≡ Menu

Human Action and Universe Creation

by on June 28, 2022

Related:

Based on a facebook post (mysteriously deleted): 1

In my various arguments about intellectual property (IP) over the years (since I first started writing and speaking on this, in about 1995) I have gradually come up with new ways of explaining the issue, mostly in response to various criticisms and arguments I’ve seen raised on the pro-IP side. I don’t disagree with much of what I wrote in my 2001 Against Intellectual Property, though I was not hard enough on trademark and trade secret, and I probably would be more careful with the term “scarcity” since I have learned that its dual meanings are an unending source of equivocation by unscrupulous opponents (e.g. when they say “well good ideas are pretty scarce, in my opinion!”). I’ve learned a few supplementary arguments against IP or have learned different ways of making the case, that I would now include in the 2001 monograph, and which I may do someday if I write a new case against IP from scratch (a possibility; tentatively entitled Copy This Book).

One thing I’ve learned to emphasize is the distinct roles of scarce means (resources), and knowledge, in human action, especially, in Mises’s conception of praxeology. (See “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” the section “The Separate Roles of Knowledge and Means in Action.”) All human action (a) employs means, (b) is guided by knowledge of causal laws and other facts about the world, and (c) is aimed at some goal or end. Both the availability of scarce means and knowledge are essential for successful action. Knowledge is always knowledge about the world. As Mises notes, the spur to action is felt uneasiness—and he also makes clear in much of his writing that all action is aimed at the uncertain future. Thus all action is action now, employing means now, aiming at some future goal. The goal has to be in the future because action and mediation takes time. Because it’s aimed at the future, all action is speculative in a sense.

The means available that one attempt to employ to achieve one’s end, are those which the actor believes can be causally efficacious at altering the course of events so as to achieve an end state different than the one the actor had envisioned that gave rise to his uneasiness. These scarce means can be the source of conflict since by their nature they cannot be employed by two actors at the same time and for similar purposes. This is why in society, in addition to merely possession or using scarce means, humans develop normative property rights schemes to better enable actors to efficaciously use their chosen means to achieve their ends.

The knowledge we possess includes a variety of forms of knowledge, but basically empirical and contingent (factual) and knowledge of the natural causal laws. For example an actor has some knowledge of how the world is arranged, how other humans behave and act, what our own values are, and we have some dim idea of the uncertain future that is heading towards us. We also have knowledge of laws of causation—of cause and effect. We understand that using a pole to knock down a coconut might work; that using a fire might help cook a fish; and so on. So our knowledge first gives us a glimpse of the future that will come if we do not intervene (act), and knowledge of how this will please us—if we suspect the future state of affairs will make us happy we feel uneasiness and use our knowledge about the world—society, facts, etc.—and about causal laws and related extant technical knowledge, to come up with some plan for a course of action (an employment of means) that we forecast will change the course of events and result in a change from the one that makes us uneasy. In sort, we act, seeking profit—the profit is the psychic satisfaction of succeeding in some action and achieving the end one desires, and in avoiding the other end that instilled uneasiness or discomfort.

And of course, then I point out how naturally this illustrates that property rights are employed to avoid conflict just in the use of the scarce means of action—things that are possibly the object of conflict; “conflictable” things (which might be a better term than “scarce” or even “rivalrous”). But the knowledge that guides human action, while important and indispensable to all successful action, is not a conflictable thing and thus not a subject of property rights.

But what I want to focus on here is this idea of envisioning one’s end as always in the future, and always a “state of affairs” that one is seeking to obtain—one different than the “default” or “autopilot” state of affairs one imagines looming if no intervening action is taken. As Professor Hoppe has written:

“Whenever we act, we employ means to achieve a valued end. This end is a state of affairs that the actor prefers to the actual (and impending) state of affairs. Both states of affairs, at the beginning of action and at its conclusion, are constellations of means (goods) at an actor’s disposal, describing the circumstances or conditions under which he must act.” 2

So the end of an action is the attainment of a certain “state of affairs” which may or may not include the “having of a thing” (or the “owning of a thing,” which is different from the having). 3 If you sing a song to a baby to lull it to sleep—you employed the resources of your body, your bedroom, and so on, to achieve an end: a universe in which Baby is Sleeping. So if you succeed, then you in some sense have altered the course of affairs (by your employment of means; this is why means have to be causally efficacious—they have to work—they have to do something in some predictable way so that your action makes some desired change in the course of events). So basically what every actor aims at, in a sense, is: achieving his end: which means, achieving a world (universe) in which a certain state of affairs is the case. In other words, every action is, in a sense, aimed at creating a universe: one of a perhaps infinite number that could exist, and in particular, the one that is not the universe the prospect of which makes one uneasy in the first place.

