Didn't Hayek Make this Argument Decades Ago?

Steven Pinker writes in "The Moral Instinct," New York Times Magazine (Sunday, January 13, 2008) that our moral intuitions often run counter to the moral demands of modern society.

Comments

[Steve Horwitz]

Interesting you bring this article up, as it's sitting next to me at the moment awaiting to be read this evening.

Having read a bunch of evolutionary psychology this summer, they too make this argument. What they do, however, is take it from speculation on Hayek's part to having a basis in evolution and neuroscience. And Pinker is part of that larger movement.

So maybe Hayek did say it decades ago, but now we have both a broader and more systematic theoretical perspective to place it in plus we have some science to support it.

[Jason Briggeman]

Wow. I wonder if there were other insights in Hayek...

[Steve Horwitz]

So having read it, it's okay. It actually doesn't make the point that Pete says it does - at least not explicitly. Pinker is more concerned in showing that our moral sense is in some way universal and hardwired. I think you need the evolutionary psych perspective to get to the Pete/Hayek point, which involves recognizing that the formation of that moral sense took place in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness, in which we lived in small homogeneous groups. What "worked" morally in that context may or may not work in the anonymous Great Society.

This is where you need Hayek.

It will also appear in my family book, which I continue to work on.

[Peter Boettke]

The conflict, I think, is hinted at in his thought experiment in the beginning about Bill Gates and Mother Teresa, and his discussion of consequentialism. This is where I see the Hayek tension point coming in. We were hard wired for one set of moral principles, and yet our survival in the great society requires another. How do we overcome this tension?

What I find fascinating about all of this work ---- go back to Robert Franks "If Homoeconomicus Could Choose His Own Utility Function Would He Choose One with a Conscious?" --- is the foundational questions that are raised about moral sentiments and social order. Bowles and Ginitis are now working on these topics of moral sentiments and material interests, and Vernon Smith of course has several important things to say about this from lab settings. So we are now getting field experiments and lab experiments "testing" these ideas.

But I think if one were to look at the scholars who raised these issues at the conceptual level, you would have Smith-Hume obviously, but then it would be Mises-Hayek, and then Buchanan, and then this modern literature. I would like to see a nice history of thought paper drawing these lines and the various attempts by these thinkers to conceptually clarify the argument and the relationship to the empirical work being done now, and the evolutionary psychology and neuroscience that is emerging.

[Kyle R. McKenzie]

Tangential to what you're talking about is highlighted in the section "Juggling the Spheres". He writes, "In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible--what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother."

So maybe the important point isn't that hard wired moral principles are in conflict with the great society, but instead different rankings of universal moral principles leads to very different economic outcomes--one example being an economic system resembling the great society is present when 'fairness' trumps 'community'.

[DPrychitko]

I would also add Marx to the mix, in terms of the "evolutionary" psych perspective... a matter of ideology, moral sentiments, and so on (the "superstructure") being influenced by the material-economic conditions. Twisting Hayek's claim into Marx's language, it's as if an element of the superstructure has resisted changing to be more consistent with the capitalistic, open-society economic order.

[DPrychitko]

And to clarify, lest I be attacked like I was for my wood splitting, I'm not saying Marx's base-superstructure idea is relevant to the contemporary literature. I just meant to add his work in the same historical context as Pete's "Smith/Hume" origins.

[Roger Koppl]

Economics has something to add to evolutionary psychology. Pinker's piece is a bit light on the "two worlds" idea Hayek rightly emphasizes. We need to put the evolutionary understanding of our universal moral sense into the context of Ricardo's Law of Association. Recall that liberalism is first and foremost a theory of society, that is, a theory of the extended order. Evolutionary psychology is not. We need both. I think advances in fields such as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology will again and again strengthen the fundatmentals of liberalism, but only if we bring a specifically economic perspective to them.

[Steven Horwitz]

Actually, Roger, what evolutionary psych also needs is the notion of monetary calculation. That is more fundamental than the Law of Association per se, as we don't get that association unless people are able to engage in the calculation necessary to determine which exchanges are profitable and which are not.

Evolutionary psych, and even the sort of empirical work of Vernon Smith, can tell us WHY people are likely to want to exchange, but only monetary calculation can help us to understand WHICH exchanges they will make and why exchange in general tends to be successful in generating social order via the Law of Association.

