Adversus Liberales: The Right to Excellence and Distributive Justice

Abstract

So far I have referred to the four levels which the moral phenomenon can be broken down into for the purposes of studying its relation with certain causally explicable determinants. In this chapter I am going to abandon this shall we say formal perspective in order to make clear some of the consequences of using a theory of ethics like the one proposed, and their significance for certain theses about the relation between biology and morals as stated by Hayek. The ideological content of determinism in moral matters as proposed by sociobiology has probably had the greatest echo within the critiques and commentaries by specialists from the social sciences, or simply by philosophers. So far I have not referred to these aspects, since as I have already maintained they seem to me to be paradigmatically separable from the body of theory itself and peripheral to its acceptance or denial. Moreover, within the theory discussed here there is a sufficient level of beta-moral autonomy to allow the idea of moral behaviour based exclusively on instinctive impulses to be left aside. By the same token, I must point out that if Social Darwinism today seems worthless, it is due to its scant explanatory value and not because it might lead to fascist-type excesses.

If modern man finds that his inborn instincts do not always lead him in the right direction, he at least flatters himself that it was his reason which made him recognize that a different kind of conduct will serve his innate values better. The conception that man has, in the service of his innate desires, consciously constructed an order of society is, however, erroneous, because without the cultural evolution which lies between instinct and the capacity of rational design he would not have possessed the reason which now makes him try to do so. Man did not adopt new rules of conduct because he was intelligent. He became intelligent by submitting to new rules of conduct. The most important insight which so many rationalists still resist and are even inclined to brand as a superstition, namely that man has not only never invented his most beneficial institutions, from language to morals and law, and even today does not yet understand why he should preserve them when they satisfy neither his instincts nor his reason, still needs to be emphasized. The basic tools of civilization — language, morals, law and money — are all the result of spontaneous growth and not of design, and of the last two organized power has got hold and thoroughly corrupted them. F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (1979)