Henry Hazlitt's The Foundations of Morality is available from places such as here, or perhaps better here since that is as text, rather useful for my purposes. I realised when trying to write up TOSaiE that I had great problems because there was a lot in it1, and I think I may have similar problems here.2026/3: I wrote this in 2022, and didn't end up actually publishing a review in 2024. This text has some slight value despite being obviously incomplete, so I'll publish it now, with its original 2022 date.
0. Preface
I've copied my OCR in at the end, since that doesn't seem to be in the text I've reffed above. Qute from Mill: whatever may be the practical value of a true philosophy of these matters, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the mischiefs of a false one.
1. Introduction
Ethics as a practical problem; that seeing it as theoretical leads to sterility. The hastiness of some leading writers to be "original". Ethics a science, if we mean by that a rational inquiry aiming to arrive at a unified and systematized body of deductions and conclusions.
Our most modest aim is to find out what our unwritten moral code actually is, what our traditional, "spontaneous," or "common sense" moral judgments actually are. Our next aim must be to ask to what extent these judgments form a consistent whole. Wherever they are inconsistent, or apparently so, we must look for some principle or criterion that would harmonize them or decide between them. After twenty-five hundred years and thousands of books, it is enormously probable that no completely "original" theory of ethics is possible. Probably all the leading major principles have been at least suggested. Progress in ethics is likely to consist, rather, in more definiteness, precision, and clarification, in harmonization, in more generality and unification. A "system" of ethics, therefore, would mean a code, or a set of principles, that formed a consistent, coherent, and integrated whole.
Marxism is not only belligerently atheistic, but seeks to destroy religion... because it supports a "bourgeois" morality that deprecates the systematic deceit, lying, treachery, lawlessness, confiscation, violence, civil war, and murder that the Communists regard as necessary for the overthrow or conquest of capitalism.
2: The Mystery of Morals; The source of morals what2
Four theories: God told us; innate moral sense; social evolution; or all-are-arbitrary. How to decide? Inductive: examine cases, deduce theory. Deductive: create theory, derive cases, compare to reality. Use both.
Notes
1. In which it stands in stark contrast to so many other texts which are little but filler.
2. Channelling my inner Hobbes
Preface
It would be enormously presumptuous for any writer, in a subject that has engaged the earnest attention of the world's greatest minds over twenty-five centuries, to claim very much originality. Such a claim would, moreover, probably be more presumptuous in ethics than in any other subject; for as I point 1 out in my Introduction, any ethical system that proposed a "transvaluation of all (traditional) values" would be almost certainly wrong.
Yet progress in ethics is none the less possible, and for the same reasons that it is possible and has been achieved in other branches of knowledge and thought. "A dwarf sees farther than a giant can, if he stands on the giant's shoulders." Because we stand on the shoulders of our great predecessors, and have the benefit of their insights and solutions, it is not unreasonable to hope that we can formulate more satisfactory answers to at least a few questions in ethics than the answers they were able to find. This progress is most likely to consist in achieving greater clarity, precision, logical rigor, unification, and integration with other disciplines.
I was myself originally led to write the present book by the conviction that modern economics had worked out answers to the problems of individual and social value of which most contemporary moral philosophers still seem quite unaware. These answers not only throw great light on some of the central problems of ethics, but enable us to make a better analysis of the comparative moral merits of capitalism, socialism, and communism than ethical specialists have hitherto been able to offer.
After I decided to write this book, however, and began to think and read more about the problems of ethics, I became increasingly impressed with the enormous amount, also, that ethical theory had to learn from what had already been discovered in jurisprudence. It is true not merely that law enforces a "minimum ethics," that "law is a circle with the same center as moral philosophy, but with a smaller circumference." It is true also that jurisprudence has worked out methods and principles for solving legal problems that can be extremely illuminating when applied to ethical problems. The legal point of view leads, among other things, to explicit recognition of the immense importance of acting in strict accordance with established general rules. I have sought here to present a "unified theory" of law, morals, and manners.
Finally I was increasingly struck by the falsity of the antithesis so commonly drawn by moral philosophers between the interests of the individual and the interests of society. When the rightly understood interests of the individual are considered in the long Tun, they are found to be in harmony with and to coincide (almost if not quite to the point of identity) with the long-run interests of society. And to recognize this leads us to recognize conduciveness to social cooperation as the great criterion of the rightness of actions, because voluntary social cooperation is the great means for the attainment not only of our collective but of nearly all our individual ends.
On the negative side, I have been depressed by the excessive preoccupation of most of the serious ethical literature of the last thirty and even sixty years (if we begin with G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica) with purely linguistic analysis. I have touched on this (in Sections 7 and 8 of Chapter 23) only enough to point out why most of this hair-splitting and logomachy is a digression from the true business of ethics.