I have a piece coming out in the APEE journal that makes this argument. You can find a PDF of the manuscript here:

http://myslu.stlawu.edu/~shorwitz/Papers/Calculation%20Anonymity.pdf

[Grant]

Dr. Horwitz,

Its been a while since I've read anything on evolutionary psych, but doesn't it deal with evolved memes as well as genes? It seems a stretch to try to explain too many of our moral values in terms of genetic hard-wiring, when so many cultures have values which are completely at odds with other culture's. I can certainly see that a lot of value of family and friends is likely hard-coded, but beyond that, it seems like memes allow for a wide range of other ethics.

[Steve Horwitz]

It does Grant. But it does argue that there are certain, to use Hayek's phrase, "moral instincts" that we have that are the result of our brains taking shape in a particular historical environment. We can overcome those instincts (i.e., memes matter) but we have to recognize that they are there if we want to understand human behavior.

[Mike Giberson]

In response to Grant I would add that Pinker does address the question of how the variety of moral systems that are observed can emerge even if relatively few basic moral instincts are hard wired. Pinker suggests that cultural practices influence the relative priority of the different basic moral instincts within any particular society.

[PrestoPundit]

Pinker now and again footnotes Hayek on moral theory, so he's read at least a bit of it. Who knows what or which parts left traces in his brain.

[PrestoPundit]

Recall that Hayek's own account of this tension seems to have grown out of his development of the influential work of Ferdinand Toennies and his distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (no doubt filtered through Wieser, Menger and Mises, among others).

[PrestoPundit]

Sorrry, spell that Ferdinand Tönnies.

[Matt Zwolinski]

I've been thinking a bit about the role of evolution in Hayek, but I'm sure you folks have given it much more and more careful thought than I. One thing that's been puzzling me is the question of when an evolutionary process confers a kind of justification on its output.

So, there's one strand in Hayek that looks somewhat conservative in a Burkean sense. This is the strand that stresses the limits of human reason and argues that our attempts to devise principles of social justice or economic order from whole cloth are likely to fail due to lack of knowledge, and that we would be better to trust those principles that have evolved over time because they reflect the wisdom of past generations. Perhaps I'm being a bit loose in speaking about evolved 'principles' here. Burke certainly does apply this kind of argument to moral principles, but for Hayek this argument seems mostly to apply to institutions (and maybe institutional principles?). Evolution, in this aspect of Hayek, seems to provide a kind of procedural justification for institutions that gives us reason to have confidence in them even when we lack a substantive justification for them - I don't know *why* it's a good institution, but the fact that it emerged from this sort of process makes me believe that it *is* good.

Then there's Hayek a la Fatal Conceit where, somewhat surprisingly, evolution seems to play precisely the *opposite* role. The fact that principels of social justice are the product of an evolutionary process the formative steps of which occured in a very different social context is meant to *undermine* our faith in them. This, actually, is the line that Josh Greene (one of the authors cited in the Pinker piece) takes, though for a very different purpose (viz. undermining deontology and supporting consequentialism).

So what happened? My hunch is that the Hayekian answer has to be that whether evolution confers a kind of prima facie justification on its products has to be a function of the context in which the evolution occured. Log-rolling and the 'rules' associated with it in legislatures are evolved outcomes, but they're not desirable and part of the reason why is that they evolve from coerced exchanges. One of the things a more fully worked out theory of social evolution would do, then, would be to tell us more clearly what sort of features undermine the justificatory power of an evolutionary process (coercion? rapid and radical social change?), and what sort contribute to it.

Any thoughts? Am I getting my Hayek right here?

[Steven Horwitz]

Briefly Matt, I think you have Hayek right. Hayek is quite clear that evolution per se justifies nothing, but can explain a lot. The later Hayek is just recognizing that there is a tension between our evolved moral dispositions, which are the result of millenia of social and biological evolution in an environment very different from our own, and the moral rules required for modern (evolved!) social institutions to function well.

We have evolved social institutions and practices in our own time that are highly functional in the Great Society but require us to override the long-evolved rules that lie in the very structure of our brains/minds. So the institutions and practices that evolved in more recent times are good not because they are evolved per se, but because they work. The evolved moral dispositions have to be overcome, not because they evolved and are good or bad, but because they are not functional in a different context.

Does that help?

[wintervssummer]

I very much love summer :)
Someone very much loves winter :(
I Wish to know whom more :)
For what you love winter?
For what you love summer? Let's argue :)