a rational actor, he consciously exerts thought into his actions, whether concisely and cogently or

absentmindedly is irrelevant. Using reason to analyze human action, we recognize that it must obviously

take place over time, and that time is an unchangeable variable that all action is subject to.


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Becauseof the nature of human action, becauseit must take place over time, it can be said to be a

rationalistic, a prioriunderstanding of causal relations (in a fundamental way, If I do this then that will

happen, This action leads to that resultall action requires DOING things, all of which things lead to

separate results, so to speak.)

Any conceivable action a human might take, it mustfollow along a cause & effect timeline, theres no

other way it could happen. Actions such as speaking or writing themselves rely on this path of causation.

To quickly broach the topic of pure epistemological empiricism, where it is claimed that observations

from experience are the only way to gain knowledge, all claims are falsifiable by evidence; there are no

meaningful, non-tautological, analytical statements, or a priori knowledge. But the act of observation

itself couldnt be understood if there werent an underlying invariantly consistent variable that held all

of these things in causal constraint; time.

It would be impossible to present evidence to refute the concept of causality. To even make an

observation in attemptto attain such evidence, you presuppose that your observations can only be

relevant if you can collaborate past events and project them into the future. Language could only carry

any meaning at all if each word was contingent upon the last, in a sequential order.

To even make an observation or an argument, or any action whatsoever, a time-invariant or unchanging

variable, causality, is presupposed. Not to be posited, but to be discovered through reason.

This is not to say that empirical claims are completely useless, they just arent the only kind of claim to

truth, and some truths in fact cannotbe discovered empirically.

Conclusion

The basic notion that humans act carries a lot to be unpacked and fleshed out. This fact carries a large

amount of economic and politico-ethical significance. It leads us to learn that humans make choices, to

act consciously. If this is so, then a rational actor must be said to be responsible for their actions, they

own their actions in a metaphorical sense

(They reallyown their body and are the direct creators of causality into the scarce world).

Through deductive reasoning and a few empirical postulates we can arrive at the libertarian

homesteading theory, to the non-aggression principle, to a slew of economic truths, and to a generally

more nuanced, praxeological, understanding of the nature of human consciousness and action.

Much more can be said here about this topic, but will have to be discussed at a later time. This short

paper is meant to be a topical analysis on some of the general implications of human action in the realm

of political ethics and property theory.


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I hope to revisit this piece and constantly expand and revise it, as I myself attain a more nuanced

understanding of the rational being and the nature of his action.

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