timelets

You're viewing

timelets's journal
Create a Dreamwidth Account Learn More

Reload page in style: light

In order to recommend a course of action to achieve an objective, we must first know whether that course of action will in fact promote the objective. Positive scientific knowledge that enables us to predict the consequences of a possible course of action is clearly a prerequisite for the normative judgment whether that course of action is desirable. The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions, precisely because of the neglect of this rather obvious point.

-- Milton Friedman, Nobel Memorial Lecture, December 13, 1976.

Social progress is valued, not because it extends happiness, but because it extends human intelligence. ibid. p. 50

- appears to be in conflict with religious beliefs.

From a shared belief in advancement for its own sake, Hayek and Keynes oth emphasise the responsibilities, as against the rights, of an individual. From Hayek comes the view that '[l]earnt moral rules, customs, progresively displaced innate responses, not because men recognised by reason that they were better but because they made possible the growth of an extended order exceeding anyone's vision' (Hayek 198B: 23), while Keynes quotes EJnlund Burke: 'out of the physical causes unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are perfectly able to comprehend, we re bound indispensably to perform' (Keynes; cited from Fitzgibbons 1988: 57).
p. 51.