O busílis da questão

Hayek sobre valores morais e altruísmo



There are three levels of beliefs: we have in the first instance our intuitive moral feelings which are adapted to the small person, to person society, where we act for people whom we know and are served by people whom we know.

Then we have a society governed by moral traditions, which unlike what the rationalists believe, are not intelectual discoveries of men who designed them but that are a result of a process which I now prefer to describe as a biological term of "group selection". Those groups who had quite accidentally developed favourable habits such as the tradition of private property and the family who did succeed but who never understood this. So we owe our present extended order of human cooperation very largely to a moral tradition which the intellectual does not approve of because they have never been intellectually designed and it has to compete with a third level of moral beliefs. Those morals which the intellectuals design in the hope that they can better satisfy Man's instincts than the traditional rules do.

And we live in a world where three moral traditions are in constant conflict: the innate ones, the traditional ones and the intellectually designed ones, and ultimately, all our political conflicts of this time can be reduced as affected by a conflict between three moral traditions of a different nature, not only of different content: one being innate and spontaneous, the other traditions we have learned and the third, imagined designs of our intelect. I think you can explain the whole of the social conflicts of the last two hundred years by the conflict of three moral traditions.

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The altruism is an instinct we've inherited from the small society where we know for whom we work, who we serve. When you pass from this, as I like to call it, concrete society where we are guided by what we see, to the abstract society which far transcends our range of vision it becomes necessary thet we are guided not by the knowledge of the effect of what we do, but through some abstract symbols. Now the only symbol that tells us where we can make the best contribution is profit and, in fact, by persuing profit we are as altruistic as we can possibly be because we extend our concern to people who are beyond our range of personal conception. This is the condition which makes it possible even to produce what I call an extended order. An order which is not determined by our aims, by our knowing what are the most urgent needs, but by impersonal mechanism who by a system of communication puts a label on certain things which are wholly impersonal. Now it's exactly this where the conflict between the traditional moral which is not altruistic, which emphasizes private property and the instinctive moral which is altruistic come in constant conflict. The very tradition from a concrete society where each serves the needs of other people whom he knows to an extended abstract society where most people serve the needs of others whom they do not know, whose existence they are not even aware of was only made possible by the abandonment of the altruism and solidarity as the main guiding factors which, I admit, are still the factors dominating our instincts and what restrains our instincts in this respect is the tradition of private property and the family, the two traditional rules of morals which are in conflict with instinct.