Published in 1999, this book is a shorter version of Hazlitt’s underappreciated Foundations of Morality. It contains a number of chapters from the book that are framed by an introduction by Leland Yeager. Hazlitt argues that our ethical and moral rules should be judged by the degree to which they forward social cooperation. He is putting forward a form of what Yeager, in his own similar work, has termed “indirect utilitarianism.” Ethical rules are not given by God or a priori reasoning, but by observing practices that have demonstrated their ability to allow humans to flourish by cooperating through the market and other institutions. Hazlitt’s argument here is a brilliant attempt to flesh out the ethical implications of Mises’s Human Action and this shorter version makes his work that much more accessible.
Also from the FEE Library
Cliches of Socialism Number 20 by Hans Sennholz
“Don’t you want to do anything?”
The Foundation of Historic Irvington by Barbara Dodsworth
This pamphlet is a short history of the town of Irvington, New York and the FEE property.
Cliches of Socialism Number 63 by Gordon Conklin
“But everyone else is doing it.”
Cliches of Socialism Number 54 by Benjamin A. Rogge
“Society is to blame, not I.”
The Mainspring of Human Progress by Henry Grady Weaver
Weaver’s book offers human liberty as the “mainspring of human progress.” The book begins with a series of puzzles about why we are so much better off than our ancestors and then explores why systems lacking liberty haven’t worked. The…
Categories: 
[...] human race through history, as Henry Grady Weaver said, appears as a man struggling to rise, to break free of constraints, with varying degrees of [...]
18 March 2010 at 12:47 pm