Austrian Economics, Wertfreiheit, and Political Philosophy: A Reply to Slenzok and Dominiak (2024)

Norbert Slenzok and Łukasz Dominiak (2024) deliver a fundamental challenge to the way most Austrian economists conceive of economic science. Whereas Austrian economists are unanimous in rejecting value judgments in science and subscribe to the Weberian ideal of Wertfreiheit (value freedom), Slenzok and Dominiak claim their theories depend crucially on normative principles and moral value judgments. The concepts of voluntariness, freedom and free exchange, and property rights are fundamental to the construction of Austrian economic theory, but these concepts (at least as they are used by Austrians) are derived from libertarian political philosophy (330–32).

A partial exception to Slenzok and Dominiak’s claim that Austrians employ value-laden concepts despite their protestations of value freedom is Murray N. Rothbard himself, who is otherwise the main target of Slenzok and Dominiak’s critique.^[1] Rothbard makes clear in some of his writings that the economist cannot define the free market or free exchange without a theory of property rights, but he does not conclude from this that value freedom is untenable (Slenzok and Dominiak, 330).

Slenzok and Dominiak’s is a serious challenge, not only to the self-understanding of Austrian economists, but to economics and social science generally. After all, while they carefully make clear that this is not their position, value freedom is often seen as synonymous with objective knowledge. If the Austrian School must ultimately discard value freedom, it is reasonable to expect that many, scholars and laypeople alike, will dismiss it as unserious and not worthy of their time. It becomes, then, simply ideology with no necessary connection to the real world.

Our contention, however, is that the challenge ultimately fails. For one thing, it is not in itself problematic that scientists are guided by some value judgments. Presumably, scientists prefer truth to falsehood; this is a value judgment and one that everybody must make. We might say with Hilary Putnam (2002, 30) that the preference for truth is an epistemic value, but it is not clear where the boundary between allowable, epistemic value judgments and prohibited, moral value judgments is. Whatever value freedom is supposed to mean, one can hardly believe that it is supposed to rule out this kind of value judgment. To be sure, Slenzok and Dominiak do not criticize Austrians for valuing truth above falsehood; we only mention this point in order to suggest that there is something incoherent to the strong value-free position they ascribe to Ludwig von Mises and Rothbard.

Having set out their general critique, Slenzok and Dominiak go on to examine some key passages from Mises and Rothbard in order to show that their purportedly value-free economic theory depends on thick, value-laden concepts imported from political philosophy. However, their understanding of Mises and Rothbard is deficient on key points, as we shall see, further undermining their goal of showing that we must abandon value freedom in economics.

The positive contribution of Slenzok and Dominiak lies in their pointing to the dependence of key concepts of economics on philosophy. This dependence, as they themselves explain, does not undercut the objectivity of economics, since ethics and political philosophy are themselves areas of universally valid judgments (356). We would put it slightly differently: Economics cannot prove its own first principles but must take them from another science (Aquinas 2012, Summa Theologiae 1.1.2); philosophy must provide these principles. Ludwig von Mises (1998, 11–14) attempted an axiomatic starting point for economics from the category of human action, which he defined in terms of means and ends. Mises (2007, 12–15; 1962, 34) argued repeatedly that human action is the starting point of praxeology, the science of human action, and that there is nothing underlying it. The value judgments that lead men to adopt certain ends and reject others are an ultimate given that we cannot analyze. However, here there is admittedly room for improvement, specifically when it comes to defining what sets human actions apart from animal actions and other processes in the universe and how praxeology relates to moral philosophy. Rothbard’s (2011d, 17) starting point was slightly different: “The fundamental axiom, then, for the study of man is the existence of individual consciousness.” Mises and Rothbard are in agreement that the starting point of human action and hence of economic science lies in human nature; we will therefore suggest that philosophical anthropology, the study of human nature, in the tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas provides the first principles, not only in defining human volition and action but also in supplying the concepts of freedom and rights (cf. Zanotti 1998). Despite our disagreements with Slenzok and Dominiak we therefore agree with their ultimate point that we should abandon the doctrine of Wertfreiheit insofar as it is part of the empiricist-positivist philosophy (Slenzok and Dominiak, 357; Putnam 2002). But praxeology is still an objective science for all that.