As Hoppe writes:

“Every action is and must be understood as an interference with the observational world, made with the intent of diverting the “natural” course of events in order to produce (i.e., to cause to come into being) a different, preferred state of affairs—of making things happen that otherwise would not happen….” 4

So, we can think of all human action as the attempt to create universes, to create realities. You could analogize this to the Harry Potter world where wizards wield “spells” to accomplish certain results: we human actors wield “means” to deflect the course of events so as to create a desired world, or state of affairs. In a sense, human actors are all like little wizards, seeking to create new universes.

For a related observation, see Randy E. Barnett, “The Sound of Silence: Default Rules and Contractual Consent,” Va. L. Rev. 78  (1992): 821–911, p. 879:

Fictitious worlds are constructs of which only a fraction appears explicitly at any given time. Similarly, the human mind can be viewed as creating a “virtual reality,” an elaborate construct of the external world. Only a tiny fraction of this construct is present in consciousness at any given time.

Contracts, too, can be understood as the enterprise of projecting into the future an imagined “world.” As Steven Burton and Eric Andersen have explained: “Two persons can cooperate by jointly imagining a possible world and, by entering an agreement with a promise on at least one side, committing themselves to each other to bring that world into being by their actions.” [Quoting Steven J. Burton & Eric G. Andersen, “The World of a Contract,” Iowa L. Rev. 75 (1990): 861–76, p. 864.]

Now the problem that arises here is that we usually think of ends or values as not being in conflict, only the means of action, which by their very nature are “scarce” or “conflictable.” 5 But if we imagine a planet of 7 billion people, all acting, they are all trying to achieve new future universes. Some of these are no doubt compossible, i.e. compatible with each other: I can put my baby to sleep and you can also sell your Roomba, so we can both change the universe so that both ends are magically achieved. But not all ends are compatible. If John and Zack both want to win the heart of Jenny, they are both devoting scarce means and action to achieving this future end, but at most, only one of them will succeed. So this means that the future universes that wizards John and Zack are aiming at can’t both be achieved (here I dismiss the silly idea of the multiverse, which doesn’t solve the problem anyway) … which means that whichever one has the most “powerful” “spell” will win—i.e., whichever one employs his means more effectively.

Anyway, the more I thought about this, and after kicking it around with Gil Guillory, I think there is not much to this approach, but I still find it interesting. At least, we ought to keep in mind that the object of action is always in the future, the future is uncertain, and we are trying to change the future reality by using knowledge to achieve the best means (spells) to bring it to life.
***

Update: my tweet:

Saturday morning musings. As I note here stephankinsella.com/2022/06/human- — every action we take is in effect creating a new universe. this means we are little gods. It means we are basically magical. We have power. Puissance. there is a mystery to life. Where does it lie? It lies in that little tiny moment of true choice when we choose to do A instead of B, to manipulate this as opposed to that scarce means, to change the world and create a new universe of our choosing, or at least one better to our liking, the one that avoids the uneasiness we fear. So we are magical. We are all little demi-gods, battling over new universe creation. Some of these new universes are compatible with each other, or compossible, but not all. If A and B both want to buy a car they can both take actions where the new universe they create has them each owning a new car. But if they both want the same car, then only one of their attempted universes will be created. This is the source of conflict. In any case, the point is that the reason we are gods and have magical powers is because we have choice. That is, free will. This is implicit in human action, in the very praxeological conception of what it means to act, and even the conception of what it means to be a person, and thus, to be. But since magic is obviously impossible, this simply means action and choice are illusions and impossible. We don’t really act. We are not gods after all. We are just little passengers sitting inside either deterministic or chaotic meat robots. I have spaketh.

***

More updates:

Twitter discussions with Bob Murphy:

See Bob Murphy Show, Ep. 88 Ludwig von Mises versus God and Murphy, “Reconciling God With Libertarian Theory,” in Elvira Nica & Gheorghe H. Popescu, eds., A Passion for Justice: Essays in Honor of Walter Block (New York: Addleton Academic Publishers, forthcoming 2025 or 2026?) (my comments below).

