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| Image credit. Attersee, Austria - where we used to spent the summer holidays. The lake is 20 kilometres in length. My father calculated that the view from one end of the lake to the other is blocked by a water hump about 8 meters in height. |
Continued from here.
14.4 Conscious Design, Intermediary
Conditions, and Spontaneous Order
Man lives in a world of intermediary conditions
(see section 2.1) that challenge him
to exercise his rational faculties so as to align his means to his purposes.
Behaviour attempting and organised around rational anticipation is itself a
product of evolution. In this way, conscious design is built into a world that
proves to be largely a spontaneous order looked at from distant enough a
vantage point. The principles of liberalism as well as the principled behaviour
needed to maintain a liberal order are ultimately delivered by acts of
purposive behaviour and conscious design, which in other instances may at the
same time also be the source of more or less rational, yet groping
experimentation, or fully unintended negative or positive consequences. The
relationship of conscious design to
outcomes engendered in a spontaneous order is subtle and multifaceted. It is
not exhaustively captured by a simple dichotomy. Spontaneous order being
essentially an experimental event, human experimentation is part and parcel of
it, and not always destructive of it, regardless of whether more or less
successful at predicting its likely results. For us to discern which features
of a spontaneous order are useful and deserving of careful application and
protection, we are again dependent on the human ability of conscious judgement
and design. Hayek’s policy proposals – currency competition, the bicameral
legislature, his concept of a private law society ‑ are unadulterated examples of conscious design. Tolerant and
considerate behaviour, action aiming at trust, cooperation, and give-and-take,
requires premeditated stratagems – conscious
design in other words. By contrast, it appears that the Hayekian habit of
thinking in terms of SO1
breeds secondary habits such as reflexive dismissal of conscious design and an
obsession with impersonal mechanisms of the market type or other variants
incorrectly thought to operate without being vitally tied to politics and the state.
15. Liberalism between
Harm Principle and Benefit Principle[1]
More generally, where does one draw the line
between the inactive liberal harm principle and the activist benefit principle,
the latter calling for coercive public measures – engendered, incidentally,
within the tradition of the common law – that, at the cost of restricting
personal freedom, bring about benefits for all, thus at least presumptively lifting
all ships at once? At what point is liberty being fatally compromised? Has the
welfare state led to a secular decline in liberty? If not, why? Can we expect
people to shun the new social technology, the modern state with its
unprecedented command of resources? Is freedom really indivisible? Is freedom
so rigid as not to be amenable to contextually dependent suspension of certain
of its aspects, even some of her principles? Of course, in a sense, liberty is
indivisible in that for her to prevail we need to apply certain principles in
general (equality before the law). In another sense, liberty is not indivisible:
think of the redefinition of bundles of rights that in a free society
permanently takes place both in the world of commercial transactions and in the
political sphere (abolition of slavery, female suffrage, gay rights etc).
Considering these constraints and avenues of advance, are the options for the
development of liberty susceptible to valid treatment by a uniform concept of
liberalism? Do not liberals disagree on these issues? Is not freedom turning liberalism into an ambiguous
concept, naturally sparking a fierce competition of meanings?
The classical liberal legal scholar Richard
Epstein, the very man accusing Hayek of socialism, argues passionately in
favour of pursuing the benefit principle and recommends the paradigm of the
social contract to be applied as a means of imitating the win-win outcomes of
private contracting by public coercive policies, when such benefits are
impossible to attain from voluntary transactions.
The social contract theory is not,
it has been said, worth the paper it is not written on, and modern efforts to
work out that theory have all emphasized the hypothetical nature of the consent
that drives the underlying transaction. But just because the obvious theories
fall short, do we reject (in the name of the free market, no less) all forms of
taxation and regulation? For most people the answer is no: political obligation
there must be-strong enough to account for a state and its power to tax, but
not so strong as to leave nothing left to individual discretion and control.
[…] That’s where the benefit principle comes into its own, and the language of
social contract gains its lasting intellectual force. […] In an ordinary
contract, two elements are conjoined: the parties each have consented to the
new package of rights and duties, and each benefits from that exchange. With
complex social settings, the notion of consent is jettisoned, but the central
ideal of contract – joint gains – remains. The system, therefore, is social
insofar as it represents a grand construct that is imposed on individuals and
is not chosen by them, but it is contractual insofar as it imitates the
distribution of net gains that any system of voluntary contracts presupposes. [2]
16. Undercurrents of
Freedom
The emergence of order from causes that form
hard-to-detect undercurrents beneath the surface of appearances is a
characteristic feature of the processes that lend stability and effectiveness
to spontaneous systems. The paradox of freedom suggests that liberty has a
concealed depth-structure and operates in large measure without the benefit of
detailed management and immediate political support. Extending the paradigm of
spontaneous order to politics and the state is apt to shed light on the hidden
depth structure of freedom and the potential as well as the limits of her
self-generating nature.
16.1 Freedom as Method
(II)
Epstein’s approach points in the direction of
what we call “freedom as method.” Namely,
the search for methods and institutions that promote positive-sum-games in a
society where value-diversity is admitted and high levels of personal autonomy
are aspired to as a presumptive condition of peaceful existence and high
productivity.
This contrasts with “freedom as model” or “freedom
as blueprint.” In our reading (see section 12.), freedom is not the projection
of a complete world – like the three dimensional, detailed model of, say, a
city to be built – or more generally: a system that is at some conceivable stage (a) complete and (b) can be anticipated and
prescribed in its completeness.[3]
Freedom as method is rather a barrier
of caution, a way of asking critical questions that help us guard against error,
dysfunction, and accident? Freedom as
method seeks to filter out restrictions on personal liberty that issue in
zero-sum-games and negative-sum games, while admitting such restrictions that
create win-win situations in the private as well as the public sphere.
[1] According to the harm principle,
the protected domain of the individual may not be infringed upon, except to
defend against illegitimate force and fraud. The benefit principle, however,
admits of more extensive infringements, if the latter are necessitated by the common
weal, i.e. a substantial public advantage requiring qualified and controlled
transgression, with those infringed upon receiving just compensation for
curtailment of their rights.
[2] Epstein, R. (1998), pp. 124-125.
[3] In criticising certain presumed violations of freedom
some libertarians as if a world of no such violations were feasible, ignoring
the fact that freedom requires fallible experimentation, compromise, and
changes in relative political dominance. In this way, liberal criticism often
implies freedom as model or freedom as blueprint, i.e. a state of
affairs in which no presumed violation of freedom occurs and freedom is
realised in exhaustive fullness.
Continued here.
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