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. In the example given by Mises, they seek to solve the problem of hunger by fixing food prices, but instead of solving the problem their intervention only leads to food shortages. Mises explains:
They protest that they are sincere believers and opposed to tyranny and socialism. What they aim at is only the improvement of the conditions of the poor. They say that they are driven by considerations of social justice, and favour a fairer distribution of income precisely because they are intent upon preserving capitalism and its political corollary or superstructure, viz., democratic government.
Mises warns that,
What these people fail to realize is that the various measures they suggest are not capable of bringing about the beneficial results aimed at. On the contrary they produce a state of affairs which from the point of view of their advocates is worse than the previous state which they were designed to alter.
He saw the social justice warriors as often being “either not bright enough or not industrious enough” to achieve their goals, and thus attributing their own failure to unfairness or injustice:
They consoled themselves and tried to convince other people that the cause of their failure was not their own inferiority but the injustice of society’s economic organization. Under capitalism, they declared, self-realization is only possible for the few. “Liberty in a laissez-faire society is attainable only by those who have the wealth or opportunity to purchase it.” Hence, they concluded, the state must interfere in order to realize “social justice.”
What they really meant is, in order to give to the frustrated mediocrity “according to his needs.”
The social justice warriors often invoke the “natural law” or a “higher law” in an attempt to bypass the difficult paths to success. Invoking a “higher law” is the strategy of all revolutionaries and, on the face of it, their opposing invocations of justice seem to be entirely arbitrary. Without knowing more about them, they all seem equally spurious. Hence Mises says, “It is nonsensical to justify or to reject interventionism from the point of view of a fictitious and arbitrary idea of absolute justice. It is vain to ponder over the just delimitation of the tasks of government from any preconceived standard of perennial values.”
Both Mises and Hayek therefore rejected the invocation of “natural law” as a foundation for law or economics. Although the extent to which Hayek rejected natural law altogether is contested, Mises depicted the law of nature as the law of the jungle by which animals live, observing that “the characteristic feature of natural conditions is that one animal is intent upon killing other animals,” and so, “‘Thou shalt not kill’ is certainly not part of natural law.” What seems “just” to the hungry predator is “unjust” to the vulnerable prey. Mises, therefore, rejected natural law concepts of justice altogether, arguing that, “There is, however, no such thing as natural law and a perennial standard of what is just and what is unjust.” He considered the “natural law” to be “fictitious and arbitrary.”
In the Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard adopted a different standpoint in relation to the role of justice, arguing that libertarian law must be founded upon natural law principles. He viewed “a rationally established natural law” as the foundation of justice. The reference to rationality is important in Rothbard’s philosophy; it signifies that natural law is not merely a reference to what animals do in a state of nature, but denotes principles derived from human reason. Rothbard considered it important not only to defend property rights for utilitarian reasons, but to defend “just property or legitimate property or perhaps ‘natural property.’” He did not see justice as merely incidental to a defense of liberty, but rather as a moral and ethical concept that lies at the very heart of liberty. He considered it necessary to invoke moral and ethical arguments to counter the demands of the ignorant, but nevertheless destructive, interventionists driven by their good intentions. The social justice warriors cannot be answered only with economic arguments. Rothbard argued that, “one must go beyond economics and utilitarianism to establish an objective ethics which affirms the overriding value of liberty, and morally condemns all forms of statism.” His view was that “while praxeological economic theory is extremely useful for providing data and knowledge for framing economic policy, it cannot be sufficient by itself to enable the economist to make any value pronouncements or to advocate any public policy whatsoever.” His point about public policy is important in understanding why he invokes principles of justice. As David Gordon puts it,
…a supporter of social justice might argue that the requirement to redress discriminatory treatment isn’t an empirical [economic] claim about the sources of current inequality but a moral demand. People who hold this view might think that even if you are now doing very well, you are still entitled to compensation if you have suffered from discrimination. (Once more, I do not favor this view, quite the contrary; but an adequate response to it must involve moral theory.)
There are many overlaps between utilitarian and natural law philosophies, as well as many important distinctions, that cannot be addressed in this brief article. But it can be seen that the different Austrian perspectives on the concept of justice are not so much definitional or methodological differences, but rather pertain to how different theorists understand the role of the economist in engaging with public policy debates and answering the “justice” claims of statists and interventionists. While Austrians maintain a very clear analytical separation between economic science, or praxeology, and political philosophy or public policy, they have different views on whether, when, and how economists ought to engage with the “social justice” debates.
