TELEOLOGY has fallen into general disrepute as a result of materialist and physicalist metaphysical worldviews which mostly gained prominence during the general European enlightenment period reaching its peak in the early twentieth century. This fall appears to have originated with Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum in 1620, and the of the establishment of Newtonian mechanics with the publishing of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton in 1687 and, with it, Aristotelian teleology was considered to be forever purged from the understanding of the physical world. Later, with the creation of Darwinian evolutionary theory, so, too, was it removed from biology. Those adhering to various materialist and physicalist worldviews, largely a result of a metaphysical interpretation of physical theories, even attempted to purge teleology from the study of man as observed with behaviorism (Watson, 1913; Skinner, 1938) and later with the functional and computational philosophies of mind (Putnam, 1967; Fodor, 1981[1]; Dennett, 1991).
While the elimination of teleology from physics and the biology of non-conscious organisms represents an advancement in the scientific understanding of the world,[2] the attempt to purge teleology from the study of man is misguided at best and regression at worst. At the heart of such belief is the idea that “in the end,” the description of reality will be of the fundamental constituents of the physical world and Intentionalistic phenomena will nowhere be found. Such naïve and simplistic metaphysical views, however, are not founded on contemporary science, but rather on outdated physical theories and metaphysical beliefs and interpretations of scientific theories.
Unfortunately, old superstitions die hard, and there still exists today a powerful resistance to any intrinsically Intentionalistic phenomena such as teleology (Dennett, 2011[3]).[4] However, contemporary science[5] and a modern science-based metaphysic[6] indicate how such phenomena may exist, and as a result, such vehement denials of the teleological nature of the action of man can no longer be rationally considered even from an epistemically objective third-person scientific perspective.
The Praxeological Foundation of Teleology
Teleology is implied in the category of action since all action is purposeful and necessarily to reduce felt uneasiness. That man acts to reduce felt uneasiness implies that he acts for his well-being, which is the fundamental Natural Law of Human Action. There have been attempts to justify rights and forms of morality by attempting to hold life as the highest value. It has been further claimed that if man acts, he affirms that he values life more than death (Rothbard, 1982: 33), yet this is readily realized to be incorrect in the case of suicide. Reckless behavior may be another potential indication that the person at least does not value life more than death and in those with an extraordinary spiritual development an indifference to life or death results. One need not act to end one’s life in order to not prefer life over death, for such action requires that one prefer death over life. While man may be indifferent to life or even prefer death over life, he can only ever act to reduce felt uneasiness, which is to act for his General Well-Being, which is the Natural Law of Human Action.
Teleology is not to be viewed as a goal of man, but simply that there are the Categories of Well-Being toward which man acts. These Categories of Well-Being (that will be elaborated in a future post) can be understood as intrinsic life values, and the acceptance of a value is the acceptance of a motivation (Searle, 2001: 29).
The acceptance is intrinsic to action and, therefore, the motivation is also intrinsic to action. This is implied in the category of action and, therefore, rationally undeniable and functions to ground normative statements resulting in varying levels of epistemic objectivity. Viewing the teleology of action in this manner provides a more epistemically objective foundation upon which an epistemically objective normativity can be established.
“Society is a product of human action, i.e., the human urge to remove felt uneasiness as far as possible.”
Ludwig von Mises[7]
The basis of this praxeological assertion is found in Mises’ Law of Association, which is the drive to act to reduce felt uneasiness that drives the cooperation found in the division of labor that increases the efficiency of the removal of felt uneasiness. This can be understood as the praxeological foundation of civilization and provides a foundation for moral judgment grounding Natural Law and a system of rights.
Social Well-Being is, in part, defined utilizing the Law of Association and the fact that man acts to reduce felt uneasiness. The social division of labor permits for the greatest reduction in felt uneasiness, and not exclusively in the long run. This provides a rationally undeniable desire-independent reason for acting with respect to Social Well-Being.
