Tag Archives: moral philosophy

Morals and the Free Society: 6. Hayek

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Here is the sixth chunk of the argument. To return to the fifth chunk, click here. To advance to the seventh chunk, click here. The complete essay is posted here. An Addendum to the present chunk, on cultural group selection theory, is posted here.

Nozick’s is a split view. There is the morality of the side constraints, and there is the egoistic morality of the market, and they have essentially nothing to do with each other. From the perspective of either, there is no intrinsic reason to care about the other. A similar critique ultimately applies to Hayek’s otherwise very interesting take on a moral vision for a free society in The Fatal Conceit (1988).

Hayek believes human behavior is structured in three tiers. The lowest tier is instinctual and includes genetically supported behavioral patterns and impulses that evolved over the thousands of years of our hunter-gatherer prehistory. The second tier is that of culture. Cultural customs, traditions, mores, and practices are transmitted through social learning. They evolved through a blind, quasi-Darwinian process of relatively random variation and selection through the success or failure of those who adopt them. They are not the product of reason. Reason itself, which is the third tier, is a late product of this process of cultural evolution. It enables us to consciously and critically evaluate evidence, hypotheses, and proposals. It is the only self-aware capacity of the three, but it is a very weak instrument. It is almost entirely incapable of grasping the reasons or justification or purposes of our actions or of predicting their effects. Hayek believes reason across the board is highly overrated. It serves mostly as a source of post hoc rationalizations of our behavior. One should not trust reason, whether theoretical or practical, very far at all. (The hostility to reason betrayed in this book is stunning. But further discussion of this point is a topic for another time.)

The different tiers are the source of different and sometimes conflicting behavioral imperatives, particularly “moral” imperatives. Continue reading →

Morals and the Free Society: 5. Nozick

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Here is the fifth chunk of the argument. To return to the fourth chunk, click here. To advance to the sixth chunk, click here. The complete essay is posted here.

 

Resolving the Contradiction

A satisfactory moral vision for a free society cannot be a schizophrenic opposition of moral directives. Yet that’s where we’ve been led by our investigation of the moral implications of the economic theory of the free market. How can these conflicting directives—to constrain our pursuit of our own utility for the sake of the free market as a whole, but also to pursue our own utility egoistically—be reconciled into a consistent moral picture?

To investigate this problem, it will be useful to survey some attempts to provide some sort of morals for the free society.

Nozick

Nozick (1974) speaks of the moral rules that bring the free market into existence as “side constraints.” The idea is that one maximally pursues one’s own goals in a state of unconcern for the goals others, while at the same time observing a set of extraneous, more or less absolute restrictions on one’s range of action. You pursue your own goals however possible, except that you aren’t allowed to kill or maim anyone, rob people, defraud them, etc. The constraints are called “rights,” and they are conceived as prohibitions on allowed action that stand completely outside the order of ends or utilities. According to Nozick, the source of rights is that “individuals are inviolable” (1974, 31). “Why?” asks the market egoist. “Why should I care about other individuals?” Nozick: “Because Kant.”

So there are rights, which appear as a set of rules separate from the rest of life, and there’s the rest of life, which can supply no intrinsic motivation to respect rights.

This is obviously no solution. It is just a reaffirmation of the very schizophrenia we want to escape. It sets rights and market behavior in opposition, the selfless versus the selfish, with the irony that the selfless observance of rights exists to create the selfish market. It invites people to think of the market as something that does not reward and even punishes rights-respecting behavior, and to think of rights-respecting behavior as something it’s better to get others to do while avoiding for themselves. In addition, it treats rights as the only source of moral constraint on the pursuit of one’s own goals. Now, perhaps the bare observance of rights is enough to secure “liberty.” But we have seen that a perfectly efficient market, which optimizes the outcomes of all, requires the elimination of all transactions costs and therefore requires adherence to mores of behavior, such as candor and fair-mindedness and forgivingness, that go well beyond the bare observance of rights.

Work Cited

  • Nozick, Robert. 1974. <em>Anarchy, State, and Utopia</em>. Basic Books.

Morals and the Free Society: 4. The Moral Contradiction of the Free Society

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Here is the fourth chunk of the argument. To return to the third chunk, click here. To advance to the fifth chunk, click here. The complete essay is posted here.

We have arrived at a peculiar situation. For the free market to exist at all requires that people adhere to certain moral principles that constrain their pursuit of their own utility, such as respect for property rights and the principle of noncoercion. And these minimal principles aren’t sufficient for a perfectly efficient free market (one that satisfies the conditions for perfect competition), only for a modestly efficient free market. Of course, no market will exhibit perfect efficiency, but efficiency will improve the more open, honest, probative, loyal, forthcoming, fair-minded, and so forth that people are, again at the expense of their pursuit of their own utility. And this generates the apparent paradox that people must be community-spirited in order to set the stage for them to be selfish!

So, what is the message here? Are people supposed to be egoists or not? In the purely competitive market, people are supposed to follow only one principle: egoistic utility maximization. But for such a market to exist, even approximately, people have to follow certain “moral” principles—principles of good behavior distinct from egoistic utility maximization and that often conflicts with egoistic utility maximization.

To be clear: The problem is not that the free society seems to require two different sorts of moral principles. It’s that the different sorts of moral principles conflict, and no rationale is provided for resolving the conflict. We have seen that the egoistic utility maximizer has no reason to forego his own utility to promote an efficient free market (or any free market) where this can be avoided. On the flip side, it’s at least ironic to insist on “moral” rules to create an egoistic free-for-all. Why should people care about nonegoistic constraints on the pursuit of their own utility if their observance is only in the service of egoism?

That a social order should require devotion to principles that sometimes require individuals to restrain their pursuit of their own utility is hardly very surprising or problematic. It’s the mixed message that is the problem. It’s that we demand that people care about the rights of others and simultaneously embrace as their moral vision egoistic utility maximization. On the one hand, we’re supposed to care about community-spirited values; on the other hand, we’re supposed to care only about our own benefit. The problem is to reconcile these two directives.