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Hayek's Constitution of Liberty: Ethical Basis of the Juridical Framework of Individual Liberty - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, Winter 1982, vol. 5, No. 4 [1982]

Edition used:

Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Hayek's Constitution of Liberty: Ethical Basis of the Juridical Framework of Individual Liberty

Clarifying Hayek's Moral Theory

Given that we recognize governmental intervention to be the greatest subverter of spontaneous order in the realm of economic exchange, what legal framework is to be adopted for the regulation of economic life? Here we come to one of the most fascinating and controversial of Hayek's contributions to social philosophy, his account of individual liberty under the rule of law. Before we can address ourselves to some of the problems surrounding Hayek's contribution to philosophical jurisprudence, however, a few words must be said about Hayek's moral theory, since few aspects of Hayek's work are so often misunderstood. Hayek has been characterized as a moral relativist, an exponent of evolutionary ethics and, less implausibly but nonetheless incorrectly, as a rule-utilitarian. Let us see if we can dissipate the confusion.

In the first place, moral life for Hayek is itself a manifestation of spontaneous order. Like language and law, morality emerged undesigned from the life of men with one another: it is so much bound up with human life, indeed, as to be partly constitutive of it. The maxims of morality, then, in no way presuppose an authority, human or divine, from which they emanate, and they antedate the institutions of the state. But, secondly, the detailed content of the moral conventions which spring up unplanned in society is not immutable or invariant. Moral conventions change, often slowly and almost inperceptibly, in accordance with the needs and circumstances of the men who subscribe to them. Moral conventions must (or Hayek's account of them) be seen as part of the evolving social order itself.

Now at this point it is likely that a charge of ethical relativism or evolutionism will at once be levelled against Hayek, but there is little substance to such criticisms. He has gone out of his way to distinguish his standpoint from any sort of evolutionary ethics. As he put it in his Constitution of Liberty:

It is a fact which we must recognize that even what we regard as good or beautiful is changeable—if not in any recognizable manner that would entitle us to take a relativistic position, then in the sense that in many respects we do not know what will appear as good or beautiful to another generation... It is not only in his knowledge, but also in his aims and values, that man is the creature of his civilization; in the last resort, it is the relevance of these individual wishes to the perpetuation of the group or the species that will determine whether they persist or change. It is, of course, a mistake to believe that we can draw conclusions about what our values ought to be simply because we realize that they are a product of evolution. But we cannot reasonably doubt that these values are created and altered by the same evolutionary forces that have produced our intelligence.68

Hayek's argument here, then, is manifestly not that we can invoke the trend of social evolution as a standard for the resolution of moral dilemmas, but rather that we are bound to recognize in our current moral conventions the outcome of an evolutionary process. Admittedly, inasmuch as nothing in the detailed content of our moral conventions is unchanging or unalterable, this means that we are compelled to abandon the idea that they have about them any character of universality or fixity, but this is a long way from any doctrine of moral relativism. As Hayek observes in his remarks on the ambiguity of relativism:

...our present values exist only as the elements of a particular cultural tradition and are significant only for some more or less long phase of evolution—whether this phase includes some of our pre-human ancestors or is confined to certain periods of human civilization. We have no more ground to ascribe to them eternal existence than to human race itself. There is thus one possible sense in which we may legitimately regard human values as relative and speak of the probability of their further evolution.

But it is a far cry from this general insight to the claims of the ethical, cultural or historical relativists or of evolutionary ethics. To put it crudely, while we know that all these values are relative to something, we do not know to what they are relative. We may be able to indicate the general class of circumstances which have made them what they are, but we do not know the particular conditions to which the values we hold are due, or what our values would be if those circumstances had been different. Most of the illegitimate conclusions are the result of erroneous interpretation of the theory of evolution as the empirical establishment of a trend. Once we recognize that it gives us no more than a scheme of explanation which might be sufficient to explain particular phenomena if we knew all the facts which have operated in the course of history, it becomes evident that the claims of the various kinds of relativists (and of evolutionary ethics) are unfounded.69

Hume's Influence on Hayek's Social Philosophy

Hayek does not, then subscribe to any sort of ethical relativism or evolutionism, but it is not altogether clear from these statements if he thinks humanity's changing moral conventions have in fact any invariant core or constant content. In order to consider this last question, and to attain a better general understanding of Hayek's conception of morality, we need to look at his debts to David Hume, whose influence upon Hayek's moral and political philosophy is ubiquitous and profound.

Hayek follows Hume in supposing that, in virtue of certain general facts about the human predicament, the moral conventions which spring up spontaneously among men all have certain features in common or (in other words) exhibit some shared principles. Among the general facts that Hume mentions in his Treatise, and which Hayek cites in “The Legal and Political Philosophy of David Hume” (in B-13), are men's limited generosity and intellectual imperfection and the unalterable scarcity of the means of satisfying human needs. As Hayek puts it succinctly: “It is thus the nature of the(se) circumstances, what Hume calls ‘the necessity of human society,’ that gives rise to the ‘three fundamental laws of nature’: those of ‘the stability of possessions, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises.’” And Hayek glosses this passage with a fuller citation from Hume's Treatise: “Though the rules of justice be artificial, they are not arbitrary. Nor is the expression improper to call them Laws of Nature; if by natural we understand what is common to any species, or even if we confine it to mean what is inseparable from the species.”70

