Posted By Mark Amagi on March 2, 2010
“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way people would like the world to work – whereas economics represents the way it actually does work” (Levitt & Dubner, Freakonomics, p. 11).
In Law Legistlation, and Liberty: The Mirage of Social Justice (Vol. 2, University of Chicago Press, 1976), Friedrich Hayek explores the concept of “social justice” or distributive justice, which he finds wanting and destructive of any real understanding of justice. Due to its complexity, it is difficult to do justice to Hayek’s argument against the political application of the concept of social justice in a brief article, but attempt to do so I will. Hayek begins his argument by contrasting the difference between a general rule (as in the Rule of Law) and the public interest, which he defines as a collection of private interests or majority rule. The former must be universally applicable to all citizens, whereas the latter merely implements the preferences of the majority. For example, today American citizens commonly think that the Supreme Court should reach decisions that coincide with the opinions of the majority of the voting public, a view which is reflected in the philosophy of judicial activism and the idea that the Constitution is a “living document” that must reflect the current mores of the citizenry. Thus, when deciding upon such cases as abortion and affirmative action, the Supreme Court begins to take on the duties of a legislative body, handing down “progressive” decisions in line with contemporary morality, whereas according to the intent of the Founders, the Supreme Court was supposed to only determine whether legislative acts were Constitutional or not and the unenumerated powers to enact social policy were to be the venue of the state legislatures. The Founding Fathers did not consider it to be the Supreme Court’s role to act as a legislative body, reflecting the will of the majority (or in the above cases, an elitist and powerful minority). As James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper, No. 10, “Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”
In Hayek’s view, justice in the Open Society concerned “rules of just conduct,” which he defined as “those end-independent rules which serve the formation of a spontaneous order, in contrast to the end-dependent rules of organization” (p. 31). In other words, in a free society that is not planned and controlled by a central authority, the rules must be fair and equally applicable to all, as in a baseball game, and not be directed towards a preferred outcome, as in picking winners and losers. This is the exact opposite, for example, of the tenets of affirmative action or outcome based education, however compensatory those policies might be.
In Hayek’s terminology, the free market is one of the primary examples of a spontaneous order, an order that comes about due to millions of small decisions by those engaged in market activities. As he’s argued in previous works, Hayek described the spontaneous order of the free market as preferable, and more efficient, than the command economies of socialism because of the knowledge problem: A small elite of government planners can never have sufficient information to plan an economy more efficiently than the independent decisions of millions of market actors, stating their preferences in terms of the prices and wages they are willing to pay for goods and services. But efficiency is not the only reason that Hayek prefers the spontaneous order of the free market to the planned economy: Freedom is also at issue, and “Freedom means that in some measure we entrust our fate to forces we do not control” (p. 30). I might add that contrary to the hubris of our current government, climate is also one of those “forces we do not control,” and efforts to control the climate, such as Cap and Trade legislation, appear to this writer to be transparent attempts to control the economy rather than for the ostensible objective of controlling the climate.
In contrast to the “end-independent rules” of the spontaneous order of the market, when Hayek refers to the “end-dependent rules of organization,” he’s referring to any organization, generally hierarchical in nature, such as a company or a governmental entity that has a common end or purpose. The problem with end-dependent rules as a standard in a free and open society is that not everyone in such a pluralistic society shares the same ends. The focus of the end-independent rules of a spontaneous order is to make sure that everyone plays by the same rules, not to guarantee outcomes. While obviously not everyone has the same start in life, in Hayek’s opinion, if government attempts to compensate the less fortunate by picking winners and losers, the rules of the game are no longer impartial and universalizable. When the rules are no longer applicable universally to all citizens, decision-making power resorts to the arbitrary and subjective preferences of the rulers, such as in the case of a command economy. On the other hand, Hayek’s view does not preclude charity, or even occasional government assistance to the poor, but it does prohibit massive government programs designed to assist certain preferred populations to the exclusion of others.
Hayek argues further that “’social’ or ‘distributive’ justice is . . . meaningless within a spontaneous order and has meaning only within an organization [or planned order]” (p. 33). This is because “only human conduct can be called just or unjust” (p. 31), or as he stated subsequently, “To speak of justice always implies that some person or persons ought, or ought not, to have performed some action” (p. 33). And while “Society has . . . become the new deity to which we complain and clamour for redress,” in such a case, “There is no individual and no cooperating group of people against which the sufferer would have a just complaint” (p. 69). The spontaneous order of the free market is by definition, not brought about by any planned organized strategy. To the extent that the market is characterized by collusion between government and business as in monopoly capitalism, it is no longer a free market or a spontaneous order. Additionally, there is no society in the social component of “social justice” that acts justly or unjustly because society does not act in unison in such a way that its acts could be judged in the same way that an individual’s actions can be judged just or unjust, or as Hayek put it:
[T]he demand for ‘social justice’ is addressed not to the individual but to society – yet society, in the strict sense in which it must be distinguished from the apparatus of government, is incapable of acting for a specific purpose, and the demand for ‘social justice’ therefore becomes a demand that the members of society should organize themselves in a manner which makes it possible to assign particular shares of the product of society to particular individuals or groups. The primary question then becomes whether there exists a moral duty to submit to a power which can co-ordinate the efforts of the members of society with the aim of achieving a particular pattern of distribution regarded as just” (p. 64).
