Friday, December 2, 2011

Hayek on Social Evolution

This is a lecture by Hayek on social evolution of morality and social norms given in 1983 at George Mason University. More on the lecture can be read here. Hayek is introduced by Karen Vaughn, no less.

And, no, I have not converted to Austrian economics: this is of scholarly and historical interest to me. Furthermore, I do not buy the excessive emphasis by Hayek on unplanned, emergent processes in social, moral, legal and economic life. There is, and always has been, a great deal of planning and conscious design. Let me take one example: the Christian religion is fundamental to Western civilisation. How was it established as the offical religion of the Roman empire? The reason is that emperors decided to adopt it first as the state-sponsored religion (by Constantine) and later as the official religion by active violence and persecution of pagan religions and philosophies, which culminated in the anti-pagan decrees of the emperor Theodosius I (for a critical discussion of this repression, see Cameron 2011: 68-74). Christianity, as the religion of the West and with all of its moral influences, was established by conscious design, not by unplanned, emergent processes.

The conscious, planning, designing mind is one of the fundamental traits of our species. But I would say of course that many of our innate moral intuitions are the product of our evolution (cf. Hayek’s remarks from 20.21), as well as social and cultural influences.

At 46.14 onwards, I note that Hayek badly misunderstands the work of Richard Dawkins on social evolution and the idea of the meme.





BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cameron, A. 2011. The Last Pagans of Rome, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

12 comments:

  1. Arguing about "planning" is often just as useless as arguing about "rationality".

    I agree with you completely - we are a planning species. Our emergent orders reflect that. The libertarian mistake is to make the over-arching plan that we should not plan; their mistake is in supposing that the plans we lay our not part of the evolutionary process.

    What Hayek is right to focus on in the breadth of his work is thinking about what we can plan and what we can't plan as individual minds. When we can't plan something as individual minds, the question becomes "how are we to address the problem?". In most cases, markets provide the best solution we have for the reasons that Hayek (and many, many others) have propounded on. But we are also very familiar with conditions under which markets are a weaker response. The market may not be the answer in these cases, but Hayek's insights still apply: solve the problems by utilizing dispersed knowledge, rather than relying on a single mind. This means decentralized democracy. Implicit in decentralization is a limit on the exercise of power by any group of representatives: in other words, constitutional limitations on government.

    All of this is fine.

    What's not fine is taking the limitations of a single mind and translating that as "all progress is serendipitous - we don't plan" or "all government is the bad planning and all markets are the good planning". Some people are more guilty of concluding these things than others are.

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  2. So Lord Keynes, you still believe that Brady's criticism of Hayek's dispersal of knowledge concept still holds?

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  3. The view that fundmamental information required for the success of investment done now does not yet exist and will be created in the future seems perfectly correct. In that sense, the relevent information is not merely dispersed now throughout many individuals.

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  4. Daniel:

    I agree with you completely - we are a planning species. Our emergent orders reflect that. The libertarian mistake is to make the over-arching plan that we should not plan; their mistake is in supposing that the plans we lay our not part of the evolutionary process.

    You are conflating government planning with planning as such, as if government has a monopoly on planning.

    The anti-libertarian mistake is to presume that planning requires coercive state planning, and that individual-based, voluntary planning is somehow not planning.

    In a free society, INDIVIDUALS are free to make their own plans, and their individual plans can coordinate with other individual plans. You're ignoring voluntary, peaceful based planning by sovereign individuals.

    It's a straw man to claim that libertarians believe that "we" should not plan. Libertarian DO believe that "we" should plan, but the "we" is composed of free individuals making their own plans with other free individuals. Libertarians want planning, just NON-VIOLENT planning.

    You can disagree with voluntary, peaceful planning if you want, but you are wrong to claim that only government can plan, and you are wrong to claim that libertarians don't want "us" to plan.

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  5. The view that fundmamental information required for the success of investment done now does not yet exist and will be created in the future seems perfectly correct. In that sense, the relevent information is not merely dispersed now throughout many individuals.

    The only information that is applicable to man is that which is known now via dispersion. Future information that is not yet known is formed into expectations, and those expectations are also dispersed. Individuals do not all have the same expectations, which is why you are right to reject rational expectations.

    But by saying "the relevant information is not merely dispersed now throughout many individuals" all you are really saying is that there exists information not yet known to man, but can potentially be known in the future, also in a dispersed fashion. Information is learned by some individuals first, then some is spread from those who know to those who don't know, some is kept secret, and some is forgotten/lost. There is no information about the external world that is known by everyone. Even something as banal as the law of gravity, is not yet known by at least some people in the world. The only thing that is known by everyone are the fundamental logical categories of human thought which cannot be avoided by consciousness.

    There is, and always has been, a great deal of planning and conscious design.

    Hayek doesn't deny conscious planning. He just made explicit the many unplanned aggregate social phenomena that arise in human life, which greatly affect people's lives and hence "the economy." For example, money was not planned. Nobody say down one day and invented money. Money was an emergent spontaneous phenomena. Another good example is the internet.