 

Robert P. Murphy, “Reconciling God With Libertarian Theory,” in Elvira Nica & Gheorghe H. Popescu, eds., A Passion for Justice: Essays in Honor of Walter Block (New York: Addleton Academic Publishers, forthcoming 2025 or 2026?).

In response to a draft of this piece, I gave Bob some comments. In my email:

Clever and well done. Not sure what the first part, about free will, has to do with god’s owning us… I embedded some comments w/ track changes. I refer to my critique of libertarian creationism so attach the latest draft of the pdf in case you what to glance at it.

Bob:

… your response is exactly what I needed; I want to be careful and not simply state as if it’s obvious that the creator of the universe owns it.

I still think that’s weird though, the move you are making, about creating bodies versus controlling them. In the future when cars are all self-driving, if I come up with a way to hack into my neighbor’s car and instruct it to drive me around, you still think that’s stealing right?
Kinsella:
yes. Direct control over cars is not the basis of ownership. As for bodies of someone can control my body it’s trickier.

As for creation-humans never create things. They only rearrange matter. They transform. This is what production is. Even rand agrees. So does Mises and Rothbard. See

I am not suggesting you, respond to me; just suggesting you might want to have some footnotes alluding to the fact that there is some external discussion of some of these matters, whether or not you have time to respond to it
…
Incidentally, this is clever and nicely written and argued. But I think there are some fallacies in some of your arguments, for example, your comic strip argument is clever but … really makes no sense. In that strip there are no characters who feel and think things. And if they say “what if God…” then that is just God writing those words for them. So the analogy is hard to maintiain. I also think there are problems w/ your free will arguments and the attempt to square it with God’s omnipotence/omniscience etc. But a B+ for effort!
And more:
Kinsella:
I also think there are different arguments that could be made. For self-ownership. We just don’t need to make them yet since we have no god-proof . e.g. you could say that everyone owns his body b/c he homesteads it, but the basis of homesteading is initial direct control. We just don’t have to respond to these situations yet.
Eg. I have told people this, re arguing why spam should be trespass:
“I assume you would agree that if someone knocks on my door after I told them they are not welcome on my property, that’s trespass. Even if it’s not, if someone else does it. Right? I have a door open to the street, but I have communicated to a given person that I revoke his permission to use my door.
I assume also you would agree that in some cases calling someone’s house can be some offense–for example a stalker who keeps calling some woman over and over, making her fear.
So suppose I have a phone connected to the phone system, like having a door and sidewalk connected to the street. If I sign up to a well-known DO NOT SPAM registry, and some spammer picks up his phone and dials my number anyway, isn’t he using my phone without my permission? He’s causing it to ring, is he not? The phone would not ring if he didn’t dial the number. It’s like he’s using a remote control device.
To take another example, suppose I and my neighbor have identical remote control helicopters. To avoid interfering with each other I switch mine to channel 7 and he uses channel 13 on his. One day he intentionally switches his remote to channel 7 and starts piloting my helicopter around my living room, wreaking havoc. Would you not say he is using my helicopter without my permission?”
[Bob]: it seems that Block and you don’t understand how e-mails and computers work. The spammer isn’t causing anything to happen to your computer to which you do not consent.
You don’t seem to understand how nuanced and complicated these words “cause” and “consent” are. I understand the factual situation but yes, I do think that the spammer is “causing” things to happen and no, I don’t think you “consent” to it.
Let’s take some other examples. suppose someone keeps calling your phone. Some telemarketer. You alert them “don’t call me anymore”. I’d say that if they keep caling you, they are using your phone without your consent–they are making it ring. The fact that you are joined to a network where this is *possible* does NOT mean you “consent to it”.
How about this. You have a remote control helicopter drone sitting on your kitchen table. Your neighbor can see it from across the street. He plays around with his “Ardoino” device and figures out the remote control signal codes, and so he remotely turns on your helicopter and flies it around your kitchen, smashing dishes and chasing your dogs and kids around. Now by your logic, the neighbor isn’t trespassing–why, you had the audacity to have a remote control that “invited” his control by having “such-and-such” a nature. He didn’t “cause” it to fly around–you “consented” to his control of your helicopter.
Bob:
I am not seeing how the spammer / helicopter stuff is hurting me.
Kinsella:
It’s about direct control. If I can control your helicopter in your dining room it’s still using your resource without your consent. maybe something like that could be modified for human bodies, if/when other people or a “god” could control it. I think the whole concept of human action and “conflict” and “use of means” would change in such a world.
Bob:

OK. Maybe this is all obvious to you, but I noticed when I was writing up my stuff about that Hoppe passage, it seems we are conflating two different uses of the possessive. In your framework, I think it would make sense to say, “OJ Simpson started out owning his body, but after the trial with competent libertarian judges, he was found guilty of murder and now the parents of his ex-wife own OJ’s body.”

