Three Levels of Moral Beliefs

Wednesday, November 11th, 2015

Our basic problem, Hayek explains, is that we have three levels of moral beliefs:

We have in the first instance our intuitive moral feelings, which are adapted to the small person to-person-society, where we act toward people that we know and are served by people that we know. Then we have a society run by moral traditions, which unlike what modern rationalists believe are not intellectual discoveries of men who designed them, but they are an example of a process that I now prefer to describe by the biological term of group selection. Those groups that quite accidentally developed favorable habits, such as a tradition of private property and the family, succeed but they never understood this. So we owe our present extended order of human cooperation very largely to a moral tradition, which the intellectual does not approve of because it had never been intellectually designed. And it has to compete with a third level of moral beliefs; the morals that intellectuals design in the hope that they can better satisfy man’s instincts than the traditional rules do. And we live in a world where the three moral traditions are in constant conflict: The innate ones, the traditional ones, and the intellectually designed ones…You can explain the whole of social conflicts of the last 200 years by the conflict of the three moral traditions.

The principle criticisms of liberal individualist society is that it is selfish:

The altruism is an instinct we’ve inherited from small society where we know for whom we work, who we serve. When we pass from this—as I like to call it—concrete society where we are guided by what we see, to the abstract society which far transcends our range of vision, it becomes necessary that we are guided not by the knowledge of the effect of what we do but with some abstract symbols. The only symbol that takes us to where we can make the best contribution is profit. And in fact by pursuing profit we are as altruistic as we can possibly be. Because we extend our concern to people who are beyond our range of personal conception. This is a condition which makes it possible even to produce what I call an extended order; an order which is not determined by our aim, by our knowing what are the most urgent needs, but by an impersonal mechanism that by a system of communication puts a label on certain things which is wholely impersonal. Now this is exactly where the conflict between the traditional moral—which is not altruistic, which emphasizes private property, and the instinctive moral which is altruistic, come in constant conflict. The very transition from a concrete society where each serves the needs of others who he knows, to an extended abstract society where people serve the needs of others whom they do not know, whose existence they are not aware of, must only be made possible by the abandonment of altruism and solidarity as the main guiding factors, which I admit are still the factors dominating our instincts, and what restrains our instincts is the tradition of private property and the family, the two traditional rules of morals, which are in conflict with instinct.

David Sloan Wilson notes that Hayek departs from orthodox economics:

Hayek places economics on an evolutionary foundation, including our genetically evolved adaptations to life in small-scale society, cultural evolution based on unplanned variation and selection, and intentional thought processes that result in planned variation and selection.

Discussions of Hayek, he argues, are therefore discussions of economics from an evolutionary perspective:

This will come as a surprise to a lot of Hayek enthusiasts, who manage to endorse his view of economics, deny evolution, and maintain a pious stance toward religion all at the same time. This absurd combination of beliefs is what passes for economic discourse in the popular sphere — and economic experts who know better somehow allow it to happen.

Wilson seems compelled to treat religion as primitive superstition and contrast it against the useful products of cultural evolution, which is amusing if you’ve been reading about Moses the Microbiologist (in The Paleo Manifesto) and fasting in Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Comments

  1. R. says:

    Wilson seems compelled to treat religion as primitive superstition and contrast it against the useful products of cultural evolution…

    Religion may have started out as a primitive superstition, but it’s evolved. Wilson makes that clear. We aren’t H. erectus either.

    He has an entire book on religion (Darwin’s Cathedral) and how it and other social entities are products of cultural evolution. Good read IMO. Should be thrown at every self-righteous know-it-all atheist.

  2. Abelard Lindsey says:

    The issue with Hayak’s emphasis on evolutionary biology as a basis for economics is that many of the “non-libertarian” right wingers do not believe in evolution. Yet, simultaneous, they believe in innate biological differences between the races. its kind of hard to believe in innate differences between the races while rejecting evolution at the same time.

    I guess logical consistency is lacking on the part of the (non-libertarian) right as it is for liberal-leftists.

  3. Lucklucky says:

    “who manage to endorse his view of economics, deny evolution, and maintain a pious stance toward religion all at the same time.”

    Never heard of people like this.

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