Value Freedom According to Mises, Rothbard, and Weber

The concept of Wertfreiheit goes back to Max Weber (1922a), who is taken to be the apostle of positivist value freedom—the complete disjunction of objective science and value judgments. However, it is worth pointing out how narrow Weber’s original claim for value freedom was. What Weber was first of all against was making the university chair and the lecture hall the forum for practical, political value judgments. “Kathederwertung” (value judgment from the chair) as Weber called it, is only consistent if all parties to a debate can claim it, but this was manifestly not the case, as both Marxists and Manchester-school liberals were consistently denied university employment. There was in the Germany of Weber’s day no freedom to debate basic political questions in the universities. It would therefore, he wrote, be more becoming to the dignity of scientists to abstain from all “Wertprobleme” (value problems), including those which they were allowed to discuss (Weber 1922a, 457–59).

From this starting point, Weber goes on to develop an argument for what a value-free social science, or what he calls an “empirische Disziplin” (empirical discipline), can explain. When the scientist discusses practical judgments, he has three possible tasks before him: He can show the necessary means for a desired end; he can describe the unavoidable, unintended consequences of pursuing the desired end with the necessary means; and he can show the resulting competition between different value judgments (Weber 1922a, 470). However, Weber sees all too clearly that there are some normative preconditions for objective science—specifically, the truths of logic and arithmetic must be taken as normative by the scientist (Weber 1922a, 493). It is worth pointing out at the outset the great distance between what Weber meant when proposing value freedom as a norm for science and how the later positivists criticized by Putnam (2002) understood it. Weber is really proposing a very limited norm, and he makes clear that value freedom is indeed a norm. This is most evident in his famous talk “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (Science as a vocation) from 1917 (Weber 1922b).^[2] A strong, positivist sense of value freedom, which allows for absolutely no value judgments in objective science, is therefore self-contradictory.^[3]

Mises adopted Weber’s understanding of value freedom. According to Mises (2007, 12), we can divide the mental operations underlying human actions into two categories: “The mental acts that determine the content of a choice refer either to ultimate ends or to the means to attain ultimate ends. The former are called judgments of value. The latter are technical decisions derived from factual propositions.” Strictly speaking, Mises reasons, man only pursues one ultimate end: happiness. All other ends sought are really only means to this one ultimate end, and the choice of ultimate ends is a matter of subjective judgment removed from the realm of rational examination. Indeed, as soon as ultimate ends are subjected to rational criticism, they are seen not as ends, but as means to some other end (Mises 2007, 13–15). Thus, Mises is consistent so far in holding to Weberian value freedom: It is not simply because it is politically impossible to discuss value judgments that we should refrain from doing so; the nature of value judgments is such that they are not subject to scientific inquiry.

This does not mean that Mises thinks economics has nothing to say in the realm of practical political and social questions. Economics developed as a science precisely because people were looking for the best means to attain their desired ends. A few people are consistent hermits and shun all society; these have no use for economics. Others pursue antisocial ends (i.e., desire the destruction of society), but such ends also tend to be self-destructive, and we therefore do not need to take notice of them (Mises 2003, 39–40). Insofar as most men aim at the same basic ends—life, health, and well-being for themselves, their families, and their friends—economics can show that these ends are better attained under social cooperation with division of labor than when each man labors on his own, and it can also show that social cooperation can only be based on private property in the means of production (Mises 2003, 40).

Mises rejects the argument that the economist must then make his own the value judgment of people seeking such ends. If the economist were motivated by the opposite value judgment, Mises (2003, 37) argues, if he wanted to make people worse off and less productive, he would arrive at the same conclusions of economic theory “except that in his presentation he would use different expressions in a few incidental remarks and digressions that are unimportant from the point of view of what is essential in the theory.”

So far, so Weberian, one might say, and it is difficult to discover any sense in which Mises has here violated the canon of value freedom.^[4] At most, the critic could say that he has postulated that private property is necessary for society to function, and that this involves an illicit value judgment. However, Mises has only postulated that the general institution of private property is necessary; he has not argued that a given distribution of property is just or that property must be grounded in some specific moral theory. Indeed, Mises argues that there is no moral grounding for property rights: It is a necessary social institution, and must be defended as such, but we cannot discover an ethical justification for the property system beyond its usefulness. The first allocation of property rights is ultimately arbitrary (Mises 1981, 32–36). Now, this does indeed constitute a value judgment in the sense of a judgment of moral theory, even if it takes the negative form: There is no just origin of property; justice is only a question of conformity to the laws as they have been formulated by men. Even if we disagree with Mises on this point, it is difficult to see how it taints the value-free character of Mises’s economics. That property rights are necessary for society to function is really all that Mises is committed to; whether and how such property rights can be justified in terms of moral philosophy is a separate question outside the sphere of praxeology. This does not mean that the question is not important to economics, only that Mises’s refusal to answer it (or his negative answer) hardly vitiates his economic theory.