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  6. 1/2

    The conscious, planning, designing mind is one of the fundamental traits of our species. But I would say of course that many of our innate moral intuitions are the product of our evolution (cf. Hayek’s remarks from 20.21), as well as social and cultural influences.

    While many people adhere to a morality the roots of which can be traced back to evolution, as well as cultural and environmental conditioning, for all cases, the individual must choose to adopt it instead of reject it. Choice and valuation is the ultimate arbiter.

    One's morality is not constrained to past evolution or even to one's cultural environment. This is why you see individuals who hold moralities different from what evolution and cultural conditioning would suggest they "should" have or would have.

    All individuals, in my view, are in principle capable of both adopting and rejecting any moral code. After all, a morality is not what we do, it is what we ought to do. No matter what people do, we can always separate that from what people ought to do, and there may be overlap, or not.

    Rationalists like me hold that there is a single moral code that is most consistent with human life as it is through time, taking into account all the complexities and varieties of human life, and establishing boundaries of separating that which is conducive to human life and well being, and that which is not conducive to human life and well being. This is because humans are contingent and temporal, not immortal and eternal. Thus we can at least know that we can rule out certain moral codes as impossible for human life, and therein resides the boundaries for our reasoning.

    For example, an ethic of murder is less consistent with human life compared to an ethic of no murder. This is because if we talk of an ethic for human life, then it is presupposed that human life must at least exist. If human life does not exist, then any human ethic, let alone one of murder or no murder, would be impossible. Since humans would cease to exist through practising an ethic of murder, and since we cannot conclusively rule out the possibility of human life through an ethic of no murder, then we are logically compelled to conclude that we can know that "no murder" is an irrefutable morality for human life.

    This is how I build a moral code for human life. I learn what we are, then I rule out what is impossible given what we are, and then hope that there exists an exhaustive contrapositive to each impossibility that is the only other conceivable option. That one must be the right one.

    When this is done, what I found is that the moral code I end up with as the only logically conceivable moral code, is what many call "libertarianism", specifically "anarcho-capitalism."

    I found that every other moral code either contradicts what can be known about human life, or starts with what can be known, but then makes logical errors through the reasoning process.

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  7. 2/2


    Please note that I am fully aware of the is-ought dichotomy. I am not attempting to claim that ought logically follows from what is. I start and stay in the "is" realm, and within that realm, I see what cannot be logically advanced due to contradictions or logical missteps. To cover my bases, I also considered the possible criticism of "OK, let's suppose your moral code is the most logical one out of all others. But you're still making an is-ought argument. For why should humans adhere to the most logical morality? Who are you to say that others cannot adhere to moralities that you say are not logically consistent? Aren't you just saying that you believe the morality should be a logical one, instead of one that people want for some other reason, and thus begging the question?"

    To answer THIS question, I respond by saying that this criticism, indeed ALL criticisms, necessarily depend on logic, and thus cannot be advanced without contradicting itself. For if a non-logical morality were possible, then at minimum, it should be possible to criticize the logical morality, without using logic in one's own moralizing.

    I mean, if I say to you "you're wrong in claiming that my argument is wrong, because there is no such thing as 'wrong' arguments", then I would be speaking nonsense. I would be saying something that contradicts the constraints the statement itself argues. "These words in this sentence are not a communication nor an argument" is another example. "I cannot make an argument" is yet another. And so on.

    So I treat ALL those who attempt to refute the logical morality to me as necessarily contradicting themselves. They necessarily must constrain their communication to me to the limits of basic rules of logic in their arguments, if those arguments are going to even make sense to me. If you are providing a moral code to me, then you must do so using meaningful communication that at least makes sense, meaning, it must at least be constrained to the rules of logic. If your communication is not so constrained, then you can't even call your sounds or symbols a refutation of the moral code I am eliciting.

    I have yet to see anyone who has proven the above wrong.

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  8. Hoppe exposes Hayek's confusions regarding "social evolution" here:

    https://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/R71_3.PDF

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  9. "For example, money was not planned. Nobody say down one day and invented money."

    Money in what sense? The standardised coinages of ancient civilizations were the result of state planning. Even credit money in anicent Babylonia entailedocmplex record keeping and "planning" of debts and credits, etc.

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  10. "Since humans would cease to exist through practising an ethic of murder, and since we cannot conclusively rule out the possibility of human life through an ethic of no murder, then we are logically compelled to conclude that we can know that "no murder" is an irrefutable morality for human life."

    That is clear consequentialist ethical reasoning.

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  11. "OK, let's suppose your moral code is the most logical one out of all others. But you're still making an is-ought argument."

    An imaginary argument you would have with yourself. Your consequentialist critic would reject the view that you have "most logical one out of all others" to begin with. Rather, it is one that lacks any convincing justification.

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  12. Hayek's "spontaneous order" versus "designed order" is a typical false dichotomy that obscures the reality of evolutionary systems. Evolutionary systems develop due to accretion (among other things.) Take for example his claim 'We have never designed our economic system. We were not intelligent enough for that'. That's nonsense: our economic system is a product of accreted designs, selected deliberately by central planners who thought we needed stable property, stable currency, transparent financial institutions, and a host of other things. There are aspects that are spontaneous and aspects that are designed.

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