Abstract
Like Darwin, I “fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense is by far the most important.”1 A fundamental project in evolutionary science is to understand how this distinctive capacity, which appears to require that an individual sometimes refrain from the course of action that maximizes his fitness,2 could have evolved. We have recently witnessed powerful analyses of the evolution of biological and psychological altruism, reciprocal cooperation, of our ability to follow rules and to socially enforce them, and of the development of conscience. Most, but not all, of this work has focused on biological evolution, employing both natural and social selection models, and increasingly employing some version of multilevel selection. This important work has made great progress in helping us understand the evolution of the building blocks of cooperation and morality. And until we know how our basic moral sense could have evolved, the entire moral enterprise—and by extension, the nature of human social life—remains an evolutionary mystery.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, second edition (New York: Penguin, [1871] 2004), 120.
For general analyses of such rules, see Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Norms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Ch. 3 and 4.
Anthony O’Hear, Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 101.
Ken Binmore, Natural Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.
See, for example, Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative. Library Edition, Containing Seven Essays Not before Republished, and Various Other Additions (London: Williams and Norgate, 1891), 2. This essay, sketching Spencer’s evolutionary theory, pre-dates the publication of The Origins of Species.
See, for example, L. T. Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1901);
L. T. Hobhouse, Development and Purpose (London: Macmillan, 1927);
L. T. Hobhouse, Social Evolution and Political Theory (New York, Columbia University Press, 1911);
Morris Ginsberg, “The Concept of Evolution in Sociology,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s. 31 (1930–31): 201–24.
Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 239.
“A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase.” Charles Darwin, On the Origins of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Ch. 3. Darwin explicitly credits Malthus with the idea. See The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, with the Original Omissions Restored, ed. Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), 120.
See, for example, David G. Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891), 1ff. Nevertheless, even Ritchie attempted to link evolution and progress in the second essay in the volume. Compare O’Hear’s skepticism, Beyond Evolution, 2ff.
See, for example, William Graham Sumner, “Sociology,” in War and Other Essays, ed. Albert Galloway Keller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919), Ch. 7.
See O’Hear, Beyond Evolution, p. 74. See also John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
It is appropriate to commence with Hayek not simply because of the present occasion, but far more importantly, because Hayek was developing subtle accounts of moral and social evolution, complex systems, and social morality from the 1950s through to the 1980s, when few social theorists would go anywhere near these topics. Well into the 1980s the application of evolutionary thought to society was commonly associated with eugenics, imperialism, and fascism. Recall the abuse heaped on Edward O. Wilson for his Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
See Friedrich A. Hayek, “Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct,” in Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 75. See also Douglas Glen Whitman, “Hayek contra Pangloss on Evolutionary Systems,” Constitutional Political Economy 9, no. 1 (1998): 450–66.
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, ed. W. W. Bartley III (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 25. For a contemporary discussion of whether cultural evolution is “Lamarckian” (allowing for the inheritance of acquired characteristics),
see Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 43–44.
Hayek, “Evolution of Systems,” 67; Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 3, The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 156–57.
For an easily accessible version of their work, see Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), Ch. 3.
Their groundbreaking modeling of cultural evolution was presented in Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985). For an overview see Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution, Ch. 3. Hayek notes prestige bias: “Evolution of Systems,” 79.
This form of transmission has recently been stressed by Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism and Shame (New York: Basic Books, 2012), Ch. 7.
Hayek, “Evolution of Systems,” 71. On Hayek’s notion of the order of actions, see Eric Mack, “Hayek on Justice and the Order of Actions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, ed. Edward Feser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 259–86.
Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1, Rules and Order (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 18; Hayek, Fatal Conceit, p. 25.
Sewall Wright participated in Hayek’s evolution seminar at Chicago. See Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 299. Hayek certainly advances what might be called a genuine multilevel selectionist account, in which the success of a group affects the selection of individual traits within it, allowing traits that have an in-group disadvantage to be selected. “Although the existence and preservation of the order of actions of a group can be accounted for only from the rules of conduct which individuals obey, these rules of conduct have developed because the individuals have been living in groups whose structures have gradually changed. In other words, the properties of the individuals which are significant for the existence and preservation of the group, and through this also for the existence and preservation of the individuals themselves, have been shaped by the selection of those individuals from the individuals living in groups which at each stage of evolution of the group tended to act according to such rules as made the group more efficient.” Hayek, “Evolution of Systems,” 72. This sort of group selection hypothesis is not supposed in this chapter.
While the importance of forms of multilevel selection in biological evolution is still hotly disputed, I think there is conclusive reason to view multilevel selection as fundamental in cultural evolution. For a very helpful discussion, see Samir Okasha, Evolution and the Levels of Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
On modeling group conflict as fundamental to social evolution, see Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
Hayek, Political Order, 26, 159; Hayek, Rules and Order, 3, 17–18; Hayek, Fatal Conceit, 6, 25, 43. For a general analysis of different forms of cultural group selection and the plausible time spans under which they might operate, see Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson, and Joseph Soltis, “Can Group-Functional Behaviors Evolve by Cultural Group Selection?” in The Origin and Evolution of Cultures, ed. Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 204–26.
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 63.