Murray Rothbard followed Mises fairly closely on these basic issues. Human action is the basic concept in the study of man, and Rothbard (2009, 1–2) takes it to be axiomatic, a self-evident truth. Action is purposeful behavior, using means to pursue ends. Rothbard (2011d, 4), like Mises, is clear that the science of praxeology is value-free and independent of any “normative” science: “On the formal fact that man uses means to attain ends we ground the science of praxeology, or economics; . . . ethics employs all the data of the various sciences to guide man toward the ends he should seek to attain, and therefore, by imputation, toward his proper means.” Praxeology is focused on “the universal formal fact that all men use means for chosen ends, without investigating the processes of the concrete choices or the justification for them” (Rothbard 2011d, 17). For the science of praxeology, then, the value judgments guiding choice are ultimately given and beyond the rational investigation of the praxeologist qua praxeologist. In this sense, Rothbard holds to Weberian value freedom, but we note the important distinction between him and Mises: Whereas Mises’s position is that there can be no rational investigation of ultimate ends, Rothbard holds that a science of ends is possible and exists, but that it is beyond the scope of praxeology. The economist cannot get around the problem of making value judgments if he wants to advise on practical policy, and to Rothbard the strategy of simply adopting the value judgments of the majority and staying personally neutral is incoherent. This position itself entails a value judgment, an endorsement of the ends sought by the majority (20–21).

Again, Rothbard is so far just as Weberian as Mises when it comes to value judgments. That Rothbard believes in the possibility of a rational ethical science does not change this—in fact, it makes Rothbard’s position stronger than Mises’s, as he insists that the economist cannot in a value-free way advise on policies or political programs, and that it behooves him to advance an objective, rational justification for the value judgments he endorses (Rothbard 2011e, 312). However, Slenzok and Dominiak’s argument strikes deeper, claiming that the very core of allegedly value-free economics depends on value-laden concepts. Above all, they assert, we cannot describe free, voluntary exchanges and thus a free market without the concept of property, yet this is an obviously value-laden concept. However, this fact arguably does not commit us to a specific theory of justice and property rights. That there is such a thing as property is all we need for economics, the underlying theory of justice being outside its scope.

While Slenzok and Dominiak (328, 332–35) only hint at this challenge, Rothbard seems to be aware of it from the beginning of his academic work. If we turn to chapter 2 of his Man, Economy, and State, where Rothbard (2009, 84, 162–69) first introduces interpersonal exchange, we find not only an analysis of price formation, but also a clear statement both of the necessity of property rights for voluntary exchange and of which kinds of exchanges are compatible with the free market and which are rather to be considered as aggression. Rothbard is here not primarily concerned with grounding why property is just or why some things can be owned but others not. Rather, having made clear that property is necessary for free exchange, he goes on to sketch just as much of a theory of property as is necessary for his present purposes. One might at most quibble that Rothbard engages here in argumentation that does not really belong to praxeology. This is also the more charitable reading: Rothbard makes clear in other writings (which Slenzok and Dominiak cite) that a theory of property is necessary for us to even define the free market, and that we cannot make pronouncements as to what is good or welfare-increasing without an ethical theory, so it would be a strange lapse if he had forgotten this stricture in his own writings.

Three Criticisms of Criticisms

In addition to these philosophical problems, Slenzok and Dominiak make several errors in their reading of Mises and Rothbard. In particular, we will criticize their description of Rothbard’s treatment of monopoly theory and welfare economics and of Mises’s account of ownership.

On monopoly theory, Slenzok and Dominiak (346) claim that “much of the heavy lifting is indeed done by [Rothbard’s] normative theory.” According to their version of Rothbard, monopoly only arises when the state confers a legal monopoly on one person or group of people, which legal grant in turn gives the monopolists control over the price of the monopolized good. Monopoly, then, is only a special case of interference with voluntary exchanges.

First, it must be said that “control over price” is a red herring. No monopolist has control over the price of his good. What the monopolist controls is the supply of the good in the market, as both Mises (1998, 355) and Rothbard (2009, 629–30, 661–63) make clear in their respective accounts. Slenzok and Dominiak (346) cite Rothbard’s account to this effect but then go on to state, “Control—and the monopoly that comes along with it—arises only when the state enters the picture and violates property rights.” This is a correct if superficial rendition of Rothbard’s theory, and yet it misses the point, for Rothbard here is not concerned with a value judgment as to the goodness of monopoly. He is elaborating a value-free theory of what monopoly is.