So notice in that formulation, I’m still calling it “OJ’s body” even though I’m saying somebody else owns it. I think what Hoppe showed is why it’s so natural for us to refer to that particular limb as “Hoppe’s arm” and not “Schulze’s arm.” But that doesn’t prove libertarian self-ownership, since Ted Bundy’s arm is still Ted Bundy’s arm in that sense.
Or put it this way: I could do a Black Mirror episode where you and Hoppe run a prison, and the android guards mistakenly take your commands to inject cyanide into the prisoner’s body on death row and put it into your body, because the robot actually took your article seriously and thinks you own the prisoner and hence “Stephan’s body” is now ambiguous.
Kinsella:

not sure the point exactly, and we could talk about it sometime,  but i despite arguments by lexicography.  and I agree w/ Lefevre. See LeFevre on Intellectual Property and the “Ownership of Intangibles”:

LeFevre also highlights the confusion that often comes from the linguistic use of possessives:

It is quite common for one or both spouses in a marriage contract to presume that their opposite number is actually a possession of theirs. Our language gives credence to this supposition for it is usual to hear a man refer to his partner as “my wife.” She is not his in a property sense.

Bob:

My point is that Hoppe’s musings (translated from German, that stuff) to me establish why we call it Hoppe’s arm, not that he owns his body in a libertarian sense.

Kinsella:

Yes, I get your objection, more or less, I think. …

***

Here are my in-line comments to his draft chapter, quoting some of Bob’s text as necessary for context:

Simply put, if the Genesis accounts are correct, then God created spacetime itself. He didn’t use other inputs, but de novo created every last quark in the cosmos. As such, according to standard libertarianism (e.g. Rothbard ____, p. 34), God is clearly the rightful owner of the material universe

Kinsella: I am curious to see what you argue here: are you arguing the standard libertarian view is that people who create some thing own it because they created it? This is the view I disagree with and do not thing it is part of libertarianism; it is an error of Lockean “creationism”. It also leads to intellectual property b/c if you create a pattern or invention or poem, you “own” it since you created it. In my book I discuss this e.g. ch. 14, Part III.B, and ch. 15, Part IV.C. I mean in a sense, parents “create” their baby; do they “own” it?? No, because the childhas direct control over its body so is as self owner, despite someone else having crated it. See my chapter 4, How We Come To Own Ourselves. But as I told you I believe in previous comments, God, unlike a child’s parents, can also directly control any human’s body [presumably]. Thus, the argument for self-ownership and against slavery [other-ownership] breaks down if we posit a God-creator. But not because he’s the creator; but instead, because of his power to control human bodies directly.

and can set whatever rules He wants for His tenants. God is no more a dictator or tyrant than the manager in a factory who tells employees they have to pass a drug test to remain on the company premises. As I put it when I spoke to the Libertarian Christian Institute: “Atheist libertarians love the idea of homesteading, except for God” (Murphy 2017).

Kinsella: Homesteading has nothing to do with creation! Homesteading means finding and using an already-existing and previously-unowned resource. In your example God didn’t do this; he created the universe. I guess you could argue that once it’s created, and it’s unowned, God can swoop down and start “using” it or embordering it—mixing his labor with it—to try to “own” it, but that was not your premise. Your premise seemed to be that if you create something you own it, and that this is part of libertarianism. It’s not. As I discuss in the sections cited above, see e.g. p. 417, and note 51. See also the section “Creation of Wealth versus Creation of Property” in this paper: “Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright,” Economic Notes No. 113 (Libertarian Alliance, Jan. 18, 2011), also published as “Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright,” The Libertarian Standard, Jan. 19, 2011.

In other words, if I reject God’s ownership of the universe based on his claim that he created it, it does not mean I object to his owning it by homesteading.]

