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