In a field that has been furrowed as often as ethics, one's intellectual indebtedness to previous writers must be so extensive as to make specific acknowledgment seem haphazard and arbitrary. But the older writers from whom I have learned most are the British Utilitarians beginning with Hume, and running through Adam Smith, Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick. And the greatest of these is Hume, whose insistence on the utility of acting strictly in accordance with general rules was so strangely overlooked by nearly all of his classical Utilitarian successors. Much of what is best in both Adam Smith and Bentham seems little more than an elaboration of ideas first clearly stated by Hume. My greatest indebtedness to a living writer (as I think will be evident from my specific quotations from his works) is to Ludwig von Mises-whose ethical observations, unfortunately have not been developed at length but appear as brief incidental passages in his great contributions to economics and "praxeology." Among contemporary moral philosophers I have learned much, even when I disagreed with them, from Sir David Ross, Stephen Toulmin, A. C. Ewing, Kurt Baier, Richard B. Brandt, J. O. Urmson, and John Hospers. And in tracing the relations between law and ethics, my chief sources have been Roscoe Pound, Sir Paul Vinogradoff, and F. A. Hayek.
I am deeply indebted both to Professor von Mises and Professor Hospers (in addition to the help I have received from their writings) for kindly reading my manuscript and offering their criticisms and suggestions. Whatever the defects of my book may still be, and however much I may have fallen short of appreciating the full force of some of their criticisms, or of making adequate correction, I am sure this is a much better book than it would have been without their generous help.
A question that may occur to some readers at the very beginning, and must haunt many a writer on ethics at some time during the course of his study and composition, is: What is the use of moral philosophy? A man may know what is right and still fail to do it. He may know that an action is wrong and still lack the strength of will to refrain. I can only offer for ethical theory the defense offered by John Stuart Mill in his Autobiography for the usefulness of his System of Logic, that "whatever may be the practical value of a true philosophy of these matters, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the mischiefs of a false one."
Preface to the Second Edition
I wish to express my gratitude to the Institute for Humane Studies for making this new edition possible.
No changes have been made from the original edition of 1964 except to correct a few typographical errors. This does not mean that my ideas on ethics have undergone no change whatever in the last nine years, but simply that these have not been important enough to justify rewriting and resetting.
Moral philosophers often have second thoughts. The ideas of Bertrand Russell underwent such frequent and radical changes that in 1952 he wrote to two anthologists (Sellers and Hospers) who reprinted an essay of his published in 1910: "I am not quite satisfied with any view of ethics that I have been able to arrive at, and that is why I have abstained from writing again on the subject." (Later, however, he did.).
I have no such violent reversals to report. I cannot think of a single change, for example, that I would make in my views as summarized in the final chapter. Yet if I were writing the book afresh, there would no doubt be changes in emphasis and in minor points. In discussing the ultimate goal of ethics I would use the word "happiness" less frequently and more often substitute "satisfaction" or "well-being" or even simply "good." In fact, I would give less attention to trying to specify the ultimate goal of conduct. As social cooperation is the great means of achieving nearly all our individual ends, this means can be thought of as itself the moral goal to be achieved.
If I have anywhere written a sentence which seems to imply that individuals are or should be always actuated by exclusively egocentric or eudemonic motives, I would now modify or withdraw it, I would emphasize even more strongly than I do in the section which runs from page 123 to page 127 that though the ideal rules of morality are those best calculated to serve the interest of everyone in the long run, there will nevertheless be occasions when these rules will call for a real sacrifice of his immediate interests by an individual, and that when they do so this sacrifice must be made because of the overriding necessity of maintaining these rules inviolate. This moral principle is no different from the universally acknowledged legal principle that a man must abide by a valid contract even when it proves costly for him to do so. The rules of morality constitute a tacit social contract.
Is the moral philosophy advocated in these pages "utilitarian" or not? In the sense that all rules of conduct must be judged by their tendency to lead to desirable rather than undesirable social results, any rational ethics whatever must be utilitarian. But when the word is used it seems most often to arouse in the minds of readers some specific nineteenth-century writer's views, if not a mere caricature of them. I found it extremely discouraging to have my ideas characterized in one so-called scholarly journal as "straight utilitarianism" (whatever that may mean) even though I had pointed out (p. 359), however facetiously, that there are probably more than thirteen "utilitarianisms," and in any case had unequivocally rejected the "classical" ad hoc utilitarianism implicit in Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick, and espoused instead a "rule-utilitism" as earlier propounded by Hume. The review just cited only reinforced the conviction I expressed (also on page 359) that the term Utilitarianism is beginning to outlive its usefulness in ethical discussion. I have called my own system Cooperatism, which seems sufficiently descriptive.
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