How Essential Is Praxeology to Philosophy

The short answer is that Praxeology is not essential to philosophy, nor is it a branch of philosophy. So, who needs it? Well, in order to understand the nature of law, we need to understand the nature of conflicts. In order to understand the nature of conflicts, we need to understand scarcity. To understand scarcity, you need to understand the nature of human action. Praxeology is implicit in the study of law. Bringing forth praxeology from an "implicit understanding" to an explicit understanding is indespensible in grasping the problem and further derivations of law.

Further, the nature of man’s felt uneasiness implies objective ethics:

We have our starting point for ethics; values must be chosen by conceptual, living organisms. How do we apply this to humans? We start, of course, with the science of human choice: praxeology.

Fundamentally, man acts in order to alleviate his uneasiness. How does this relate to ethics? Well, because man acts in order to alleviate his uneasiness, he presupposes that he ought to act to alleviate his uneasiness in the mere process of acting. “Ought” here denotes a moral, prescriptive statement.

We can develop this into ethics further; because man has an identity, there is an objective way for him to alleviate his uneasiness. Imagine if man could choose the way to alleviate his uneasiness arbitrarily. Notice, he would just decide to alleviate all his uneasiness instantaneously. Recall that he would then cease to act indefinitely. Therefore, since empirically we can see that man cannot do this (both due to our own introspections and Sense Perception of other men), the negation must be true. There is an objective–or correct– way to alleviate uneasiness. We now leave praxeology and enter ethics. How man decides his ends (altruism, egoism, life, death, etc.), is now to be evaluated for its correctness. What are then the correct and incorrect values man must decide?^[1]