We must emphasize that the state cannot give the monopolist qua monopolist control over his price, and Rothbard does not claim that it can. Rothbard’s point is that we can define monopoly as a situation where there is only one seller of a given good but that such a definition is hardly useful, as it is extremely broad. It depends crucially on how broadly or narrowly we define any given good. This we cannot do a priori as economists; only consumers can define what goods are considered homogeneous (Rothbard 2009, 665–67). If, however, a person is the sole supplier of a good, this is not enough to somehow distort the market; for that to occur, consumer demand must also be inelastic above the competitive price, so that a restriction of supply leads to larger revenue. Only then is there a special gain to monopoly (672–75). The whole theory of monopoly price, however, rests on an illusion: that we can distinguish between the competitive price on the free market and the monopoly price (687–90). But there is no way to do this, since there is no given, constant demand curve that the monopolist can somehow explore, nor is the demand curve accessible to an outside observer who could then compare the monopoly conditions to competitive conditions. There is therefore “no independent way by which we can define and distinguish a ‘monopoly price’ from a ‘competitive price’” (697), and hence monopoly in the free market becomes a meaningless concept.^[5]

What, then, of Rothbard’s (2009, 668) introduction of Lord Coke’s definition, that monopoly is “an institution or allowance by the king by his grant, commission or otherwise . . . to any person or persons, bodies politic or corporate, for the sole buying, selling, making, working, or using of anything.” Does this not rest on a theory of property and just exchanges? We will deal more with the relation of economic theory to ethics below; for now we simply point out that a monopoly based on special privilege is identifiable and leads to monopoly rents. Specifically, on the market all monopoly profits are traced back to unique, monopolized factors of production, and ultimately result in higher incomes to and higher capital values of the monopolized factors. Monopolies resolve themselves ultimately in higher wages to monopolist laborers or higher rents and capital values of monopolized land factors like diamond mines. In the case of a government grant of monopoly, however, the monopoly profit is traced back to this special privilege (Rothbard 2009, 680). It is thus a clearly identifiable factor in the pricing process whether we reject it as illegitimate or withhold judgment. Rothbard’s monopoly theory is on this point too, then, wertfrei.

Slenzok and Dominiak (347–49) are on firmer ground in their account of welfare economics and their claim that the Austrian approach to welfare economics is value-laden. As they themselves write, however, it is generally recognized by all schools of thought that welfare economics is normative. This was arguably Rothbard’s (2011e) point: to criticize mainstream approaches to welfare economics that smuggled in all kinds of normative judgments under the cover of value-free science, to show that this kind of welfare economics is not value-free, and to provide an alternative consistent with economic theory. Rothbard sets out how we can only say that the utility of a person is increased if this is demonstrated through action, what he calls the principle of demonstrated preference; Rothbard then generalizes this principle to all individuals in society through the unanimity principle. Free exchanges increase welfare, since no one is made worse off, whereas coerced exchanges cannot be said to increase welfare, since at least one individual does not demonstrate his preference for the exchange (Herbener 2008; Fegley and Israel 2024). However, Rothbard (2011e, 312) states, when we want to rationally ground any policy preference or course of action, we need to look to ethical theory.

Slenzok and Dominiak thus have a valid point, since the whole edifice rests on the distinction between voluntary and coerced exchanges. We might argue that in a voluntary exchange there is a meeting of the minds and that this is the basis for its welfare-increasing character. However, the line between voluntary and coerced exchanges is not clear. Slenzok and Dominiak (348) make this point with their tax example: Does the taxpayer not demonstrate that he would rather pay taxes than go to prison, and is the payment not therefore voluntary? Another example: A debtor would rather not pay his debts, but he is forced to do so. While most Austrians would reject the proposition that the exchange in Slenzok and Dominiak’s tax example increases welfare, we suspect that most Austrians would hesitate to say that payment of debts does not increase welfare.