The Aristotelian Conception of Action
“Aristotle captures this difference between political science and most other sciences by saying that political science is practical rather than productive, because it is concerned with ‘action’ (praxis) and not simply with ‘production’ or ‘making’ (poiêsis). In Aristotle’s strict sense of ‘action’, an action is itself the end that we aim at, not a mere means to some end external to it (1140b6-7).” (Irwin, 2007: 122)
When dealing with human action and morality, the Aristotelian conception of action must be dealt with due to its influence on Western thought. While Mises developed the analysis of the logical structure of human action, praxeology is generally either misunderstood or rejected in favor of more primitive and inadequate conceptions of action influenced by Artistotle, which leads to an inability to understand human action and its role in rationality and morality.
All Action is Teleological
The teleological nature of the action of man is a result of his intrinsically Intentional mental states.[8] All action is teleological (Hoppe, 1993: 292)[9] in that it aims at ends, and, relevant to the topic at hand, the end aimed at by the action of declaring a right is the resolution of current conflict as well as preventing future conflict. It has the further purpose of imposing obligations on others to respect that right claim. The immediate purpose of rights is conflict resolution conducive to the Categories of Well-Being.
It is essential to realize that praxeology necessarily involves teleology since all action is purposeful but more specific to the topic, the purpose of rights is resolving conflict by determining the proper action of an organism involving scarce means which requires praxeological analysis. Moreover, this intimately ties in with and is ultimately inseparable from morality since it relates to proper action regarding the scarce means necessary for the well-being of persons.
Two Necessary Teleological Distinctions
There are two relevant teleological distinctions concerning rights: The first is to state the purpose of conscious life necessary for analysis, and the other is to state the immediate purpose of rights, with the latter derivative of the former. The purpose of conscious life[10] is found in the Natural Law of Human Action toward General Well-Being, which can be broken down into the Categories of Well-Being, while the immediate purpose of rights is conflict resolution and the prevention of future conflict which is ultimately for General Well-Being.
In this way, there is a direct and immediate purpose of rights, and there is the more fundamental purpose of conscious life which rights help to protect, but ultimately the purpose of both is General Well-Being. This distinction corresponds to the difference between intermediate and ultimate ends (Mises, 1933: 33-34).
Rights may be specifically enumerated due to their importance with respect to General Well-Being as well as a result of a history of conflict in a particular area of well-being. For example, the Right of Freedom of Religion plays an important role[11] in Spiritual and Social Well-Being and has a history of conflict and is, therefore, deserving of specific enumeration.
Teleology as the Foundation of Morality
Teleology is the foundation of morality for the reason that ends frame all action and, therefore, moral cognition, providing the epistemic foundation for morality; in this way, teleology and morality are inseparable.[12] Teleology is treated, at times, as a separate consideration from morality, yet when properly understood, it will be clear that it is the essential foundation of morality (MacIntyre, 1981: 52[13]).
In this conception of rights, the relevant teleology elaborated in this section is the temporal harmony of the Categories of Well-Being, referred to as General Well-Being, and rights are critical to the pursuit of these ends implied in the category of action. It will be demonstrated that without the praxeological rights established here, moral principles founded on the teleology of the Categories of Well-Being are inevitably violated.
The Categories of Well-Being are not, however, a “moral goal” as mentioned by Robert Nozick with “an end state for some activities to achieve as their result” (Nozick, 1974: 28). The teleology implied in praxeology with respect to the Categories of Well-being does not imply a moral goal of maximizing the well-being of all or the “greater good,” but rather acknowledges the teleological nature of man’s action toward his General Well-Being as the Natural Law of Human Action implied in the category of action and requires the harmony of individuals within society. Praxeological economic theory plays a significant role in determining what contributes to this well-being in an absolute epistemically objective manner.
The Natural Law of Human Action
That man acts to reduce felt uneasiness is to say that man acts for his well-being. The categories of well-being were broken down into areas that can be better understood (Material, Psychological, Social, and Spiritual), and through this reduction ultimately a unity and harmony can be properly understood in the temporal harmony of the Categories of Well-Being, or General Well-Being.
