Abstract
This essay praises Gerald Gaus’s The Order of Public Reason as a building block for all normative explorations into the institutional foundations of human sociability. It evaluates the normative implications put forth by Gaus in terms of the Kirzner’s “finder’s keeper’s ethic.” This raises a question about the relationship between the moral order and the political order that underlies market processes. Examining the role of entrepreneurship in the market process in relation to Kirzner’s “finder’s keeper’s principle” suggests a deeper ethical foundation that underpins the institutional conditions of “social morality.”
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Notes
For the purposes of this paper, we are using the terms ethical and moral interchangeably.
Munger persuasively articulates this argument in this symposium, basing the “extra-human” entity to which we refer runs analogous to what he argues as the necessity for a “Kantian Parliamentarian.”
The relationship between the notion of entrepreneurship in the Austrian School and the notion of practical wisdom in Aristotelian tradition within an institutional framework of private property, contract, and consent is beyond the scope of this paper. See Candela and Powell 2014. Markets as Processes of Moral Discovery. Studies In Emergent Order, 7: 258–272.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Douglas Den Uyl, Douglas Rasmussen, and Solomon Stein for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Boettke, P.J., Candela, R.A. A social morality for mortals: A review essay of the order of public reason: A theory of freedom and morality in a diverse and bounded world . Rev Austrian Econ 30, 365–375 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-016-0360-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-016-0360-1