Again, the problem hinges on what constitutes a voluntary action. While there is no meeting of the minds when taxes are imposed, there is arguably such a meeting of the minds when debts are repaid. Credit exchanges are exchanges through time; what really happens when debts are collected is that the debtor’s earlier action—his decision to incur debt, his exchange of future for present goods—is enforced against him. He thus has no rational grounds for refusing payments. This might look as if it shades into ethical theory, but we are so far only describing a consistent theory of property rights. Rothbard’s (2011e, 312–13) point was that since any policy prescription presupposes a theory of property, welfare economics unaided by such a theory cannot yield any normative conclusions. Jörg Guido Hülsmann (1999, 14–15) has suggested that Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s (2013, 127–44) argumentation ethics and account of property rights can serve as the value-free basis for welfare economics, and we could also point to Stephan Kinsella’s (1992; 1996) estoppel theory when dealing with the example of enforcement of debt. These writings go beyond positive economics as normally understood, but Rothbard’s way there is perfectly objective and rational and arguably completely value-free (although we note that Slenzok 2022 rejects the idea that Hoppe’s argumentation ethics are value-free). What we have is a value-free account of property based, ultimately, on speech acts (Hülsmann 2004, 53). We do not say that people should respect private property rights based on self-ownership, original appropriation, and free exchange, only that such property rights exist and that denying them involves the denier in a contradiction. This account is thus not directly normative, but it gives us “a praxeology of justification processes, the major result of which is that violations of property rights cannot be justified without self-contradiction” (53).

To the present author, this argument proves that an objective ethical theory must undergird any argument for welfare economics and ultimately for any property allocation.^[6] What Rothbard and his followers have shown is just how far value-free analysis in welfare economics can be pushed.

That said, welfare economics is not at all central to Rothbard’s economic theory, nor to his evaluation of economic systems.^[7] Rothbard elaborates a theory of property rights in Man, Economy, and State because such a theory is necessary for positive economics. Exchanges are always exchanges of property rights. The purely free market is an abstraction, an imaginary construction, that helps us distinguish between voluntary and hegemonic action and trace out the effects of various hegemonic (violent) acts, be it various interventions in the market economy or the complete abolition of the market (Salerno 2026). Ultimately, for a justification of property rights and of the market economy, we do need to turn to (political) philosophy. Slenzok and Dominiak are thus correct on this point, but they are arguably ramming through an open door.

Turning to the final point of criticism—what Slenzok and Dominiak (351–53) say about Mises on ownership—we cannot be as generous in our judgment. Here they misread Mises completely. On Slenzok and Dominiak’s account, Mises essentially has no theory of property; to him, property is simply possession. Both Mises’s definition of capitalism as based on private ownership of the means of production and his analyses of interventionism are therefore incoherent (353). This is an extraordinary claim, as it implies that Mises’s work is at a fundamental level incoherent from first to last.

Slenzok and Dominiak’s argument rests on their reading of Mises’s Socialism, specifically chapter 1, which deals with ownership (Mises 1981, 27–44). Here Mises (27) distinguishes between the economic and the legal category of ownership: Economically, ownership is “the power to use economic goods. An owner is he who disposes of an economic good.” The legal category of ownership is different: The law “differentiates between the physical has and the legal should have” (27). From this, Slenzok and Dominiak (351) conclude that “Mises insists that economics deals solely with possession and use while leaving ownership on the cutting-room floor.” However, they argue, it makes a world of difference from the economic point of view whether there is an owner of a house as well as a tenant, and whether that owner has the power to evict the tenant. They also argue that when Mises describes capitalism, socialism, and interventionism, he uses the concept of property rights, so his economic category of ownership leads to incoherent definitions (353). They conclude that “Mises simply has no theory of property and free exchange at his disposal. And without it, he is fundamentally unable to explain what the market economy, socialism, and interventionism actually are” (353).

These are strong words, and one must wonder how Mises was ever considered a great economist if they are correct. If we turn to what Mises actually wrote on ownership, we discover that Slenzok and Dominiak have fundamentally misunderstood him. On the very first page of Socialism where they find Mises’s category of ownership, which they interpret as dealing “solely with possession and use,” we also read about legal ownership: “The economic significance of the legal should have lies only in the support it lends to the acquisition, the maintenance, and the regaining of the natural having” (Mises 1981, 27). Mises may minimize the relevance of the legal concept of property here, but he emphatically does not say that it is irrelevant to economics. As we read on, this becomes clearer—for example, when he describes the relationship between economic ownership of land and the various legal categories of ownership, servitudes, and usufruct (28).

