Evolution or Moral Realism?
“No doubt American society today differs greatly from eighteenth-century America and has in that sense evolved.”
Hayek here performs the remarkable feat of compressing a lifetime of study of the free society into a short volume. As one might expect, his argument goes rapidly and requires some unravelling if it is fully to be grasped. A way of looking at the argument I have found helpful is to consider it as composed of three parts.
The first of these gives Hayek’s answer to a basic choice facing all modern societies: capitalism or socialism? He succinctly and effectively summarizes a version of the calculation argument. A system of central planning cannot efficiently coordinate information, since much information exists only at the local level, in particular decisions of persons “on the scene.” To transmit these decisions to the planning board is futile: once made, they are past and gone and do not indicate what action now is appropriate. The market economy, which Hayek prefers to call the extended order, does not face this problem. In it, each entrepreneur uses the data provided by the prices of goods he buys and sells to plan his decisions. No group of people need attempt to combine the various local decisions into one coordinated plan.
If Hayek is right, then for any society whose members reject economic chaos, the choice between capitalism and socialism presents little difficulty. No matter what one “likes,” only one system will work.
The calculation argument seems to me successful and of decisive significance. Hayek, following the course of his teacher Ludwig von Mises, has contributed in a major way to the overthrow of the intellectual plausibility of socialism.
But a problem at once arises. Given the truth and simplicity of the calculation argument, why are there still socialists? Hayek finds the answer in the resistance to the system of rules “required for the extended order.” People living in a capitalist economy do not receive rewards according to their moral merit or lack of it. Quite the contrary, wealth and income depend on numerous factors that as they work themselves out among individuals defy ready categorization.
However arbitrary the generation of income may seem, the success of the market order depends on permitting the price system to coordinate information, in the fashion I have just briefly described. People cannot fully exercise their “natural” tendencies to act selfishly in their own interests and altruistically to the advantage of their relatives and friends. (pp. 12 ff.) Once more, they must subject their actions to the rules of the marketplace. These rules they learn through custom and tradition.
An obstacle stands in their path. Traditional moral rules, not deduced from first principles, carry little appeal to many intellectuals. Theorists of this stripe, whom Hayek dubs “constructivist rationalists,” believe that a correct account of morality need not hesitate to break with tradition. Instead, one begins with a goal that one wishes morality to achieve— e.g., happiness. Moral rules are then elaborated to secure this goal or a goal based on some other postulated “value judgment.” Whatever rules cannot be shown by reason to promote one’s goal carry no moral weight, traditional support to the contrary notwithstanding.
Hayek’s criticism of the constructivists seems to me well taken. The alternative foundations for morality he considers, custom and “rationalism,” however, seem far from exhaustive. He never so much as mentions in the book what one would have thought the most obvious position: the rules of morality are based on moral judgments that are true. If, e.g., slavery is wrong, this seems prima facie to rest on a “true moral fact,” not merely the description of a tradition in our society banning slavery. This moral principle, and others like it, are in this view statements about the world, neither mere habits nor the exfoliations of misguided constructivists intent upon an arbitrary aim.
I have not argued that moral realism is correct; and the subject in any case is large and complex. But I cannot conceal my disappointment that Hayek omits this position from his discussion. His comments imply without argument its falsity.
Further, one wonders why Hayek considers Descartes to be a rationalist of the “bad” sort, so far as morality is concerned (p. 48). Descartes argued in the Discourse on Method in a way rather like that of Hayek himself, that one ought to observe faithfully the laws and customs of one’s country. Also, Hayek’s indictment of G. E. Moore as a constructivist, because of his influence on the Bloomsbury set (p. 58), ignores the argument of Principia Ethica. Moore contends in that work that because in practice the consequences of a break with custom are impossible to calculate, one ought almost always to adhere to the rules in force in society. This “constructivist” argues in a very “Hayekian” manner.
Hayek’s view of morality as traditional makes up the second part of the book’s argument. But a deeper question yet remains. If traditional morality has arrived at the “right” rules to maintain the market economy in being, then, Hayek argues, one ought to prefer it to constructivism. But how has tradition achieved the remarkable feat of coming up with the correct values? The proper understanding of the way the market works is, after all, a discovery of modern economics, not part of the inherited wisdom of the past.
No doubt American society today differs greatly from eighteenth-century America and has in that sense evolved. But this hardly shows that evolution, in the sense of the partial or total replacement of one society by others better “fitted” to survive, has taken place.
Hayek finds the answer in evolution. According to modern biology, animals evolve by means of natural selection. Those animals better able to reproduce than their competitors gradually supplant them. The result, given sufficient time, is the development of a new species; as the process goes on, greater and greater differences will develop.
Human beings, Hayek thinks, still stand under the rule of natural selection. Cultural adaptation has however replaced biological change as the “subject” on which natural selection operates. Societies capable of supporting large populations will “win out” against those that cannot. Since the extended order is the society able to support more growth in population than any other, this system, and the moral rules upon which its existence depends, has risen to preeminence in the contemporary world. It is natural selection, then, that explains how tradition has come up with the proper rules.
Hayek discusses in a valuable and insightful way the benefits of population growth and the errors of the Malthusian theory of population (pp. 122 ff.). His account of social evolution, however, fails badly. He does not show, in the first place, that societies compete with each other for survival in a way like that of animals according to Darwinian theory.
Hayek’s understanding of biological evolution also seems questionable. Evolutionary change takes place through animals with ‘superior’ adaptations leaving more descendants than their competitors. It isn’t a case of the “more animals, the better”: it is differential reproduction, not absolute numbers, that determines evolutionary success.
No doubt American society today differs greatly from eighteenth-century America and has in that sense evolved. But this hardly shows that evolution, in the sense of the partial or total replacement of one society by others better “fitted” to survive, has taken place.
Also, it does not follow from the fact that a market economy can support more people at a higher standard of prosperity than any other type of system that a society with a large population needs to have a market economy. What about Russia and China?
Though I disagree with substantial parts of Hayek’s argument, his book seems to me deserving of very careful study. A reader will gain from it an understanding of how the world looks to a thinker of rare originality and power.