Everything's a Decision

Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong direct us to an interview with Friedrich Hayek from 1977. They discuss the real economic parts of the interview, but the following struck me as an interesting bit of political philosophy. In response to the question, "why is there no social justice?" Hayek responds:

"Because justice refers to rules of individual conduct. And no rules of the conduct of individuals can have the effect that the good things of life are distributed in a particular manner. No state of affairs as such is just or unjust: it is only when we assume that somebody is responsible for having brought it about. Now, we do complain that God has been unjust when one family has suffered many deaths and another family has all of its children grow up safely. But we know we can't take that seriously. We don't mean that anybody has been unjust. In the same sense, a spontaneously working market, where prices act as guides to action, cannot take account of what people in any sense need or deserve, because it creates a distribution which nobody has designed, and something which has not been designed, a mere state of affairs as such, cannot be just or unjust. And the idea that things ought to be designed in a 'just' manner means, in effect, that we must abandon the market and turn to a planned economy in which somebody decides how much each ought to have, and that means, of course, that we can only have it at the price of the complete abolition of personal liberty."

This strikes me as almost the logical maximum of the conservative tendency to assume that the moral content of doing nothing is automatically nothing. You only risk doing wrong when you decide to do something in the first place. But this way of thinking about it is completely wrong.