Austrian Perspectives on Social Justice
Fiat justitia, ne pereat mundus—Let justice be done, lest the world perish. With these evocative words, Ludwig von Mises sets justice at the heart of his treatise on free market capitalism, Human Action. Echoing the importance of justice, in Law, Legislation and Liberty Friedrich von Hayek described “rules of just conduct” as “the indispensable foundation and limitation of all law.” Hayek considered it important that, “Government certainly ought to be just in all it does.” But what role does the concept of justice play in their analysis?
Many economists consider questions of justice irrelevant to the study of value-free economics. After all, while exchange based on private property must be voluntary, it need not be “just.” Hayek saw it as “an abuse” of the word justice, to evaluate “the joint effects of the actions of many people, even where these were never foreseen or intended,” by reference to whether those effects are “just.” Thus, for example, a rise or fall in prices is neither “just” nor “unjust.” Hayek saw the attempt to evaluate market outcomes by reference to justice as “that anthropomorphism or personification by which naïve thinking tries to account for all self-ordering processes.” He argued that, “A bare fact, or a state of affairs which nobody can change, may be good or bad, but not just or unjust. To apply the term ‘just’ to circumstances other than human actions or the rules governing them is a category mistake.” This means that we may or may not happen to like particular market outcomes, but we cannot describe those outcomes as just or unjust.
Hayek drew a clear distinction between “rules of just conduct” and law or legislation: “We are not contending that all rules of just conduct which are in fact observed in a society are law, nor that all that is commonly called law consists of rules of just conduct.” In his view, the right rule is that which yields the desired goal, while the wrong rule is that which fails to do so: “All moral rules and human laws are means for the realization of definite ends. There is no method available for the appreciation of their goodness or badness other than to scrutinize their usefulness for the attainment of the ends chosen and aimed at.” On that reasoning, his view was that the law does not reflect “justice” in an abstract sense, but reflects the rules chosen by society with a view to constructing the type of society they value.
On that basis, Hayek rejected the use of “social justice” arguments in political debate: “…the term ‘social justice’ is wholly devoid of meaning or content… it is a semantic fraud, a phrase used to give moral approval to what is in fact a demand for the distribution of benefits according to some arbitrary criterion.” They seek to justify redistributing wealth and power according to their preferences. Mises observes in his book Socialism, that redistributionists do not necessarily consider themselves to be socialists. Social justice warriors are often liberals who do not understand economic science, and have therefore failed to appreciate that the means they promote to resolve social problems are incapable of solving the problem.
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