Things become a little more complicated when Mises describes economic ownership of durable consumer goods. Here Slenzok and Dominiak (352) cite his example of the inhabitant of a room as its economic owner at the time in question, but leave out his other examples of the Matterhorn and of a picture, as well as his antecedent discussion of ownership of perishable consumer goods (Mises 1981, 28). Throughout, Mises is elucidating the concept of economic ownership as it applies to different categories of economic goods. One might well ask what the point of the whole discussion is. The answer becomes apparent when we turn to Mises’s discussion of production goods. Whereas ownership of consumption goods is necessarily exclusive or private (only one person can have a given consumption good at a given time), production goods are different. If production takes place with the division of labor, we must distinguish between two kinds of economic ownership: the physical, direct having of the production good and the social, indirect having of the same good (30): “The physical having is his who holds the commodity physically and uses it productively; the social having belongs to him who, unable to dispose physically or legally of the commodity, may yet dispose indirectly of the effects of its use, i.e. he who can buy its products or the services which it provides. In this sense natural [economic] ownership in a society which divides labour is shared between the producer and those for whose wants he produces” (30).

The self-sufficient farmer produces for himself and directs his own activity; for him there is only the physical having of production goods. But the activity of the farmer who produces for the market is directed, in the final analysis, by the will of the consumers. The consumers have no legal ownership of the farmer’s production goods and no direct physical having—but what Mises terms “social having” is theirs, since they indirectly determine how the production goods are to be used. In a society based on the division of labor, economic ownership of the means of production is thus shared between the producers (who have physical, direct ownership) and the consumers (who have social, indirect ownership). This is the whole point of Mises’s (1981, 31–32) discussion: “Therefore, renouncing any particular terminology, let us only stress once more that the essence of the ownership of the means of production in a society which divides labour differs from that found where the division of labour does not take place; and that it differs essentially from the ownership of consumption goods in any economic order.”

We need not follow Mises further. The point of Socialism was to show the difference between private ownership of the means of production and public ownership of the same, and what the consequences of each would be, and his careful analysis of the categories of ownership in chapter 1 serves this general purpose. In other works too, Mises uses the same economic category of ownership—for instance, when he contrasts social relations under the precapitalist social system with those under the capitalist system (Mises 2009)—and again it is evident that he does not claim that legal ownership is irrelevant.

Thus, while it may be unsatisfactory to Slenzok and Dominiak that Mises does not elucidate the legal category of ownership, it is manifestly wrong to claim that Mises thought it did not exist or was irrelevant to economics. It is true that Mises had no ethical theory of legal property rights and that he thought that one could not ultimately ground such rights in moral theory. However, Mises (1981, 32–36) had an essentially utilitarian theory of law: It exists to give peace to society, to allow society to flourish. He held that property rights are fundamental to a society based on the division of labor (Mises 2005, 1–9). By this Mises obviously did not mean simply that the economic category of ownership is fundamental, but that the legal protection of ownership is necessary for any society and especially for an advanced capitalist society. This also clears up another misunderstanding: Slenzok and Dominiak (344–45) argue that Mises’s argument that a state is necessary to protect life and property is in contradiction to Rothbard and Rothbardians. This may be, but Mises’s argument follows from his theory of legal ownership. Property rights must be enforced in order for society to function, but this enforcement is itself something fundamentally outside the social, or at least the economic, sphere. Hence, Mises thinks that the state has this role to play. This may certainly be a wrong theory of property and of the state, but it is such a theory. Slenzok and Dominiak cannot have it both ways: They say there is a contradiction between Mises and Rothbard due to Mises’s theory of property, and then they criticize Mises for not having a theory of property.

On the three points we have here examined, Slenzok and Dominiak fail in their critique. The position on value freedom that Mises and Rothbard espoused is, as we saw, also immune to Slenzok and Dominiak’s critique, so there is no reason for us to abandon value-free science, correctly understood. Their suggestion that we should look beyond economics to political philosophy is nevertheless well taken, as the first principles of economics depend on other sciences.

First Principles of Economics

While praxeology pursues value-free science in the sense that the praxeologist does not advance a given ethical position and is not committed to any specific value judgment, we have seen that it arrives at the bounds of ethics on two points.

First, economics shows the effects (shortages, disarrangement of production, unemployment, and so on) of interventionism (i.e., violent interventions in the market economy) and the impossibility of socialism (i.e., the violent abolition of the market).^[8] Rothbard’s critique of welfare economics also shows that one cannot justify a violent intervention in the ownership of economic goods without falling into self-contradiction. However, there is so far no value judgment. Praxeology cannot show that falling into self-contradiction is abhorrent or disqualifying. If the socialist or interventionist says, “And why should I care about self-contradiction?” we might intuitively find the question perverse, but if we want to give an answer, it must be grounded outside praxeology.^[9]

Second, praxeology can pursue the purely descriptive analysis of property and property rights very far. It can perform a valuable service in showing which rights (and value judgments generally) are consistent (Rothbard 2009, 1297–356), and it can also show which rights do not result in self-contradiction and pursue the counterfactual analysis of property in treating government action on par with private aggression against property (Hülsmann 2004). However, praxeology cannot justify property rights and argue that they should be binding on action. To do so, we must move outside the bounds of value-free praxeology and into philosophy.

