Aristotle, Anarchy, Action!

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

I’m back from San Diego, but once again I’m too busy to blog about it. (My backlog of things I want to blog about – my b(ack!)log? – has grown to monstrous dimensions.) But I’m not too busy to engage in a bit of shameless self-promotion:

Tomorrow I start my philosophy seminar on the praxeological foundations of libertarian ethics. To quote the prospectus:

On the one hand, the subjective-value approach to economics characteristic of the Austrian school might seem inhospitable to objective theories of ethical value. Yet on the other hand, philosophers like Socrates, Aristotle, and Aquinas based their objective conceptions of ethics on something rather like a praxeological analysis of subjective valuation; indeed, subjectivist economics and natural law ethics both originated from this common tradition. Can an objective ethics in a broadly Aristotelean tradition be grounded in praxeological considerations? And if so, what shape might a radical libertarian political theory take if built on such foundations?

The first half of the seminar will deal with the praxeological foundations of ethics. Topics include: do human beings have an ultimate end? can we knowingly choose the bad? how are morality and self-interest related? why should we care about other people’s interests? ...

The second half of the seminar will explore the implications of praxeological, Aristotelean ethics for such issues as property rights, contracts, land ownership, punishment and restitution, military policy, stateless legal systems, utilitarian vs. rights-based considerations, and the cultural preconditions of liberty.

A live webcast of the seminar will be available here, presumably followed eventually by archived recordings here.

There will also be two bonus lectures by David Gordon, on Narveson and Nozick. Be there or B²!