The Natural Law of Human Action is that man acts toward General Well-Being, and this is the basis of Natural Law as well as the foundation for morality and ultimately rationality. In this Natural Law of Human Action one can find many of the truths in various conceptions of natural law over the many centuries. It avoids the appeal to nature fallacy for it does not claim that natural inclinations and behaviors are necessarily good, but rather that there is a natural drive in all conscious life to act toward well-being and it may or may not be successful.
One can also understand a certain truth found in following one’s conscience, in that the natural law can be determined by one’s conscience or is written in the heart of man. These claims all failed to fully and adequately account for the Natural Law, yet gave glimpses of it that resonated with philosophers and theologians over the centuries despite an inability to explicitly articulate it in the face of legitimate criticism. It was not until the advent of praxeology that such an explicit and logical defense of the Natural Law could be made.
The Limitations of the Teleological Explanation
If rights were to be grounded solely on teleology, this would result in a weak and vague conception and would be unable to generate any principled, structured system of rights. What qualifies as an activity as significant enough in life to be considered a right? Such a criterion is so remarkably vague that it will undoubtedly result in a list of unending and contentious claims as to what ought to be a right.
With so many different cultures and ideologies, one can claim almost anything to be important for ‘the good life,’ so on what basis is such a claim to be judged if the sole justification is teleological? While an epistemic basis is introduced with a teleological foundation, a structure of rights cannot be established from such a variety of possible ways of living. Such claims would also surely change with time, creating a further problem for such an attempted grounding of rights. What are Natural and Human Rights if they can change with time and culture when the nature of man and his action have not?
In short, the teleology implied in the category of action provides an epistemic foundation for the morality of law that has intrinsic motivation and permits epistemic objectivity. Any denial of the Natural Law of Human Action toward well-being is a performative contradiction, for all action is purposeful and ultimately to reduce felt uneasiness, which is to act for one’s well-being. In other words, a person cannot rationally deny this basis for morality, for it is found in the very logical structure of human action. Man may or may not succeed in reducing felt uneasiness, and some areas particularly in economics and the Right of Private Property can be assessed with levels of epistemic objectivity. In this way, praxeology provides a logical basis for teleology, moral epistemology, and rationality more generally, providing a sound epistemic justification of the conception of rights put forth here.
[1] “Functionalism is committed to defining mental states in terms of their causes and effects.”
[2] And importantly, from the philosophy of history such as that of Hegel (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1837) as well as Karl Marx in the preface to the first edition of Das Kapital (1867): “[…] it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society – it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. […] My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”
[3] “Every physical thing, whether designed or alive or not, is subject to the laws of physics and hence behaves in ways that in principle can be explained and predicted from the physical stance.”
[4] Incidentally, this is also a source for the resistance to praxeological economic theory.
[5] Specifically, see (Stapp, 1992, 2007, and 2017) regarding orthodox quantum theory and Giulio Tononi on Integrated Information Theory (Tononi, 2012) and Oizumi et al., 2014.
[6] Please see Ladymann & Ross, 2007, particularly chapters 3 and 4.
[7] (Mises, 1949, 146)
[8] This is due to consciousness which results in knowledge and action in the proper sense.
[9] “[…] everything that is an action must be categorized teleologically.”
[10] This is not to mean that there is an externally imposed purpose, but rather there is an intrinsic purpose of life implied in the category of action.
[11] This is not to say that religion is required for spiritual well-being, but that it plays an important role for the majority of individuals. Furthermore, the Right of Freedom of Religion includes the right of non-religion, which is essential for the spiritual development of those that prefer a non-religious practice. Even if one believes that religion is necessary for the spiritual well-being of all, forcing anyone to practice any particular religion is anathema to salvation.
[12] Teleology is the corner stone for the epistemic foundation of morality, which requires further elaboration in future posts.