The result, of course, would be a planned economy, managed by government bureaucrats with the power to pick winners and losers, or to distribute goods and services equally to all members of society, regardless of their contribution. Hayek wrote, “While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers” (p. 83). Such systems have already been implemented and failed miserably, in the Soviet Union, East Germany, China, and Cuba. While it would have to be admitted that the apportionment of goods and services by the market, without government intervention, may appear to be unjust due to the manifest inequality, this distribution cannot be considered unjust in any meaningful sense of the word because it is not “the result of a deliberate allocation to particular people” (Ibid.). And while there are no examples of a strictly free market economy today, it can certainly be argued that at least the mixed capitalist economies of the West have been far more efficient in raising the living standards of the poor and working classes, than the more egalitarian societies cited above, despite inequalities in income and wealth.
At the core of Hayek’s concept of justice is the idea that coercion by government should be at a minimum, and thus he defines justice in negative terms: The law and government’s power of coercion should only be used to prevent or punish one for transgressions against the person or property of another. While according to Hayek, the aim of legal positivists or socialists is “to make coercion in the service of any particular purposes or special interests . . . legitimate,” in his view “coercion is legitimate only if it is applied in the enforcement of universal rules of just conduct equally applicable to all citizens” (p. 50). Hayek was critical of Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” because they included “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear,” reflective of a positive definition of justice, guaranteeing benefits that a government could not grant without an immense expansion of coercive power. As Hayek observed, this notion of Roosevelt’s was later embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, an attempt “to fuse the rights of the Western liberal tradition with the altogether different conception deriving from the Marxist Russian Revolution” (p. 103).
For the contemporary reader of Hayek, it is essential to keep in mind the context of Hayek’s writings in the first half of the twentieth century, which was an era when socialism, communism, and other forms of statism were ascendant, and free market economics and libertarian politics were on the wane. But while economic Marxism is now in decline, other forms of cultural Marxism such as Political Correctness and Multiculturalism are now ascendant. Considering that he wrote before the era of Multiculturalism, Hayek was rather prescient in equating social justice with an atavistic return of the mores of tribal society: “The demand for ‘social justice’ is indeed an expression of the tribal spirit against the abstract requirements of the coherence of the Great Society [Hayek uses the term synonymously with Popper’s phrase, the Open Society] with no such visible common purpose” (p. 144). It is possible that he was influenced here by Bertrand de Jouvenel, whom he cites as arguing in Sovereignty (London & Chicago, 1957) that although “small [tribal] society” exercises an “infinite attraction” for modern man (as I would insert here, the nostalgia for simpler times), “any attempt to graft the same features on a large society is utopian and leads to tyranny” (Hayek, p. 191n. 15). De Jouvenel added that Rousseau, the author of the concept of the “noble savage,” was in agreement that primitive social forms could not be grafted onto modern civilizations, but rather, as de Jouvenel wrote, Rousseau’s purpose was “to check, if possible, the progress of those whom smallness and situation had preserved from the same headlong rush to the perfection of society and the deterioration of the species” (Ibid.). John Fonte, in a 1997 National Review article makes similar claims about the tribal loyalties of Multiculturalism:
Liberal democracy and liberal democratic nationalism are phenomena of the modern age, whereas the alternative progressive vision smacks of the pre-modern and post-modern. Instead of individual rights and national citizenship there is an emphasis on group rights and multiculturalism; instead of majority rule there is proportional representation for ascribed groups; instead of patriotic affection for one’s own nation, multiple loyalties to subnational and supranational groups are emphasized.
Group rights and the group identity politics of multiculturalism indeed tend to splinter the Open Society into tribal ethnic, racial, and gender groups, all vying for special preferences from a paternalistic and all-powerful central government. Hayek called the ideal of social justice “an atavism, a vain attempt to impose upon the Open Society the morals of the tribal society,” which would not only destroy the former, but “would also greatly threaten the survival” of the large populations made sustainable by 300 years of economic growth and development, made possible by the market order (p. 147).
Hayek also cites de Jouvenel’s The Ethics of Redistribution (Cambridge, 1952), which prior to his own work, was the classic in the field of libertarian critiques of social or distributive justice. One of de Jouvenal’s main arguments against redistribution is the factual observation that contrary to its stated aim to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, its actual result is “a redistribution of power from the individual to the state” (p. 72). He also seems to echo Burnham’s theory of the Managerial Elite and presage “New Class” theory when he argues that centralization of power in the hands of a new managerial class is a consequence of the ethics of redistribution: “This results in a transfer of power from individuals to officials, who tend to constitute a new ruling class as against that which is being destroyed” (p. 77). Thus, both Hayek and de Jouvenel agreed that one of the main effects of the application of social justice theory would be an expansion of government power to the detriment of individual power and freedom. It may do us well to remember that when the activists of the left seek to replace the codes of individual responsibility and morality with the cries and demands for social responsibility and justice, the end result tends to be that standards of personal conduct and behavior erode and decline, while the power of government to interfere in our daily lives expands enormously. It takes little imagination to realize that our massive government spending and accumulated National Debt, which has mortgaged the futures of our progeny, is actually reflective of this ethical paradigm shift from individual responsibility to social justice.
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Category: Political philosophy, Socialism, liberalism, libertarianism |
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Tags: Government, Hayek, liberalism, Marxism, Socialism
