I’ll leave further defense of Chris to Chris, but my view is that he would have no trouble not only saying ‘social justice’ but moreover taking the possibility of the notion seriously.

Far from it. A moment’s reflection would tell you that all justice is both social and individual (and all meaningful analyses of justice reflect those two levels of analysis). Hayek didn’t even make it onto the field.

With his usual intellectual dishonesty, Hayek seeks to confound ‘people don’t know what they mean by social justice’ with the idea that ‘social justice cannot have any meaning’. His justification for the latter claim is that justice is only an attribute of particular human actions and cannot be an attribute of systems. Tell this to anyone considering the features of a system of civil and criminal law, compared to other systems.

It is meaningful to talk of a system as just in comparison to another system that is unjust: and of course all Hayek’s absurdities derive from a claim of justice, that property gives as a matter of justice power to the property holder that should not be fettered or limited by obligations to those without property.

And blah, blah, bloody blah. And yet not once do you sit-down face-to-face wid da ‘S’ word – SOCIAL!

Hullllloooooooooooooooooooo!?

Hayek is still bitching ya, 1-0, toots.

Thanks.

I must say I was very disappointed by Hayek in this clip. Don’s ‘discovery’ of Hayek’s ‘Rawlsian turn’ turns out not to be the discovery of some deep symmetry, which would have been of great interest, but of a rhetorical ploy by Hayek. I have quite a high regard for Hayek’s basic ideas, but as he suggested himself, most of Hayek boils down to a single – and strong – idea that of the importance of distributed information.

The rest is a construct that is largely rhetorical and based on privileging some things – pretty arbitrarily – over others.

That’s not wrong, but ‘not getting carried away’ is an entirely different kettle of fish from saying: it can’t be done, don’t bother deliberating/trying.

“The justice of any system in operation will depend on particular human actions by particular humans.”

No, it will depend mainly on opinions about what is just. Something that varies mightily. It is easy to get broad agreement about broad concepts, but that often disappears when you try to be more specific. For example, I think there is broad agreement with the idea that a progressive tax system is socially just. The level of agreement changes when you try and specify a tax scale. The other thing is that we have no way of establishing the actual level of agreement about various policies. Instead we have mandate theories. For these reasons I think nobody should get to carried away with ideas as to what is and is not socially just.

People don’t know, in the narrow sense that Hayek is talking about, what’s meant by democracy or freedom either. That’s not to say we can’t use what John Ralston Saul would describe as a common-sense or intuitive, practical and non-utopian series of decisions to move towards something that people agree (again in a common-sense/intuitive way) resembles democracy, freedom, or social justice.

I think his claim that they wouldn’t disagree about anything but terminology is a cop out – an admission (of sorts) that he can’t actually formulate a decent rebuttal, because none is available.

In other words, I think he’s slyly putting the shoe on the other foot of linguistic determinism, suggesting that ‘mere’ terminology is all that separates their positions, when in fact language and its relationship with our understanding of the world precludes him being correct.

So yeah, “many of his supporters would find this surprising”, but only those who think the sun shines out of his arse.

I’ve often wondered what Hayek would have said if you asked him directly about Rawls.

Me too. [watch to the end]

He’d probably say he prefers Dostoyevsky.