Hume's three rules of justice or laws of nature, then, give a constant content to Hayek's conception of an evolving morality. They frame what the distinguished Oxford jurist, H. L. A. Hart, was illuminatingly to call “the minimum content of natural law.”71 The justification of these fundamental rules of justice, and of the detailed and changing content of the less permanent elements of morality, is (in Hayek's view as in Hume's)that they form indispensable conditions for the promotion of human welfare. There is in Hayek as in Hume, accordingly, a fundamental utilitarian committment in their theories of morality. It is a very indirect utilitarianism that they espouse, however, more akin to that of the late nineteenth-century Cambridge moralist Henry Sidgwick72 (1838–1900) than it is to Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill. The utilitarian component of Hayek's conception of morality is indirect in that it is never supposed by him that we ought or could invoke a utilitarian principle in order to settle practical questions: for, given the great partiality and fallibility of our understanding, we are in general better advised to follow the code of behavior accepted in our own society. That code can, in turn, Hayek believes, never properly be the subject of a rationalist reconstruction in Benthamite fashion, but only reformed piecemeal and slowly. In repudiating the claims that utilitarian principles can govern specific actions and that utility may yield new social rules, Hayek shows himself to be an indirect or system utilitarian, for whom the proper role of utility is not prescriptive or practical but rather as a standard of evaluation for the assessment of whole systems of rules.

Hayek's Utilitarianism & Liberty

Again however, Hayek's utilitarian outlook is distinctive in that he explicitly repudiates any hedonistic conception of the content of utility itself.73 How, then, does he understand utilitarian welfare? Just how are we to assess different systems of rules in regard to their welfare-promoting effects? Here Hayek comes close to modern preference utilitarianism, but gives that view an original formulation, in arguing that the test of any system of rules is whether it maximizes an anonymous individual's chance of achieving his unknown purposes.74 In Hayek's conception, we are not bound to accept the historical body of social rules just as we find it: it may be reformed in order to improve the chances of the unknown man's achieving his goals. It will be seen that this is a maximizing conception, but not one that represents utility as a sort of neutral stuff, a container of intrinsic value whose magnitude may vary. Indeed, in taking as the point of comparison an hypothesized unknown individual, Hayek's conception (as he recognizes75 ) parallels John Rawls’ model of rational choice behind a veil of ignorance as presented in Rawls’ Theory of Justice.

Mention of Rawls’ contractarian derivation of principles of justice at once raises the question of how Hayek's indirect or system utilitarian argument is supposed to ground the rules of justice he defends, and, in particular, how Hayek's defense of the priority of liberty squares with his utilitarian outlook.

Several observations are apposite here. First, Hayek undoubtedly follows Hume in believing that, because they constitute an indispensable condition for the promotion of general welfare, the rules of justice are bound to take priority over any specific claim to welfare. Again, it is to be noted that Hume's second rule of justice, the transference of property by consent, itself frames a protected domain and so promotes individual liberty. Finally, Hayek argues forcefully that, if individuals are to be free to use their own knowledge and resources to best advantage, they must do so in a context of known and predictable rules governed by law. It is in a framework of liberty under the rule of law, Hayek contends, that justice and general welfare are both served. Indeed, under the rule of law, justice and the general welfare are convergent and not conflicting goals or values.

[68.] Hayek, µB-12Õ, The Constitution of Liberty, pp. 35-6.

[69.] Hayek, µB-13Õ, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, p. 38.

[70.] Hayek, µB-13Õ, Studies, p. 113. Hayek acknowledges earlier in his Hume essay (p. 109, note 5: “My attention was first directed to these parts of Hume's works many years ago by Professor Sir Arnold Plant, whose development of the Humean theory of property we are still eagerly awaiting.”) Hayek is alluding to his discussions with Sir Arnold in the early 1930s at the London School of Economics, where Hayek had migrated to take up The Tooke Professorship. See Sir Arnold Plant, “A Tribute to Hayek—The Rational Persuader.” Economic Age 2, no. 2 (January-February 1970): 4-8, especially p. 5: “I myself had returned to LSE in the middle of 1930 after six years at the University of Cape Town, where I had developed a special interest in the scope of and functions of property and ownership, both private and public. It was a delight to find Hayek as well seized of the economic significance of the ramifications of property law as I was myself. I recall his excitement when I called his attention to the profound discussion of these matters in David Hume's Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals: section III, Of Justice, and my own gratitude to him for his influence on my own thinking about so-called intellectual and industrial property law.” The entirety of Sir Arnold's article should be consulted for the light it sheds on LSE during the 30s as a seedbed for transmitting Austrian economics (One visitor described LSE as “ein Vorort von Wien”—a suburb of Vienna; Plant, p. 6). See also Hayek's important Inaugural lecture delivered at LSE March 1, 1933, “The Trend of Economic Thinking,” (A-20) and his revealing article on the history of “The London School of Economics, 1895–1945,” (A-60). During the 1940s Hayek was also editor of LSE's journal, Economica.

[71.] H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.

[72.] See, especially, Henry Sidgwick's masterpiece, The Method of Ethics, in which Sidgwick defends an indirect form of utilitarian morality.

[73.] For Hayek's criticism of the standard variety of utilitarian theory, see especially µB-16Õ, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. II, pp. 17-23.

[74.] See Hayek, µB-13Õ, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, p. 173: “An optimal policy in a catallaxy may aim, and ought to aim, at increasing the chances of any member of society taken at random of having a high income, or, what amounts to the same thing, the chance that, whatever his share in total income may be, the real equivalent of this share will be as large as we know how to make it.”

[75.] See Hayek, µB-16Õ, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. II: The Mirage of Social Justice, p. xiii, for his endorsement of some aspects of Rawls’ theory.