This does not mean that any answers we find are incompatible with praxeology. Praxeological science is embedded in a greater edifice of sciences and philosophy, and no one science can contradict the other. Rather, the more basic science or philosophy must supply the more particular sciences with their first principles (Summa Theologiae 1.1.2). All sciences are in this way connected, and the truths of one special science (say, praxeology) cannot contradict those of another (say, moral philosophy), since both sciences are ultimately based on the same principles.

The fundamental concept of praxeology is human action (Mises 1998, 11–14; Rothbard 2009, 1). It would be self-refuting to deny the fact of human action, and in this sense it is axiomatic for praxeology. Yet what human action is, what sets it apart from animal behavior and other processes in the universe, is a question of vital importance. To answer this question, we need to explain what man is, which takes us beyond praxeology proper. Once we have done this, we may also be in a better position to show the exact relationship between praxeology and moral science.

Mises ultimately grounds human action in the will. For him, action is instigated by judgments as to the value of definite ends and is guided by judgments as to the suitability of specific means. “It is conscious behavior. It is choosing. It is volition; it is a display of the will” (Mises 1962, 34). Man can choose the ends he wants to pursue. Man has the power to suppress instinctive desires, he has a will of his own, and he chooses between incompatible ends. In this sense he is a moral person; in this sense he is free (Mises 1962, 57). Rothbard (2011d, 17), following a slightly different line of argument, grounds the study of man in the existence of individual consciousness, but this difference is immaterial. Both certainly agree on grounding human action in man’s rational nature.

The will is thus the fundamental aspect of human nature for explaining human action. If we look to philosophy, specifically in the tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, we will find a notable explanation of the will. There is good reason to turn to Thomistic philosophy: Gabriel Zanotti (1998) has noted the compatibility between praxeology and Thomism, and Rothbard (2011b; 2011c) himself explicitly grounded his economics in this tradition. The link to ethics is also evident, as Aquinas (like everyone in this tradition) grounded moral science in his analysis of human nature and human action, and Rothbard (1998, 1–26) used the resulting framework of natural law as the grounding for his own treatise on ethics (cf. Lottieri 2009). Although Cristian López and Michael Esfeld (2025) doubt that Aristotelian philosophy is truly compatible with modern natural and social science, we thus still find it acceptable to integrate Thomism and praxeology. It is also worth noting that modern philosophers have argued that the Aristotelian-Thomist framework is not only compatible with modern (natural) science but is indeed a better grounding for it than the alternatives (Oderberg 2007; Feser 2019).

Like Mises, Aquinas sees human action as grounded in the will, since only those actions are called human of which man is master. Such mastery is only through the reason and the will: “Therefore those actions are properly called human which proceed from a deliberate will. And if any other actions are found in man, they can be called actions of a man, but not properly human actions, since they are not proper to man as man” (Summa Theologiae 1-2.1.1).

We can here clearly delimit the sphere of human action from nonhuman action. Animals and children also have a kind of imperfect voluntary action, but they have incomplete knowledge of the end, and it is precisely the consideration of a thing as an end and the relation of means to end that constitutes deliberate willing and action (cf. Grenier 1949, 21): “Perfect knowledge of the end consists in not only apprehending the thing which is the end, but also in knowing it under the aspect of end, and the relationship of the means to that end. And such knowledge belongs to none but the rational nature” (Summa Theologiae 1-2.6.2).

To Aquinas, then, the object of the will is the end, and it selects those means it deems suitable to the end. Necessarily, man only has one ultimate end, namely happiness, and all that he desires he desires for this end (Summa Theologiae 1-2.1.5–7). Mises (2007, 13) also argues that there is only one ultimate end to which men tend, namely the removal of uneasiness or the substitution of a state of affairs that suits the acting man better for one that suits him worse; he also calls this end happiness. Mises’s argument is thus entirely formal; he does not concern himself with the content of ultimate ends. This is partly because this content lies outside the sphere of praxeology and partly because, as we saw above, to Mises there can be no rational argument over value judgments. Aquinas argues differently: that we can rationally determine what man’s true end and true happiness consist in, and which means are appropriate to gain this end.

