The Form of Justice

One of Hayek’s biggest faults is that he is nearly impossible to read sometimes.  Sometimes to the point that you have to read the same paragraph multiple times, only to get more confused each time.  In the second volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty entitled The Mirage of Social Justice, Hayek associates multiple principles with what he calls rules of Just Conduct. Among these are impersonality, universalizability, generality, and end-independency.  The cohesion between these principles was not apparent to me at first until I experienced them directly.

As I was walking home from the Mercatus office this afternoon, I took my usual route through the Johnson Center.  I like to take the Northeastern door as it has very efficient automatic door openers. This instance, however, I had an additional hurdle.  Someone was coming through in the other direction! We both kept up our regular pace, but if neither of us deviated from our regular path we would collide.  As we only noticed each other seconds before the imminent disaster, we had no time to make a plan as to who would go through first. I stepped to the side and waited for a moment while he passed through.  On reflection, it was decided implicitly between the both of us that I would be the one to step to the side as he was closer to the door when we both noticed each other. At the time, I didn’t make an efficiency calculation and judge from a total social welfare position what the optimal distribution of door usage would be.  I just knew the rules of justice and followed them.

In this case, the rule was end-independent as it didn’t take into account how much either of us needed the extra 2 seconds of time.  It was impersonal as it did not I.D. either of us to make sure we were of the right class to participate in such a rule. It was general as it could apply to any situation in which two people try to use a door, but only one must be chosen.  It was universalizable as I (and I presume the other gentleman) would have applied the same rule regardless of the gender, race, or otherwise distinguishing feature of the other person. We would treat all humans equal according to such a rule.

I lost two seconds not because it is more just for him to have those seconds and me to lose them, but because such rules are blind to circumstance, and can have no comment on the outcome.  If we discover that some rules often create certain kinds of outcomes then we may have reason to change the rules. But those rules again must be changed by other rules of this general type.  In no way does Hayek mean to say that all inherited rules are principles of an eternal justice, but that a certain form of rule, one that is generalizable, universal, impersonal, and end-independent, the product of human action but not of human design, is necessary to a general form of cooperation.  Social justice then acts on the ignorance of the existence of such laws and the belief that the criteria of justice at the outcome level can be used to judge such rules.

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