A recent surge of politically-motivated violence, dramatically underscored by the shocking assassination of Charlie Kirk, has left many Americans wondering just how we got to a point where political activists are increasingly attempting to settle their disagreements, not by offering rational arguments, engaging in civil debates, casting ballots, or enforcing a rule of law; but instead by dishing out insults, canceling opposing speakers, firing bullets, and imposing executive authority in defiance of law. What has gone wrong?
These partisan divisions are being framed largely in terms of morality. Opponents aren’t being viewed simply as mistaken about their opinions and personal choices; they are viewed as being irredeemably evil—partisan opponents are seen as hateful, malevolent creatures who can’t be talked out of posing an existential threat to others. If one truly believes that the opposition’s political goals are intolerable and opponents can’t be reasoned with, then they are bound to be treated as mortal enemies, not as fellow Americans.
But could something be wrong with supposedly ethical doctrines that abandon rational persuasion and instead seek to compel compliance? Is goodness a universal attribute that requires compelling everyone to attain the collective good regardless of what they think? Or is goodness a personal attribute, where we don’t resort to compulsion unless someone infringes upon someone else’s peaceful pursuit of their own individual good?
In chapter 8 of Human Action, Ludwig von Mises made the case that collectivist ethics is fallacious. He identified an inherent contradiction in subordinating independent moral judgments to a universal code enforced by the state:
Universalism and collectivism are by necessity systems of theocratic government. The common characteristic of all their varieties is that they postulate the existence of a superhuman entity which the individuals are bound to obey. What differentiates them from one another is only the appellation they give to this entity and the content of the laws they proclaim in its name. The dictatorial rule of a minority cannot find any legitimation other than the appeal to an alleged mandate obtained from a superhuman absolute authority. It does not matter whether the autocrat bases his claims on the divine rights of anointed kings or on the historical mission of the vanguard of the proletariat or whether the supreme being is called Geist (Hegel) or Humanite (Auguste Comte). The terms society and state as they are used by the contemporary advocates of socialism, planning, and social control of all the activities of individuals signify a deity. The priests of this new creed ascribe to their idol all those attributes which the theologians ascribe to God—omnipotence, omniscience, infinite goodness, and so on.
In the above passage, Mises observed that universalist ethics implies an abandonment of rational discourse. A collective good necessarily lacks foundation in human experience, as humans only think, sense, feel, and act as individuals. Rational persuasion isn’t possible when there are no supporting facts or self-evident truths one can cite in its favor. A collectivist can only cite arbitrary decrees from some unfathomable idol.
But without rational persuasion to build a widely-shared consensus for a particular collective good, how can collectivists hope to settle disagreements among themselves? Mises went on to diagnose what happens in that case:
For the faithful believer there cannot be any doubt; he is fully confident that he has espoused the only true doctrine. But it is precisely the firmness of such beliefs that renders the antagonisms irreconcilable. Each party is prepared to make its own tenets prevail. But as logical argumentation cannot decide between various dissenting creeds, there is no means left for the settlement of such disputes other than armed conflict. The nonrationalist, nonutilitarian, and nonliberal social doctrines must beget wars and civil wars until one of the adversaries is annihilated or subdued. The history of the world’s great religions is a record of battles and wars, as is the history of the present-day counterfeit religions, socialism, statolatry, and nationalism.
Collectivist ethics, in brief, is a recipe for violence. Any moral code claiming that peaceful coexistence with immoral individuals is impossible makes peace itself impossible. Mises not only diagnosed the collectivist propensity for violence, he also pointed the way to a peaceful individualist solution:
In striving after his own—rightly understood—interests the individual works toward an intensification of social cooperation and peaceful intercourse. Society is a product of human action, i.e., the human urge to remove uneasiness as far as possible. In order to explain its becoming and its evolution it is not necessary to have recourse to a doctrine, certainly offensive to a truly religious mind, according to which the original creation was so defective that reiterated superhuman intervention is needed to prevent its failure.
The historical role of the theory of the division of labor as elaborated by British political economy from Hume to Ricardo consisted in the complete demolition of all metaphysical doctrines concerning the origin and the operation of social cooperation. It consummated the spiritual, moral and intellectual emancipation of mankind inaugurated by the philosophy of Epicureanism. It substituted an autonomous rational morality for the heteronomous and intuitionist ethics of older days. Law and legality, the moral code and social institutions are no longer revered as unfathomable decrees of Heaven. They are of human origin, and the only yardstick that must be applied to them is that of expediency with regard to human welfare.
Here Mises held out the hope that at least religions embracing a benevolent view of creation would not begrudge man’s pursuit of happiness within a created world. He also mentioned two crucially important secular philosophical traditions that were historically significant in justifying classical liberal principles, one pioneered by the British empiricist David Hume in the early 1700s and another by the Hellenistic Greek philosopher Epicurus ~300 BCE.
Hume asserted that one cannot derive any prescriptive “ought” solely from factual, descriptive “is” statements. Given an ultimate “ought” value, at best one might cite facts to argue that some subordinate “ought” is instrumental to optimizing one’s pursuit of the ultimate value, but the choice of the ultimate value itself can’t be justified by such facts. Mises endorsed Hume’s ethical skepticism. In line with later utilitarian philosophers, Mises argued that although we can’t change each other’s minds about ultimate values, we can at least acknowledge that an overwhelming majority of people do require peace and prosperity for optimizing the divergent ultimate values they have in fact chosen.
According to value-free economic theory, a social order based on liberty and private ownership is what optimizes the attainment of peace and prosperity. When combined with the fact that a vast majority of people prefer their own personal well-being over bloodshed and poverty, we arrive at the utilitarian conclusion that this vast majority ought to support libertarian political values for best realizing their personal choices, not murder each other and undermine social cooperation in a vain attempt to correct each other’s morals.
Unlike utilitarians, Epicurus based his defense of individualist values on a positive conception of an ultimate value. Epicurus rejected the ethical skepticism of Hume’s ancient predecessors, pointing out that an arbitrary choice of values in conflict with man’s innate desire for happiness can’t be acted upon consistently, such a conflict producing mental disturbances that modern psychology and neurosciences classify as cognitive dissonance. Since it makes no sense to recommend values unless they can be realized consistently, a rational formulation of ethics must acknowledge that the pursuit of one’s own happiness is the only logically-coherent choice of a final end for an individual.
Epicurean ethics doesn’t treat happiness as merely arising from momentary, passive experiences of pleasure. Rather, man’s intellect enables him to learn how to appreciate pleasures of an entire lifetime and how to act to attain them, both creating future pleasures and recollecting past pleasures. The necessity of thinking and acting on one’s own to enable enjoyment of these “mental pleasures” implies a preference for social circumstances that respect one’s intellectual and moral autonomy. According to an ancient biographer, Epicurus supported private ownership over communal ownership, viewing the pursuit of collective goods as being based upon mutual mistrust, presumably because collectivist associations, even when voluntary, contradict essential psychological requirements for optimizing personal happiness. Epicurean and utilitarian arguments complement each other in their support for libertarian principles.
While some critics erroneously dismiss libertarianism as mere “market fundamentalism” and indifferent to cultural and moral concerns, Mises offers compelling reasons—derived from the teachings of his philosophical forebears—explaining why the pursuit of morality must be an inherently personal endeavor. Instead of collectivist zealots arrogantly presuming to judge how good the American people are, we need to judge how just and honorable the state is being with respect to how it formulates and applies its laws. If America is to spurn the violence, misery, impoverishment, and bloodshed inherent in collectivism, then Americans must embrace a separation of morality and state.
