Machan argues that it is inappropriate to regard the mechanistic viewpoint as the scientific way of looking at human life. Machan proposes that we reject this as our model of proper science which is, after all, extrapolated from one of the natural sciences, mechanics, and imported into the human social sciences. It is clearly possible to argue with this extrapolation, and maintain that there may be a scientific approach to human life which is non-mechanistic, which does not demand that human behavior be accounted for in the same way as the behavior of rocks or plants or even animals is accounted for. So we do not need to grant the currently purely mechanistic (positivist or even evolutionist) economic model of understanding human affairs the status of being the only scientific account.
One of the difficulties of challenging this economic case for capitalism is precisely that the scientistic — to be distinguished from the scientific — approach to everything in nature, including human nature, has had such a hold on the intellectual community.
No content found
Tibor R. Machan (1939 - 2016) was a Hoover research fellow, Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, Alabama, and held the R. C. Hoiles Endowed Chair in Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University.
Tibor Machan engages in some conjectural history to imagine how the world might be different had government never intervened to protect the environment but rather left all matters to property owners to sort out.
Many of the governmental edicts are pseudo laws, rules that are annoying mainly because government has accrued to itself the sole, monopolistic authority to impose them on us.
Edwin Mellen Press, 1988
