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Social Cooperation, Flourishing, and Happiness Mises contends that prosperity is expressed by the fulfillment of diverse human purposes. He maintains that social cooperation is required for the achievement of human prosperity and happiness. Mises' utilitarian benchmark to be applied to social institutions, law, and moral codes is effectiveness with respect to human welfare. Mises' rule utilitarianism focuses on outcomes and consequences. It follows that political legislation and moral rules are to be judged based on their consequences or effects. Mises offers the proposition that one must judge legislation according to its logically deduced probable consequences. Rules, therefore, derive their value as preconditions to social cooperation. Mises emphasizes that priorities are those of individuals. It is individual men who endeavor to advance their priorities and to attain prosperity. For individual persons, social cooperation is a means to attain those ends. Through specialization and division of labor, the independent individual becomes a social being. Mises maintains that only a system based on freedom for every person elicits the greatest productivity of human labor and is in the interest of all individuals. It follows that Mises assigns importance to social cooperation achieved impersonally through the free market process. Free markets promote prosperity by allowing individual purposes to be fulfilled. An act of exchange creates prosperity by simultaneously fulfilling the purposes of both involved parties. Free markets permit and enable men to achieve their own goals through mutual cooperation and exchange. Mises' defense of individual freedom is on the consequentialist grounds that freedom leads to good results. Mises's brand of individualism is thus utilitarian individualism. Voluntary cooperation enhances a person’s individuality by increasing his chances of attaining his goals and flourishing and happiness as a human being. Mises distinguishes between social cooperation based on freely-made contracts and social cooperation based on subordination. If social cooperation is voluntary it is contractual, and if it is based on subordination and command it is hegemonic. Mises favors contractual social cooperation because the maximization of individual free choice is a means to achieve greater prosperity for everyone in society. Any interference with the free market is interference with the freedom of human choice and action. Mises thus concludes that the free market and the social order on which it is based comprise the only viable system of social cooperation and division of labor. Utilitarianism is based on the notion that human flourishing and happiness are good and that suffering is bad. Utilitarianism favors institutions, laws, rules, and traditions that underpin the types of society that permits people to make satisfactory lives for themselves. Such institutions and practices facilitate cooperation among persons as they pursue their diverse specific goals. Utilitarianism views social cooperation as valuable to human life. Mises explains that economic theory examines the efficiency and effectiveness of the means selected to attain chosen ends. Since action pursues definite chosen ends, it follows that there can be no other standard for evaluating actions beside the desirability or undesirability of their effects. The given purpose of economics is to preserve the order of social cooperation and social harmony. This is done by predicting the outcomes of purposive actions undertaken within the framework of the division of labor. Actions, institutions, laws, and so on are correct if they sustain social cooperation, the precondition of the happiness of individuals within society. In the other words, social cooperation facilitates and contributes to human flourishing and happiness. Mises contends that economics is the foundation for politics, even though economics itself is value-free and apolitical. He explains that the political doctrine of classical liberalism is a direct application of the scientific findings of economics. Mises's case for classical liberalism is a utilitarian one because, when an economist proclaims that a certain economic system or policy is bad, he is saying that it is unsuitable for pursuing the desired goal. In assessing an economic doctrine, one only has to ask if it is logically coherent and if its practical application will enable people to attain their desired goals. Mises's concern is with whether or not policies and institutions serve or undermine social cooperation and individuals' happiness. He views social cooperation as a norm to assess social arrangements and to examine the consequences of different social rules. He thus sees classical liberalism, a political doctrine, as an application of theories developed by praxeology and based on rational economics. According to Mises, classical liberalism is a coherent theory of man, society, and the institutional arrangements required to provide social harmony and cooperation. Rules associated with the contractual society of the liberal order permit and enhance social cooperation. Mises maintains that sound, value-free economic reasoning leads a person to favor laissez-faire economic systems. He deduces the nature and outcomes of human cooperation in a market economy based on private property and the division of labor and compares these with the means employed and outcomes achieved under alternative systems such as socialism and interventionism. As an economist, he employs the logic of praxeology to work toward his goal of comparing systems with regard to their capacity to attain ends. He thus advocates the market economy because economic reasoning shows that it best enables people to achieve their chosen ends. According to Mises, government is a necessary prerequisite for a free market society. The free market requires an institutional framework that identifies and protects individual rights. This framework includes private property, freedom to contract, and government monopoly of coercion. As the institution that holds a monopoly on legitimate violence, government maintains peace and enforces rules so that individuals can cooperate and enjoy the benefits of that cooperation. Mises's utilitarianism starts with the goals of human flourishing and happiness, and moves on to discuss social cooperation and the existence of individual rights, but does not explicitly include natural law, which Mises thought was unnecessary, problematic, and intuitionist. Mises proclaims agnosticism with respect to the facts of human nature. With regard to individual rights, he says that there exists a private domain in man which should not be regulated or violated. This realm constitutes what is deepest, highest, and most valuable in the individual human being. Although he says he rejects natural law, Mises's approach to justifying the free society has a great deal in common with natural law constructs. The life-affirming rules for social cooperation and for interpersonal conduct that he deduced seem to be based on the essential nature of human life. For Mises, the reason or goal for this system of rules is to maintain and promote social harmony and human life. These rules for the protection of individual rights are essential for social cooperation on the part of rational human beings with free will. In the end, Mises' utilitarianism appears to be based, at least implicitly, on a principled, categorical, natural law-like framework. The natural law insists that everything stands under the test of reason