ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: ON THE HAYEKIAN IMPOSSIBILITY OF SOCIAL JUSTICE – A CRITIQUE
Author: Brscic Bernard
The paper analyzes Hayek’s theory of justice and his vociferous opposition to the concept of social justice. According to Hayek the call for social justice anthropomorphizes what is in reality an impersonal market order. Hayek interprets justice in terms of the formal consistency of a set of social rules which emerge as result of innumerable individual decisions. As no one is responsible for the overall pattern of distribution that the spontaneous market produces, market outcomes are arbitrary from a moral point of view, i.e. what emerges by means of the invisible hand cannot be qualified in terms of justice. To Hayek social justice refers to something that emerges not organically and spontaneously from the rule abiding behaviour of free individuals, but from an abstract ideal imposed from the above. Hayek’s theory of justice is rooted in his epistemology, in his disbelief in the possibility for a rational evaluation of the social whole in terms of objective values. Hayek’s attack on the notion of social justice is at best only partially successful. He is certainly right that the law of unintended consequences counsels scepticism about comprehensive attempts to control and plan complex social and economic systems. It can be argued against Hayek that the notion of social justice is not necessarily founded on the error that some person or entity is responsible for bringing about distributive inequalities. Rather, it is founded on the notion that we can collectively intervene if we choose to do so, through democratic means of the political process. The intervention doesn’t need to take the form of economic planning, but may take the form of more modest efforts to promote universal access to certain basic benefits.
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