Naturalistic Fallacy

To distinguish between “spontaneous order” regarded as “Great Society” and “spontaneous order” as “any blind self-generated mechanism evolving in accordance with the changes in the environment” becomes essential when it is necessary to avoid the naturalistic fallacy. The “Great Society” is a spontaneous order provided with several sub-systems which behave as spontaneous orders in themselves, such as the law, morals, language, monetary systems and so on. The present legal system of a given society, although spontaneously evolved, is not necessarily the only possible spontaneous legal system to rule that society.

The Law and the Social Order

That the law follows the evolution pattern of a spontaneous order –like the language or the monetary system also do- does not imply that the rules prevailing in any society -meant as a spontaneous order as well- have to be regarded as norms worth of being obeyed just because they emerge from the spontaneous social order. As we had already said, whether a norm acts as a negative or a positive feedback system, giving society a stabilization devise or not, is subject to being empirically proved. Once that problem is solved, we have to face with the question of if the stable order that that norm contribute to is also in accordance with our values, such as the importance of the individual liberty or of the equality before the law.

Stability

Since rational agents are not fully aware of the rules which govern human action, no social institution can provide the spontaneous order with a complete stability. Moreover, the aptitude for providing stability for any social order is not a necessary attribute for every set of rules that compound an institution. Whether a particular social institution plays a role of a negative feedback system in the social order or not is a statement subject to empirical investigation.

Types of Rules

The different types of rules of conduct are named by Hayek as “articulated”, “unarticulated” and “implicit” (see “Law, Legislation and Liberty”, Chapter 4), following progressive degrees of abstraction. The “command” is an articulated rule which conveys a concrete purpose. The norms of just conduct may be articulated or unarticulated, but in both cases they will be purposeless. A leading case would be that whose solution was implied in unarticulated norms of just conduct. The new precedent invokes a norm not enunciated before, but being considered as just once it is articulated by the judge, because it expresses an implicit feeling of justice previously shared by everyone. The most difficult task in the Hayekian theory of law is to explain convincingly the sphere of the implicit norms just conduct. The norms of that kind inform our notion of justice, notwithstanding they are insusceptible of ever being fully stated or provided of a complete rational justification. In the Chapter Four of Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek explains that even the already articulated norms of just conduct rest on a background of implicit norms, which give sense to the former. This is a central issue for Hayek’s critical rationalism, whose implications reach his theory of democracy.

Levels of abstraction

In “The Sensory Order” and in “The Primacy of the Abstract”, Hayek suggests that the mind is made of the juxtaposition of several kinds of abstraction levels and systems of classification. Mind is part of the nature and the different levels of abstraction that compound it change in response to the changes in the environment. The rational agent is unaware of the highest levels of abstraction that condition his mind. These highest levels of abstraction are formed by social institutions, aesthetic values, “moral sentiments”, etc, and evolve following a natural selection pattern. That the rational agent is not able to choose or modify such levels of abstraction is at the core of the notion of “spontaneous order”.

Reason, institutions and evolution.

The statement that institutions define different kinds of rationalities is a mislead conception of the evolutionary interaction between mind and its environment. Rationality is only of one type: the adjustment of means to ends. Although this instrumental notion of reason has its failures, is better than any paralogism. What institutions really do is to condition rational agent’s decisions to follow a certain pattern in order to maximize the utility of his resources. The result of this conditioning is a rational action according to the limitations imposed by institutions. Nevertheless, reason is always only one –what change are the different outcomes of its application in different environments. What evolve are the institutional frame and, specially, an important part of it: the strategies for adaptation to the environment. At this point, we need to feed the Hayekian social thought on game theory.

Feedforward Systems

As Hayek stated in “Law, Legislation and Liberty” that society works as a negative feedback system, we can say that individuals and groups act as if they were feed-forward systems. At least, that is what we can conclude from reading Hayek´s essay “Economics and Knowledge”.