In writing Praxeological Ethics, I borrowed heavily from the moral and legal views of F.A. Hayek. Most explicitly, I referenced his distinction between “law” and “legislation” to open Chapter VII. However, I also implicitly borrowed from his “spontaneous order” perspective on morality, especially in some of my follow-up articles I wrote after publishing my book (more on those later). While I find a lot of value (no pun intended) in Hayek’s perspective, I don’t agree with everything he writes. In this article, I hope to outline where he and I agree and where we differ.
Hayek’s Ideas
In Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Volume 1, Hayek writes:
“Yet the basic assumption underlying the belief that man has achieved mastery of his surroundings mainly through his capacity for logical deduction from explicit premises is factually false, and any attempt to confine his actions to what could thus be justified would deprive him of many of the most effective means to success that have been available to him…Many of the institutions of society which are indispensable conditions for the successful pursuit of out conscious aims are in fact the result of customs, habits or practices which have been neither invented not are observed with any such purposes in view.” (1973, pg. 11)
One of the common threads through Hayek’s work is the concept of spontaneous order — a method of organization whereby the result was not consciously aimed at, but created through second-order effects. Man never purposefully set out to create language (esperanto doesn’t count), but we all speak languages nonetheless. Most famously, Hayek employed this concept to explain the organization of the market. Entrepreneurs don’t set prices with the intention of transmitting information to market participants, but these higher or lower prices transmit scarcity to consumers.
However, Hayek also applied this idea to the source of social morality. Rather than being rationally created or randomly chosen, the values we hold are the result of a spontaneous, evolutionary process. How exactly did this happen? In short, through the transformation of successful actions into moral codes. Primitive man had no ideas of right and wrong — only what was good for his survival and the survival of his nomadic group. Just as with any other facet of life, he pursued those actions which seemed to fulfill these ends. Over time, these methods of acting became more and more calcified as it became more and more clear that they were the correct means to attain those ends. This calcification continues on until these methods of acting and taken not only as instrumentally good, but morally good. They become what people should do, not simply what is beneficial or reasonable.
This view solves an important problem: the social chicken-of-the-egg of morality. Did man invent the idea of a moral and just society, or did the moral and just society imbibe man with these qualities? Hayek posits that the answer is neither: they evolved simultaneously. He writes in “The Three Sources of Human Values”:
“That cultural evolution is not the result of human reason consciously building institutions, but of a process in which culture and reason developed concurrently is, perhaps, beginning to be more widely understood. It is probably no more justified to claim that thinking man has created his culture than that culture created his reason.” (Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Volume 19, pg. 155)
If our morals came to us via an evolutionary process, how exactly can we trust them? How do we know they are any good? Hayek answers: because they have undergone that evolutionary process. Just as an animal that survives must have adapted to his environment, so too must morals have been successful actions before they evolved into morals.
But if these values result from these processes, why can’t we just shorten the process by deriving them rationally instead? After all, a couple hours of philosophical rationalizing is much more efficient than a multi-generational evolutionary journey. While alluring, Hayek is clear that any purely rationalistic construction of ethics is a fatal mistake. As individuals, we are only privy to a small number of the totality of social facts at any given time. Hayek writes:
“Economics has long stressed the ‘division of labor’ which such a situation involves. But it has laid much less stress on the fragmentation of knowledge, on the fact that each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and that each is therefore ignorant of the knowledge possessed by all, and that each is therefore ignorant of the most of the acts on which the working of society rests.” (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 1, pg. 14)
The creation of moral values requires a much greater knowledge base than any single individual is or can be privy to. As a result, any “constructivist” attempt at morality is doomed to abject failure. As evidence of this fact, Hayek points to the communist regimes of the twentieth century. All of these states were attempting to implement their own system of morality that they felt was rationally defensible. Yet to a tee, all of them resulted in stagnation at best, and widespread atrocities at worst.
But if we are relegated to a reliance on evolutionary processes, is there any way we can consciously improve our moral codes? Are we just relegated to whatever values spontaneously pop out of our respective cultures? Hayek indicates that purposive moral improvement is possible, but only within the strictures of our other morals. Essentially, this is a process of making our morals more internally consistent rather than building new ones from the ground up. As he writes in “The Three Sources of Human Values”:
“There is certainly room for improvement, but we cannot redesign but only further evolve what we do not fully understand.” (pg. 167)
Agreements and Disagreements
As stated above, I find much agreement with the central themes of Hayek’s moral views. However, I find myself less pessimistic than him on certain questions. As I discussed in “Unpeeling the Ethical Onion”, I agree with Hayek’s evolutionary views on the source of human values. In practice, Hayek’s picture of value-forming through spontaneous processes is how the majority of human values come about. But I don’t agree with Hayek that this is the only legitimate source of human values. As I laid out in Chapter 1 of Praxeological Ethics, all ethical statements can be seen in the terms of means/ends. Any ethical investigation is essentially an investigation into the suitability of a means to attain a particular end. Consequently, I do believe that rational inquiry into moral problems is possible. Through the accumulation of tradition, we all accept that murder is wrong. But we don’t have to stop there — we can rationally investigate the question for ourselves as well.
However (as I also detail in the above article), these rational derivations are difficult and prone to error for all the same reasons that Hayek states. Especially in broad questions of social morality, accounting for all of the factors influencing the suitability of a means for attaining an end is incredibly difficult. To avoid these pitfalls, we are better off relying on tradition and spontaneously arisen values for general purposes.
Similarly, I have a sunnier view than Hayek on the prospects of improving our morals. Through a process of ethical argumentation, we can improve our existing moral beliefs and principles (although caution should always be exercised in doing so). But I think Hayek’s position of value alignment is a more practical and expedient way to evaluate moral principles. We can even see this process occurring in history as well. Some of the biggest moral revolutions in history (the abolition of slavery in the West, for instance), were built on appealing to already existing values: common dignity, inherent worth of human life, etc.
There are also some interesting questions that Hayek’s work invokes, but doesn’t quite answer. For example, how do we reconcile the views of different cultures? In the absence of any measure outside of internal consistency, how can we compare the merits of different cultural paradigms? Hayek expresses a clear affinity for Western Civilization, but how can he truly know that it is superior to other forms of civilization? I think Hayek would have probably appealed to the success of Western countries as proof, but it seems suspiciously like straying outside the realm of morality.
Additionally, the spontaneous order explanation of values tells us where they come from but it doesn’t answer what they are. Are moral values just optimal modes of acting? If so, then how do we explain the intuition within people to exalt moral values to a place of importance? People don’t treat moral values as useful — they treat them with religious reverence. I don’t think Hayek has a satisfactory explanation for this elevated status.
There’s great value in the spontaneous order tradition, but as always, there’s still room for growth. Spontaneous order gives a compelling story for where moral values come from, but doesn’t offer much — if any — practical advice. I believe this provides an intriguing opportunity: to plug the spontaneous order view of values into a moral philosophy to paint a more complete view of ethics. If I can find the time, I’ll try to explore this more in some future blog posts.
If you have found this subject interesting and would like to learn more, I highly recommend diving into Hayek’s writings on the topic. The overview I provided above was only a cursory look at his views, and there are a lot of nuances I didn’t have the chance to cover. Below is a small list of additional reading you can investigate, if you feel so inclined:
- “The Three Sources of Human Value”s from Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 19
- Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order (Especially sections 1 and 2)
- “Errors of Constructivism” from New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and the History of Ideas
- The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, Chapters 1–4
