Principles and Pragmatism

Over at Knowledge Problem, Lynne Kiesling reproduces a nice quote from Friedrich Hayek’s essay, “Principles or Expediency” (1971):

From the insight that the benefits of civilization rest on the use of more knowledge than can be used in any deliberately concerted effort, it follows that it is not in our power to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable. Though probably all beneficial improvements must be piecemeal, if the separate steps are not guided by a body of coherent principles, the outcome is likely to be a suppression of individual freedom.

The reason for this is very simple though not generally understood. Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known. The indirect effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and will therefore be disregarded. We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving particular results by such interference.

And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appears to be its individual merits, we always overestimate the advantages of central direction. Our choice will regularly appear to be one between a certain known and tangible gain and the mere probability of the prevention of some unknown beneficial action by unknown persons.

I’m attracted to the point Hayek is making here, and it gets at some issues I’ve been thinking about regarding the gap between strict minimal state versions of libertarianism and more modest forms of classical liberalism (see here or here for my take on the distinction).  Here are some reflections, and questions.

1. Suppose you believe in certain principles about the efficiency or morality of free markets.  I take it that the point of this quotation is to suggest that you should be marginally more radical in your commitment to those principles than you otherwise would be.  You might think you see exceptions to those principles, but you should, on reflection, doubt your ability to accurately identify those cases where the exceptions are genuine rather than merely apparent.  And so you should, at least in some cases,  stick with your commitment to free-markets even when you think you have good reason to deviate from that commitment.  The problem with a pragmatic approach is that, given constraints on our knowledge, such an approach just really isn’t that pragmatic.
2. Hayek’s point is, naturally given the focus of his work, an epistemic one.  But it seems like a similar argument could be made on familiar public choice grounds.  Even if we think people can know when they’ve found an exception, we might not trust the institutional structures in which they operate to provide them with the right incentives to identify it accurately.  In other words, if we give government agents the power to identify and act on perceived exceptions to the rule of laissez-faire, we should expect them to abuse that discretion in order to serve their own interests.
3. It seems to me that there are some affinities in this argument with Richard Epstein’s argument in Simple Rules for a Complex World.  The arguments are different, but both seem to push toward the conclusion that our actual legal rules should be less fine-grained than those that would be necessary to achieve “perfect justice.”
4. Epstein, though, is no radical.  In fact, he’s gone on record criticizing more radical libertarians like Randy Barnett for being, well, too simplistic.
5. And, of course, Hayek is no radical libertarian either.  While he certainly favored a much more libertarian set of policies than we have today, he nevertheless supported a state-financed social safety net (“an assured minimum income, a floor below which nobody need descend”), public support for orphans and others in extreme need, and mildly progressive taxation in order to fund these and other deviations from the night watchman state.  In fact, it’s hard to read through a single chapter of The Constitution of Liberty without coming across some program Hayek endorses that exceeds the bounds of the strict libertarian minimal state.  And Hayek took even greater pains to distance himself from radical libertarianism in The Road to Serfdom, writing that “probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all of the principle of laissez-faire capitalism.”
6. How to make sense of the seeming tension between [1] and [5] above?  Perhaps chronology matters?  The quote we’re analyzing here comes from a 1971 essay.  The Constitution of Liberty, in contrast, was published in 1960.  And The Road to Serfdom in 1944.  Perhaps this essay represents Hayek changing his mind about just how strong a commitment to libertarian principles ought to be?  There can be no doubt that Hayek gradually moved in this direction toward the end of his life.  Is this idea about the strength of principles part of what drove that shift?
7. Intellectual biography aside, should the idea Hayek expresses in this quote lead libertarians to become more radical?  Is it always unreasonable for lawmakers to betray a principle in order to “aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result”?  (Didn’t Jerry Gaus make an argument somewhat along these lines?)  Or does it depend on the importance and predictability of the result for which we’re aiming? Or the nature of the principle we’re betraying?  (Isn’t a good principle, partly, one that has been constructed in such a way as to not have important exceptions?)