Now I wonder if
one couldn't make a critisism of some Liberals
some classical liberals
of a different
but related kind and arising almost from
your relationship with von Mises
is it not the case that
some liberals
are so anxious to allow society to develop
freely and spontaneously
that they wish to remove
virtually all habits, customs
all pre existing inherited moral traditions they want a very radical criticism of society
and you yourself
wouldn't
go along with that I think It's fair to say
Well I don’t know that I wouldn’t I think it needs a much more careful definition
our basic problem is that we have
three levels I would say of moral 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 modern rationalists believe are not
intellectual discoveries
of men who designed them
but that is
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 mans instincts
then 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 effected
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 intellect
I think you can
explain the whole of the
social conflicts of the last two hundred years by the conflict of the three moral traditions
now i'd like to approach
the question of the future society from a different standpoint
one of the principal criticisms
that one gets of a liberal individualist society
is that it is selfish
that it is not an altruistic society whereas socialism
whatever flaws it has in terms of efficiency
is a society in which
we all look after the weakest, the sick
the old and so on
now what role do you see for altruism in a liberal individualist society. The Altruism is
an instinct we’ve inherited from the small society where we know
for whom we work for whom 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 that 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
pursuing 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 is exactly this where the conflict between
the traditional moral
which is not altruistic
which emphasises private property
and the instinctive moral which
is altruistic come in constant conflict
the very tradtion
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
who’s existence
they are not even aware
was only made possible
by the
abandonment of 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