Before we turn to examining the relationship between human action and ethical science, let us also point out that Aquinas has a value-free distinction between voluntariness and violence and thus in embryo the comparative analysis of property and appropriation (Hülsmann 2004). Violence is as opposed to voluntariness as it is to the natural. Voluntariness and the natural spring from an intrinsic principle, whereas violence is an extrinsic principle that forces action in a different direction than what it would have followed: “And for this reason, just as in things devoid of knowledge, violence effects something against nature: so in things endowed with knowledge, it effects something against the will. Now that which is against nature is said to be unnatural; and in like manner that which is against the will is said to be involuntary. Therefore violence causes involuntariness” (Summa Theologiae 1-2.6.5).

Violence is thus a kind of negation of the human will, yet we need to know how we circumscribe the individual person and his will. What kind of actions would constitute violence against the will? Arguably only those that infringe on a person’s rights. Thus, it would not be violence to insist on repayment of a justly contracted debt, whereas it would constitute violence to force a person to pay taxes.

Moral science flows from our definition of man as a rational animal. There are ends proper to man which perfect him and others that detract from or even pervert him. For a man to be perfected, he must pursue the good. Following the Aristotelian distinction between act and potency (cf. Feser 2014), we may say that the good is simply the actual related to the potential in man (Veatch 1962, 200).

Actions are therefore good insofar as they tend toward the perfection of man—that is, insofar as their end is conformity with human nature. Aquinas explicitly names as an example of a good action “to make use of what is one’s own” and of an evil action “to take what belongs to another” (Summa Theologiae 1-2.18.2). He does not explain why these specific actions are good or evil, but we can use our principle of self-contradiction to fill in. Here, indeed, is where this principle acquires normative force: One should not engage in self-contradictory acts or speech acts, since such acts negate one’s rational nature.

Similarly, the use of physical things is necessary for man to achieve his ends, and the right of ownership is thus also ethically justified from this factual relationship (Summa Theologiae 2-2.66.2). If one man uses something as an economic good, this use clearly excludes somebody else’s use of it, as Mises (1981, 27–29) explained, and hence grounds his property right. Appropriation must take place in conformity with the principles of human nature, essentially in the way explained by the Austrians (Grenier 1949, 379–82; cf. Rothbard 1998; Hoppe 2013; Hülsmann 2004).

A necessary conclusion of moral philosophy, then, is respect for private property. Indeed, such respect is a basic part of the virtue of justice, which Aquinas defines as the constant will to render to each his right (Summa Theologiae 2-2.58.1). The basic principles and normative force of property rights theory thus follow from human nature and the necessity of using external goods as means, but the theory of rights is, seen in itself, a purely descriptive science—that is, we do not need to hold to a specific philosophy of man or morals to develop it. That men have rights and can own property, what kind of appropriation is justifiable, that violent interference with rights goes against the will and thus cannot be justified—these are all, in the correct, narrow sense of the word, value-free propositions (cf. Hoppe 2006).

Our point here is not to argue for the whole of Thomist or Christian ethics, but only to show that the “ought”-statement needed to make property rights normative can be rationally grounded in a way that is fully compatible with the praxeological tradition. It is hopefully clear how minimal the ethical entanglement we propose is and, further, that it does not contradict any of the standard works on property in the Austrian tradition. Contrary to Slenzok and Dominiak, this argument also does not commit the praxeologist qua praxeologist to any ethical theory.

Conclusion

Economics in the tradition of Mises and Rothbard is certainly an objective science, and it is also value-free in the sense that Weber meant. Slenzok and Dominiak’s main argument thus fails. While it is true that property rights are a necessary concept for economic analysis, it does not follow that we depend on a given theory of property rights. That there is such a thing as property is all that is necessary for praxeology.

However, Slenzok and Dominiak correctly note that we cannot avoid all entanglement with philosophy and normative science. Praxeology is the study of human action, and any kind of interpersonal exchange is an exchange of rights to property of one kind or another. Any coherent system of rights must be based on human nature, and the system’s normative force can only be derived from moral philosophy. Moral philosophy (along with political philosophy, as one of its branches) and praxeology are sister disciplines based on the basic principle of human action. They are on parallel tracks, as it were, but clearly related. As mentioned above, Rothbard (2011d, 4) summed up this relation best: “On the formal fact that man uses means to attain ends we ground the science of praxeology, or economics; . . . ethics employs all the data of the various sciences to guide man toward the ends he should seek to attain, and therefore, by imputation, toward his proper means.”