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