Bruce Caldwell wrote:
>Hayek's remarks about Keynes in these earlier papers refer to Keynes'
>paper My Early Beliefs, and Keynes is taken by Hayek as an example of a
>person embracing a type of rationalism that leads the person to substitute
>in his own personal evaluations in making moral judgments.
It is useful to note that Keynes, and the whole
Bloomsbury Group, was very much influenced by G.
E. Moore's "Principia Ethica" (1903) which
promulgated the doctrine known as "emotivism,"
that is, the idea that any ethical statement
could only be the expression of a personal
preference. Therefore, moral dialogue could only
be, at best, an attempt to force our personal
preferences on others. This did not mean that
they denied the moral realm (they didn't), its
just that they could find no roots for it in
anything other than the emotions, than our
instinctive reactions to evil. Such a position is inherently relativistic.
Hayek (and Mises), on the other hand, were
proto-neo-conservatives: they combined an extreme
form of economic liberalism with a rather rigid
social conservatism. Their position depends
crucially on a "fact/value" distinction wherein
the law of economics belong to the realm of facts
and the moral "laws" belong to the realm of
values; in this, they really do not differ from
Moore. It is doubtful, however, that this
position can be consistently held. If ethics are
confined to the realm of "values" and divorced
from the realm of "facts," then where else can we
root the moral order but in the emotions? I am
not relativist myself, but I do find the
emotivist position (wrong as it is) to be at
least internally consistent in a way that
neo-conservatism is not, and there is always
something to be said for intellectual
consistency. In reality, both positions confine
ethics to a kind of nether world of the
non-rational, and hence remove any possible
method of deciding between their moral positions.
In the basics, there is more similarity than
difference in their positions, however much they
may dispute the details, and dispute them in
disputes that cannot even in principle be
resolved because there is no possible standard of
truth between the differing emotions.
John C. Medaille
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