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Subject Area: Political Theory

Ontological Values - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, April/June 1978, vol. 1, No. 2 [1978]

Edition used:

Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Ontological Values

Walter B. Mead

“A Call for Conceptual Clarification in Value Theory: A Response to Professor Moon.” The Journal of Politics 39 (1977): 904–912.

Has Donald Moon actually made a case for an objective foundation of value terms found in the social sciences?

Arguing against Moon's views on “qualified cognitivism” there are two distinct positions concerning value cognitivism/noncognitivism: the one may be called ontological and the other epistemological. Professor Moon tends to confuse the two. Moon, while ostensibly refuting the positivistic-modernist position on value theory, ends up by embracing precisely that framework by arguing for a “value cognitivism that is essentially epistemological.”

Moon's argument is undermined by a failure to provide an ontological or naturalistic base for his epistemological cognitivism. Furthermore, Moon's enterprise fails to be normative because his “research programs” for deriving conceptions of human nature depend on empirical observations of what men, or societies, regard as “good.” Thus, we are still left with value relativism.

A more coherent alternative is Michael Polanyi's, which combines ontological cognitivism with epistemological noncognitivism.

V

Justice

Justice, in the judgment of social thinkers from Plato to Harvard's John Rawls and Robert Nozick, has meant fairness and rightness of human actions in a social context. This harmony dissolves, however, when each thinker seeks to coherently explain the traditional formulation of justice: “giving to each his due.” What is each person's due? How should society determine and assure just allocation in economic resources, education, social standing, legal justice?

These fundamental questions lead to the rival options of choosing either the state or the market as the mechanism of achieving social justice. Should the state be the voice of justice, and essay to achieve social welfare, equality, distributive justice, and a fair balance of competing claims and rights through its coercive authority? Or should the market—the network of voluntary interactions among humans—be the mechanism to guarantee a spontaneous order of both distributive and commutative and commutative justice?

This alternative raises another issue: how may we define the relationship between justice and individual rights or liberty?

So overarching a concept is justice that it overflows the confines of this set of summaries and reappears in several other sections, most notably in the following section on “Property.”