grounded in reality. The particular nature of entities requires particular actions if the desired ends are to be attained. Natural laws of human action, discoverable through the use of reason, necessitate specific means and arrangements to affect the desired ends. The laws of nature determine the consequences. The free society works because it is in accord with nature. Natural law provides for reasoning and verification about what is good and what is not good. Natural law underpins the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Negative liberty, the absence of constraints and restraints imposed upon a person by other persons, can be arrived at by studying the distinctive faculties and abilities of human beings and abstracting away the particular levels or amounts that specific individuals possess with respect to their faculties and abilities. What remains is the ability of each man to think his own thoughts and control his own energies in his attempts to act according to those thoughts. Negative freedom is thus a natural requirement of human existence. It follows that the idea of voluntary social cooperation is included in natural law doctrines. According to the precepts of natural law, a person should not be forced into acting or using his resources in a manner to which he has not granted his voluntary consent. It follows that man has certain natural rights to life, to the use of one’s faculties as one wills for one’s own ends, and to the fruits of one’s labor. These rights inhere in man’s nature and predate government, constitutions, and courts. Natural rights are derived from the facts of human nature and are respected because they promote individuals’ well-being. Government is necessary to enable people to live well in society. It is needed only to prohibit and punish the private violation of the natural rights, to punish fraud and deception, and to settle disputes that may arise. The minimal state is an institutional precondition for the contractual society, which leads to specialization and exchange. Moral values enter the world with human life. Human flourishing or happiness is the standard underpinning the assessment that a goal is rational and should be pursued. This common human benchmark implies a framework for evaluating a person’s decisions and actions. It follows that the fundamental ethical task for each man is the fullest development of himself as a human being and as the individual that he is. An Aristotelian self-perfectionist approach to ethics can be shown to support the natural right to liberty, which itself provides a solid foundation for a minimal state. This approach gives liberty moral significance by illustrating how the natural right to liberty is a social and political condition necessary for the possibility of human flourishing—the ultimate moral standard in Aristotelian ethics interpreted as a natural-end ethics. A foundation is thus provided for a classical liberal political theory within the Aristotelian tradition. Human flourishing involves the rational use of one’s individual human potentialities—including talents, abilities, and virtues—in the pursuit of one's freely and rationally chosen values and goals. An action is considered to be proper if it leads to the flourishing of the person performing the action. Happiness, in turn, is the positive conscious and emotional experience that accompanies or stems from one’s flourishing. Self-direction (i.e., autonomy) involves the use of one’s reason and is central and necessary for the possibility of attaining human flourishing and happiness. It is the only characteristic of flourishing that is both common to all acts of self-actualization and particular to each. Freedom in decision-making and behavior is a necessary operating condition for the pursuit and achievement of human flourishing. Respect for individual autonomy is required because autonomy is essential to human flourishing. This logically leads to the endorsement of the right of personal direction of one’s life, including the use of one's endowments, capacities, and energies. These natural (i.e., negative) rights are metanormative principles concerned with protecting the self-directedness of individuals, thus ensuring the freedom through which individuals can pursue their flourishing. The goal of the right to liberty is to secure the possibility of human flourishing by protecting the possibility of self-directedness. This is done by preventing encroachments upon the conditions under which human flourishing can occur. Natural rights impose a negative obligation—the obligation not to interfere with one’s liberty. Natural rights, therefore, require a legal system that provides the necessary conditions for the possibility that individuals might self-actualize. It follows that the proper role of the government is to protect man’s natural rights through the use of force, but only in response, and only against those who initiate its use. According to Mises, economics is a value-free science of means, rather than of ends, that describes but does not prescribe. However, although the world of praxeological economics, as a science, may be value-free, the human world is not value-free. Economics is the science of human action, and human actions are inextricably connected with values and ethics. It follows that praxeological economics needs to be situated within the context of a normative framework. Praxeological economics does not conflict with a normative perspective on human life. Economics needs to be connected with a discipline that is concerned with ends such as the end of human flourishing. Praxeological economics can stay value-free if it is recognized that it is morally proper for people to take part in market and other voluntary transactions. Such a value-free science must be combined with an appropriate end. Knowledge gained from praxeological economics is both value-free (i.e., value neutral) and value-relevant. Value-free knowledge supplied by economic science is value-relevant when it supplies information for rational discussions, deliberations, and determinations of the moral good. Economics is reconnected with philosophy, especially the branches of metaphysics and ethics, when the discussion is shifted to another sphere. It is fair to say that economic science exists because men have concluded that the objective knowledge provided by praxeological economics is valuable for the pursuit of a person’s ultimate ends. Praxeological economics and a natural-law-based philosophy of human flourishing and happiness such as Objectivism are complementary and compatible disciplines. Economics teaches us that social cooperation through the private property system and division of labor enables most individuals to prosper and to pursue their flourishing and happiness. In turn, the worldview of human flourishing informs men how to act. Social cooperation is not happiness, nor is it a substitute criterion for happiness—but it is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for individuals to make good lives for themselves. Voluntary cooperation accords with each person’s pursuit of his own life, with his own projects and purposes. Peaceful social cooperation is a precondition for most other values. Both Misesian Economics and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism arrive at the necessity of voluntary cooperation, through different intellectual processes. In order to be complete, praxelogical economics needs Objectivism’s moral vision, which itself begins in the natural law tradition of individualism.
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