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Abstract: This study suggests a fundamental different approach to human ends from what prevails nowadays in economic science and it was promoted especially by economists such as Frank Knight, Ludwig von Mises and Lionel Robbins: Economic science has nothing to say about the formation of human ends and it should limit itself to the study of the allocation of means. On the contrary, the anti-entropic perspective on life taken in this study proves that economic science seems to be the only social science that can solve the problem of human ends formation.

There are no human ends that simultaneously are not means, except the common end of all living beings defined by the nature of the phenomenon of life -the reversal of universal entropic degradation. Consequently, there is no principle of formation of means separate and different from the principle of formation of ends. What we commonly call human objectives primarily are chosen and ranked components of each individual’s external reality, which provide the fuel of life: What physicists call low entropy and keeps on the potential of living beings to perpetuate them, control, and do things generally.

The understanding of human ends as primarily deriving from the objective anti-entropic evolution of living matter removes any trace of subjectivity or arbitrariness in human ends formation as claimed by Mises and Knight. The apparent irrationality or lack of standards of human ends, their lack of stability or variation across time and individuals – characteristics about which Knight and Mises lament - are problems derived from an improper scientific perspective. Human ends evolve or vary continuously in response to individuals’ continuous search for optimum combinations of low entropy sources that maximize their anti-entropic effectiveness.

Making human ends intimately connected to the components of objective external reality has another dramatic consequence: Human action has to adapt to the concrete nature of human ends and as such it cannot be an end-neutral economic science. The project of a general economic science of means allocation which ignores the nature of human ends proves to be a very serious error.

JEL Classification: A10, A12, B41, B52, Z10

Keywords: human ends, method, definition of economic science

1. Some Relevant Methodological Issues to the Study of Ends

The problem of human ends I tackle in this paper, although is about “the most fundamental of the various sorts of data”, is also about “the most obstinately unknown of all unknowns“ in economic “science” (Knight, 2009:12). Knight’s assessment is almost similar with Mises (1949) and Robbins’ (1932), if I contain myself to listing only three very influential economists who wrote on this subject and whose ideas prevail even today.

Of course our capacity to know is limited and there are characteristic limits for each moment in human history. However, there has been also a continuous progress in human knowledge. Consequently, when for at least 90 years there has been no progress in the knowledge about ends , one has the duty to seriously question the general methodology of economic science. What then presumably went so wrong in the general economic methodology and why?

The following methodological corrections I suggest at the beginning of this paper are based upon general characteristics, causal principles and laws of the universe and its components as they have been revealed by other solid sciences, especially natural sciences. Too often economists invoke mankind and man as exceptions from what other solid sciences take as being general and valid principles. The argument seems quite natural: Except the case when someone takes a mystical or religious stance, the mankind is part and parcel of the universe and its living-world component and as such it has to comply or be consistent with all general characteristics, causal regularities and laws of the same universe and the living world. As such, the standard of compliance and consistency has to be fundamental in double checking the value of truth and even in suggesting solutions to economic problems.

To know enough about those causal regularities and laws does not require economists to master in detail those corresponding sciences, but only be aware of their fundamental discoveries. As our general training could have hardly missed those discoveries, what I am here suggesting is more a change in attitude. To proceed by referring to Robbins’ way, each of us should stop writing “as an economist for fellow-economists” and rather write as scholars for fellow-scholars. It is hard nowadays to master a universality of knowledge, once a normal requirement, but it is also a very dangerous situation to completely forget about it. At least, we should use the fundamental knowledge of other sciences to ground and check our own new discoveries. Following this path, for this research on ends and even generally, I would suggest the following methodological corrections.

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