From the annals of the socialist calculation debate stood the proud economist of knowledge F. A. Hayek. The knowledge generated by distributed systems, he argued, can never be contained in a single mind or a single directing body. Rational blueprints can never be good enough to connect the “man on the spot” with the reality of the bigger picture more effectively than the price system. A good Hayekian deprecates explicit knowledge in favor of the tacit for its role in making the human world go round. And yet I find myself these days arguing from the perspective of virtue ethics, a system devised by ancient rationalists. How can I hold, on the one hand, that moral order is defined in the process of its emergence, and on the other hand, that we can speak meaningfully of articulable virtues? But I want to impress upon you that I have not gone mad or embraced a contradiction; rather I think it is quite possible to be a Hayekian virtue ethicist. What’s more, you should be one, too!

The issue is self-consciousness, and whether we can be morally self-conscious and still be Hayekian. To illustrate this, I would like to turn to Michael Oakeshott, another believer in emergent and embedded knowledge structures. In his essay “The Tower of Babel” he speaks of two types of stylized moral orders, the unreflectively traditionalist and the self-conscious. Of the first he says:

The current situations of a normal life are met, not by consciously applying to ourselves a rule of behaviour, nor by conduct recognized as the expression of a moral ideal, but by acting in accordance with a certain habit of behaviour. The moral life in this form does not spring from the consciousness of possible alternative ways of behaving and a choice, determined by an opinion, a rule or an ideal, from among these alternatives; conduct is as nearly as possible without reflection. And consequently, most of the current situations of life do not appear as occasions calling for judgment, or as problems requiring solutions; there is no weighing up of alternatives or reflection on consequences, no uncertainty, no battle of scruples. There is, on the occasion, nothing more than the unreflective following of a tradition of conduct in which we have been brought up.

Sounds like the perfect picture of a Hayekian order, right? I’m not so sure. But before we get to that, let’s look at Oakeshott’s second type of moral order:

This is a form of the moral life in which a special value is attributed to selfconsciousness, individual or social; not only is the rule or the ideal the product of reflective thought, but the application of the rule or the ideal to the situation is also a reflective activity.

Surely Hayek has nothing to do with this sort of morality except as a critic of it, correct?

Not at all. For while Hayek was writing about something like Oakeshott’s unreflective moral life, he was engaging in a self-conscious observation of it. Without self-consciousness — that is to say, abstraction — we do not get Edmund Burke’s “bank and capital of nations and of ages”, for to make an explicit argument on behalf of only following a set of tacit traditions in an unreflective manner is already to have put oneself outside of that behavior. For abstraction, metaphor, and making a case for a thing are precisely the sort of self-conscious activity that Oakeshott is describing in the second sort of moral life. Without such self-consciousness, there is no Oakeshott, no Burke, no Buchanan, no Smith, no Hume, and…no Hayek. And indeed though Oakeshott believes we moderns have pushed too hard in the direction of self-consciousness, he ultimately advocates a mixture of the two forms.

What role can such self-conscious reflection and abstraction have in a Hayekian order?

I believe that the pragmatists’ view on the role of theory in general applies here. Frameworks — Thomas Kuhn’s famous paradigms — are built not by rational constructors but by communities, and over time. Specific individuals may have outsized impacts, but ultimately it takes on a life of its own, across hundreds or thousands of people, and across generations. People like Deirdre McCloskey see frameworks as useful, as shedding light on many conditional truths. But the Enlightenment rationalist believes that they can pierce the veil between themselves and unblemished Truth. They don’t want useful frameworks, they want a direct description of the operation of the universe, physical and moral.

Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools that came after him that formed the beginning of the virtue ethics tradition were on such a mission, this embarrassed Hayekian has to concede. This is how Oakeshott described this period:

It was an age of moral change. In that Greco-Roman world the old habits of moral behaviour had lost their vitality. There were, no doubt, men who were good neighbors, faithful friends and pious citizens, whose confidence in the customs that determined their conduct was still unshaken; but, in general, the impetus of moral habit of behaviour seems to have been spent-illustrating, perhaps, the defect of a form of morality too securely insulated from the criticism of ideals. It was, in consequence, an age of intense moral self-consciousness. an age of moral reformers who, unavoidably, preached a morality of the pursuit of ideals and taught a variety of dogmatic moral ideologies. The intellectual energy of the time was directed towards the determination of an ideal, and the moral energy towards the translation of that ideal into practice. Moral selfconsciousness itself became a virtue; genuine morality was identified with the ‘practice of philosophy’. And it was thought that for the achievement of a good life it was necessary that a man should submit to an artificial moral training, a moral gymnastic; learning and discipline must be added to ‘nature’.

And yet there is something about Aristotle that should endear him to a Hayekian right off the bat. If you read the Nichomachean Ethics, you will find early on that Aristotle feels obliged to make an account of the conventionally held beliefs of his day and engage with them. Moreover, it is clear that he often feels that when his theory has taken him too far afield of widely held beliefs, it should be a source of anxiety for him rather than a source of pride. This is very different from the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, who makes it clear on a regular basis that the vulgar morality of the average person is beneath contempt.

As a result, Aristotle’s ethics make use of a language that is very natural to a non-philosopher, even to this day. I don’t need for you to have read a word of moral philosophy for you to know what I’m talking about when I say that someone was very courageous, or prudent, or — on the other side — self-indulgent, myopic, or arrogant. These common notions are refined, and put into an organized framework, and given a few specific additions from Aristotle and those who came after him.

One such addition that Hayekians are bound to find appealing is the notion of practical wisdom; or “phronesis” in Greek. For Aristotle ethical acts are a highly contingent affair:

For instance, both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way

For Aristotle a virtuous act is like a well-delivered joke; there are a ton of things that have to be “just right”. In the case of a joke, it has to be the right content, delivered with the right timing, in the right tone, in the right situation, to the right audience. Each specific virtue has a host of specific parameters such as that which must be met in just the right way.

And — this is the best part from a Hayekian point of view — there is no shortcut. The only way to develop practical wisdom is with experience, by living life, by learning from other people in a shared ethical community. Aristotle was no Hayekian himself — he believed that the virtues were part of the essential Truth of things. But the metaphysics of the virtues are not built into the framework itself, and so we need not agree with Aristotle here. And the notion of knowledge that can only be learned by doing, by becoming familiar with particular contingent contexts is profoundly Hayekian. Though given the chronology, perhaps we ought instead to be saying that Hayek had an Aristotelian streak.

Indeed, after the Hellenistic schools and the Romans, it was the Christian theologians who built on top of this framework, and they had a very different metaphysical universe in mind than the philosophers they inherited it from. Names like Aquinas loom large but even when they were working just with Aristotle they were working with an enormous commentary tradition, which included commentaries from Muslim scholars.

And this is the final piece that should endear virtue ethics to any Hayekian — or Burkean, Oakshottian, Humean, what have you — virtue ethics has withstood the test of time more than any other moral framework. At least, any other framework in the western tradition — I’ll admit an appalling ignorance outside of that boundary. Nevertheless, we are talking about thousands of years of philosophers, scholars, and theologians taking an inheritance and investing in a legacy which is available and alive for us to use today.

I’ve made my Hayekian apology for virtue ethics, but there’s still work to be done. After all, I still have to make a case that it is actually useful as a framework and demonstrate just how it can be used. I am slowly trying to demonstrate through practice how it can be useful for clarifying how we think about moral questions. I intend to demonstrate that it can also be useful for informing how we live our lives — but that is a much larger project.