Honest Money

The law department at Leuven University deprives man of his right to exist for his own sake.

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of man. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs. (1)

This 1932 quote of Walter Lippmann appears at the outset of Volume 2 “The Mirage of Social Justice” of Nobel laureate for economics Friedrich A. von Hayek’s “Law, Legislation, and Liberty”.

The back cover of that Volume 2 says that the Volume denounces the concept of “social justice”. Hayek argues, continues the back cover, that within a free market economy, the concept of “social justice” is devoid of meaning and therefore a harmful cause of misdirection of well-meant efforts. Hayek stands convinced that only a central authority and a directed economy could distribute material goods equally among all people – and this only at the cost of individual liberties and the curtailment of freedom of choice in occupation.

Hayek writes on p. XI of the Volume that the underlying consideration (one could hardly call it a principle) of “social justice” is not capable of general application.
People would never be able to agree on what “social justice” requires.
People who habitually employ the phrase do not know themselves what they mean by it and use it as an assertion that a claim is justified without giving a reason for it.
Hayek was therefore forced to conclude that the term “social justice” is entirely empty and meaningless.
The more he tried to give it a definite meaning the more it fell apart.
The conception of justice requires that it be justified by a general rule, says Hayek.

For Hayek, justice is indeed an attribute of human conduct, and the attempt – inherent in the concept of “social” justice – to apply the concept to a state of affairs, without any reference to the human actions that produced it, does violence to our understanding of responsibility and choice. (2)

Hayek claims that the ideal of social justice – understood as people being rewarded on the basis of what they merit -  is meaningless and cannot be realised within a commercial society.
Hayek’s argument is clearly NOT that there cannot be non-market welfare provision, for of this he was an advocate.
RATHER, it is his view that many significant occurrences in societies like ours are the products of disaggregated action and that this may have profound implications for what can – and what cannot – be achieved in such societies. (3)

Contrary to what Rawls argues in “A Theory of Justice”, there is, for Hayek, no such thing as a just distribution, conceived independently of the deliberate choices that bring it about. (4)

Hayek explains at the outset of chapter nine “Social or Distributive Justice”, pages 62-63, of Volume 2 of “Law, legislation, and Liberty” that the abuse of the word “social justice” threatens to destroy the conception of law which made it the safeguard of individual freedom. It is perhaps not surprising that men should have applied to the joint effects of the actions of many people, even where these were never foreseen or intended, the conception of justice which they had developed with respect to the conduct of individuals towards each other. “Social” justice (or sometimes “economic” justice) came to be regarded as an attribute which the “actions” of society or the “treatment” of individuals an groups by society, ought to possess. As PRIMITIVE THINKING usually does when first noticing some regular processes, the results of the spontaneous ordering of the market were interpreted as if some thinking being deliberately directed them, or as if the particular benefits or harm different persons derived from them were determined by deliberate acts of will, and could therefore be guided by moral rules. This conception of “social” justice is thus a direct consequence of that ANTHROPOMORPHISM or personification by which naive thinking tries to account for all self-ordering processes. It is a sign of the IMMATURITY OF OUR MINDS that we have not yet outgrown these primitive concepts and still demand from an impersonal process which brings about a greater satisfaction of human desires than any deliberate human organisation could achieve, that it conform to the moral precepts men have evolved for the guidance of their individual actions. (all capitalisations mine)

“It is idle to assume that ethically desirable results will necessarily be produced by an ethically indifferent instrument”, said P. H. Wickseed in 1910. (5)

Not so for two of the leading brains behind the law department at Leuven University until the third quarter of last decade.

For Professor Walter Van Gerven, who taught contract law, commercial law and European law at Leuven and other universities and was Advocate-General at the European Court of Justice,
in his 2005 book “The European Union – A polity of peoples and states” (6),
the pursuit of social justice by enabling dignified living for all is seen in Europe as an objective of good governance. (p. 211)

For his senior by one or two years, Professor Roger Blanpain who taught Belgian and comparative labour law at Leuven and other universities,
in his 2008 Memoirs “Wat kan ik voor u doen?” (7),
for every student of labour law, the International Labour Organisation is a beacon of social justice. (p. 278)

Yes, Van Gerven has also a section “III Social Justice and the Welfare State” on p. 183 where he writes inter alia that the answer to the question whether social justice is a matter to be pursued by the welfare state as an objective of good governance will differ from one country to another, depending on the goal that it assigns to social welfare policy.

But from somebody like Blanpain who specialises in labour law, I had expected the term “social justice” to figure more prominently and earlier in his book which has 324 pages plus the annexes and the Preface by Professor Mark Eyskens, an economics professor and politician who obtained his Leuven law degree the same year as Blanpain.

Blanpain makes however a reference to ILO.

Blanpain’s Memoirs were published in September 2008.

The website of the ILO refers to a 2009 book “The International Labour Organization and the quest for social justice, 1919-2009” published by the ILO and written by Gerry Rodgers, Lee Swepston, Eddy Lee and Jasmien van Daele exploring key ideas that the ILO has championed and applied through the political and economic upheavals of the last 90 years: rights at work, the quality of employment, income protection, employment and poverty reduction, a fair globalisation and today’s overriding goal of decent work for all. (8)

The book thus has “social justice” in its title.

I DID NOT READ the book. However, I am UNABLE to find in the two references I find on the web to book that the book would define social justice.

The title of Blanpain’s Memoirs is “Wat kan ik voor u doen?”, “What can I do for you?”.

Does this mean that social justice is just a cover for altruism?

Ayn Rand said, the basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. (9)

Ivo Cerckel
ivocerckel@siquijor.ws

NOTES

(1)
Walter Lippmann, “An Inquiry into the Principles of a Good Society”, Boston, 1937, p. 267
quoted on the forepage of Nobel laureate for economics Friedrich A. von Hayek’s “Law, Legislation, and Liberty”, Volume 2 “The Mirage of Social justice”, The University of Chicago Press, 1976

(2)
Roger Scruton, “Hayek and conservatism”,  in: Edward Feser, ed., “The Cambridge Companion to Hayek”, Cambridge University Press,  2006,  208,  p. 213

(3)
Jeremy Shearmur, “Hayek’s politics”, in: Feser, ed, op. cit.,  148, p. 153 – 154

(4)
Roger Scruton, art. cit., p. 220

(5)
P.H. Wickseed, “The Common Sense of the Political Economy”, London, 1910, p. 184, quoted by Hayek as a note to the text of p. 63 of Volume 2 of “Law, Legislation, and Liberty”

(6)
Walter Van Gerven. “The European Union – A polity of peoples and states”, Stanford University Press, 2005

(7)
Roger Blanpain “Memoires – Wat kan ik voor u doen?”, Bruges, Vanden Broele 2008

(8)
Gerry Rodgers, Lee Swepston, Eddy Lee and Jasmien van Daele, “The International Labour Organization and the quest for social justice, 1919-2009”, ILO Publications, 2009
http://www.ilo.org/global/What_we_do/Publications/ILOBookstore/Orderonline/Books/lang–en/WCMS_104643/index.htm
and
http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/—publ/documents/article/wcms_105096.pdf

(9)
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/altruism.html

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