On page 161 of the Epilogue to The Political Order of a Free Society (the last volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty), Hayek argues that the steps in cultural evolution toward large-scale coordination “were made possible by some individuals breaking some traditional rules and practising new forms of conduct—not because they understood them to be better, but because the groups which acted on them prospered more and grew.” For a general analysis of the role of conscious deliberation and choice of rules in Hayek, see Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy, “Discussion, Construction and Evolution: Mill, Buchanan and Hayek on Constitutional Order,” Constitutional Political Economy 19, no. 1 (2008): 3–18.
In many models of adaptive landscapes the points represent population average fitness; in others the points represent individual fitness, and populations are groups of points. In evolutionary modeling these different versions can lead to very different insights and problems. In the present social evolutionary context, O is an individual order, not a population average. See further Sergey Gavrilets, “Evolution and Speciation on Holey Adaptive Landscapes,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 12, no. 8 (August 1997): 307–12.
For an important pioneering analysis, see Stuart A. Kauffman, The Origins of Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), especially Ch. 2. See also Sergey Gavrilets, “High-Dimensional Fitness Landscapes and Speciation,” in Evolution—the Extended Synthesis, ed. Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 45–80.
See for example, Daniel A. Levinthal, “Adaptation on Rugged Landscapes,” Management Science 43, no. 7 (July 1997): 934–50 and, more generally, Scott E. Page, The Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Especially important in management science has been the work of James G. March; see for example, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” Organization Science (Special Issue: Organizational Learning: Papers in Honor of (and by) James G. March) 2, no. 1 (1991): 71–87.
Fred D’Agostino, Naturalizing Epistemology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), esp. Ch. 7;
Fred D’Agostino, “From the Organization to the Division of Cognitive Labor,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics 8, no. 1 (2009): 101–29;
Michael Weisberg and Ryan Muldoon, “Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor,” Philosophy of Science 76, no. 2 (April 2009): 225–52.
Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), esp. chap. 4.
Gerald Gaus, “Social Contract and Social Choice,” Rutgers Law Journal 43, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 243–76;
Gerald Gaus, “Between Discovery and Choice: The General Will in a Diverse Society,” Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice 3, no. 2 (2011): 70–95. In what follows I will call the landscapes, “evaluative,” “moral,” and “justice” landscapes. Although in some contexts it would be important to distinguish these, the analysis presented here is sufficiently general that we can treat these terms as synonymous.
Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 12–15.
See Sen, The Idea of Justice, 102; A. John Simmons, “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 38, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 34–35.
I consider a slightly different version of this claim in The Order of Public Reason, 420ff. As John Thrasher has pointed out to me, James Buchanan advanced similar criticisms of Hayek; see, for example, Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan, The Reason of Rules (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 9–10. See also Peart and Levy, “Discussion, Construction and Evolution.” At various places, rather than endorsing the claim that the evolution of an order is sufficient for its moral endorsement, Hayek appears to suggest that the question of moral justification is rationalistic and so inappropriate: morality requires “following of moral traditions that are not justifiable in terms of the canons of traditional theories of rationality … The process of selection that shaped customs and morality could take account of more factual circumstances than individuals could perceive, and in consequence tradition is in some respects superior to, or ‘wiser,’ than, human reason” (The Fatal Conceit, p. 75). In one sense, this is consistent with the correlation analysis presented here (that we can use evolution as indicative of the adequacy of our morality, and so “in some sense” it is a source of justificatory wisdom), but in a more radical interpretation it seems to suggest that we cannot rationally morally evaluate our currently evolved order. O’Hear rightly criticizes this radical view, pointing out that Hayek himself engages in overall evaluative judgments; Beyond Evolution, p. 148. As Caldwell notes, caution must be exercised when relying on The Fatal Conceit in interpreting Hayek, as some of the final text seems to reflect the views of Bartley, who finished the manuscript because of Hayek’s failing health. See Hayek’s Challenge, 316ff
Page, The Difference, Parts II and III. Page’s book is based on formal theorems developed with Lu Hong. See Lu Hong and Scott E. Page, “Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents,” Journal of Economic Theory 97, no. 1 (March 2001): 123–63;
Lu Hong and Scott E. Page, “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101, no. 46 (November 16, 2004): 16385–89.
See March,“Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning”; Scott E. Page, Diversity and Complexity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 122–24.
T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 214.
Hayek repeatedly refers to “the twin ideas of evolution and spontaneous order.” See Hayek, “Evolution of Systems,” 77; Friedrich A. Hayek, “Dr. Bernard Mandeville,” in New Studies in Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (London: Routledge, 1987), 250; Hayek, Rules and Order, 23, 158; Hayek, Fatal Conceit, 146. It should be noted that Kauffman’s aim in Origins of Order was to account for self-organization within an evolutionary framework.
Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), Ch. 20–25. Popper insightfully analyzes the way that holism undermines social experimentation.
F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1944).
For just two of many examples, see David Estlund, Democratic Authority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), Ch. 14;
G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), Part II.
And, like Hayek, he believes it should be restricted to the neighborhood of the present order. See John Rawls, Justice as Fairness, A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 70.
John Rawls, “Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in John Rawls: Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 499.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2013 Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gaus, G. (2013). The Evolution, Evaluation, and Reform of Social Morality: A Hayekian Analysis. In: Peart, S.J., Levy, D.M. (eds) F. A. Hayek and the Modern Economy. Jepson Studies in Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137354365_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137354365_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47162-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-35436-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Business & Management CollectionBusiness and Management (R0)