As for whether you what to quote or cite me, well I don’t think at this point you have time to really engage with my comments. But I would think it appropriate to drop a footnote somewhere in this paper, saying that I do address some of these issues explicitly in: Stephan Kinsella, “Defending Argumentation Ethics,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), pp. 158–63, esp. the section “God as Slaveowner” (pp. 160-63).

As for your following section, again you might want to drop a note saying that though you don’t have space to deal with this, Kinsella explicitly responds to the argument in that next section, in Stephan Kinsella, “Defending Argumentation Ethics,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), the section “Arguing With Your Slave” (pp. 158–60).

***

Regarding a section about Murphy’s argument about God owning us as slaves or something (see Stephan Kinsella, “Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), in the sections “Arguing With Your Slave” and “God as Slaveowner”), I wrote:

Kinsella: In the end: as I think I said before: I don’t know if I would disagree with you that God owns us—because he has even more direct control over our bodies than we do. But … so what? Libertarianism is a political philosophy about what inter-human laws are just—it’s about how we can treat each other. The existence of God only reinforces this, since if he is the owner of us, or of the whole universe, and if he is “good” and thus somewhat of a libertarian, we can presume he also agrees that as between us humans we ought to treat each other according to libertarian rules; so his existence doesn’t oppose libertarianism. Also, in what you quoted from Walter above,… it’s not clear to me he would disagree that God owns us.. .he just thinks it’s irrelevant (?). Isn’t this basically what Walter means when he writes: “[T]his ploy of utilizing the Deity for the purpose of criticizing argumentation ethics is itself illegitimate. It is well known that libertarianism is a theory that concerns the relationship between man and man, not between man and God. When recourse is made to the latter, all bets are off.

But what if, say, intelligent aliens created the earth out of diffuse matter that was circling the sun billions of years ago? They would have homesteaded that material

This may be correct, unlike your God-created-the-universe example above, since in that case God created things ex nihilo; here, the Aliens took already-existing, unowned resources and transformed them in some useful way so as to homestead them. But then, if they are long gone, I would argue they have abandoned it. I believe I already sent you some points about abandonment e.g. of trash, in a previous correspondence. I could look it up if you need it but I imagine time is short for you and this morning it is for me to..

and would therefore be the rightful owners of planet Earth.

…

To them, the idea that intelligent beings would one day walk around Earth, thinking they had arisen purely by random mutation and natural selection, might seem preposterous—as silly as teenagers finding a bicycle parked in the woods and claiming they thought it was a weird rock formation and that’s why they took it home.

So are you saying they created the earth as as sort of zoo…? I would still argue that the humans who exist are self-owners (see above) since each one has a better claim to his body than the aliens, just as a child is a self-owner even though the parents created him

  1. Apparently Facebook retroactively deleted it since it linked to c4sif.org which for some reason Fecebook now censors; I re-posted the link here. [↩]
  2. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Two Notes on Preference and Indifference,” ch. 17 in The Great Fiction  (emphasis added). [↩]
  3. See Libertarian Answer Man: Self-ownership for slaves and Crusoe; and Yiannopoulos on Accurate Analysis and the term “Property”; Mises distinguishing between juristic and economic categories of “ownership”; KOL395 | Selling Does Not Imply Ownership, and Vice-Versa: A Dissection (PFS 2022). [↩]
  4. Hoppe, “In Defense of Extreme Rationalism: Thoughts on Donald McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics,” in ch. 16 in The Great Fiction); bolding added; italics in original. [↩]
  5. See “On Conflictability and Conflictable Resources”. [↩]
Share
{ 4 comments… add one }

Leave a Reply

Next post:

Previous post:

Archives

Kinsella profile-head - 1Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and retired patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020), and The Universal Principles of Liberty (2025).

Hoppe A Life in Liberty, cover

Hoppe Festschrift cover

Kinsella Adopting Liberty cover

Kinsella Against Intellectual Property cover

Kinsella Louisiana Civil Law Dictionary

International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide, Second Edition cover
My Failed Libertarian Speaking Hiatus; Memories of Mises Institute and Other Events, 1988–20192025

[From my Webnote series]

Webnotes

Libertarian Answer Man

This site rocks the Classic Responsive Skin for Thesis.

WP Admin

© 2012-2025 StephanKinsella.com CC0 To the extent possible under law, Stephan Kinsella has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to material on this Site, unless indicated otherwise. In the event the CC0 license is unenforceable a  Creative Commons License Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is hereby granted.

-- Copyright notice by Blog Copyright