[13] “All [Pascal, Hume, Kant, Diderot, Smith, and Kierkegaard] reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end. […] the joint effect of the secular rejection of both Protestant and Catholic theology and the scientific and philosophical rejection of Aristotelianism was to eliminate any notion of man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-telos. Since the whole point of ethics – both as a theoretical and a practical discipline – is to enable man to pass from his present state to his true end, the elimination of any notion of essential human nature and with it the abandonment of any notion of a telos leaves behind a moral scheme composed of two remaining elements whose relationship becomes quite unclear. There is on the one hand a certain content for morally: a set of injunctions deprived of their teleological context. There is on the other hand a certain view of untutored-human-nature-as-it-is. Since the moral injunctions were originally at home in a scheme in which their purpose was to correct, improve and educate that human nature, they are clearly not going to be such that they could be deduced from true statements about human nature or justified in some other way by appealing to its characteristics.”
Works Cited:
Dennett; Daniel. (1991) Consciousness Explained, New York, U.S.A.: Back Bay Books. ISBN: 978-0-316-18066-5.
Dennett; Daniel. (2011) “Intentional Systems Theory.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind. McLaughlin, Brian, Beckermann, Ansgar & Walter, Sven (eds.), New York, U.S.A.: Oxford University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0199596317.
Fodor; Jerry A. (1981) “The Mind/Body Problem.” Scientific American (244): 124–132.
Hoppe; Hans Herman. (1993) The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy. Auburn, U.S.A.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2nd edition (2006), ISBN: 978-1-61016-679-9. Available online: https://mises.org/sites/default/files/economics_and_ethics_of_private_property_2020.pdf
Irwin; Terence. (2007) The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study, Volume I: From Socrates to the Reformation. New York, U.S.A.: Oxford University Press, ISBN: 978-0-19-824267-3.
Ladymann; James & Ross; Don with Spurrett; David & Collier; John. (2007) Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. New York, U.S.A.: Oxford University Press, ISBN: 978-0-19-957309-7.
MacIntyre; Alasdair. (1981) After Virtue. Notre Dame, U.S.A.: University of Notre Dame Press, American edition, ISBN: 0-268-00594-X
Mises; Ludwig von. (1933) Epistemological Problems of Economics. Auburn, U.S.A.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute (2003) ISBN: 0-945466-36-6.
Mises; Ludwig von. (1949) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Auburn, U.S.A.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, The Scholar’s Edition (1998) ISBN: 978-1-933550-31-2. Available online: https://cdn.mises.org/Human%20Action_3.pdf
Nozick; Robert. (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York, U.S.A.: Basic Books, Inc., ISBN: 0-465-09720-0.
Oizumi; M., Albantakis; L., Tononi; G. (2014) “From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0” PLoS Computational Biology 10(5): e1003588. Doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588. Available online: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588&type=printable
Putnam; Hilary. (1967) “Psychophysical Predicates.” in Art, Mind, and Religion. W. Capitan and D. Merrill (eds.), Pittsburgh, U.S.A.: University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted in Putnam (1975) as “The Nature of Mental States”: 429-440.
Rothbard; Murray N. (1982) The Ethics of Liberty. New York, U.S.A.: New York University Press (2002) ISBN: 0-8147-7559-4.
Searle; John R. (2001) Rationality in Action. Cambridge, U.S.A.: The MIT Press, ISBN: 0-262-69282-1.
Skinner; B. F. (1938) The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis. Cambridge, U.S.A.: B.F. Skinner Foundation, ISBN 0-87411-487-X.
Stapp; Henry P. (1992) Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, 3rd Edition. The Frontiers Collection, Springer; 3rd edition (2009), ISBN-10: 3540896538, ISBN-13: 978-3540896531. doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-89654-8.
Stapp; Henry P. (2007) Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer. New York, U.S.A.: Springer, ISBN: 978-3-642-18075-0.
Stapp; Henry P. (2017) Quantum Theory and Free Will: How Mental Intentions Translate into Bodily Actions. New York, U.S.A.: Springer; 1st edition, ISBN: 978-3-319-58300-6.
Tononi; Giulio. (2012) “Integrated information theory of consciousness: An updated account.” Archives italiennes de biologie. 150. 56-90. doi: 10.4449/aib.v149i5.1388.
Watson; J. B. (1913) “Psychology as a Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review, 20: 158-177.
