Topic: Norms

Quotes

Anthony O'Hear, “Popperian Individualism Today” (2009)

• To think that a disposition to criticize might on its own be enough to hold a community together is itself utopian, and it could be as destructively utopian as some of the other utopias Popper correctly criticizes.#Quoted in Erwin Dekker, The Viennese Students of Civilization (2016)

Barry Weingast, “The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law” (1997)

• Maintaining limits on the state requires that citizens oppose a violation even if they potentially benefit from it. . . . [C]itizens in stable democracies not only must value democracy but also must be willing to take costly action to defend democratic institutions against potential violations.#

Erwin Dekker, The Viennese Students of Civilization (2016)

• The liberal movement in Vienna had started around the celebration of German cultural heroes such as Goethe or Schiller. Communities can never be sustained without a shared identity and shared symbols.#
• As Hayek stresses time and time again, his concept of freedom defends the individual from the arbitrary will of others, but it does not defends him from the impersonal forces of the market, social norms, a governing morality, or the acceptance of not fully understood and hence incompletely justified norms.#
• Civilization is always concerned with practices, how things are done: with greater or less foresight, with more or less specialization, with manners or without, with more or less technical sophistication.#

F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1945)

• Democratic government has worked successfully where, and so long as, the functions of government were, by a widely accepted creed, restricted to fields where agreement among a majority could be achieved by free discussion; and it is the great merit of the liberal creed that it reduced the range of subjects on which agreement was necessary to one on which it was likely to exist in a society of free men. It is now often said that democracy will not tolerate “capitalism”. If “capitalism” means here a competitive system based on free disposal over private property, it is far more important to realize that only within this system is democracy possible. When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.#

F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

• Like all moral principles, [freedom] demands that it be accepted as a value in itself, as a principle that must be respected without our asking whether the consequences in the particular instance will be beneficial. We shall not achieve the results we want if we do not accept it as a creed or presumption so strong that no considerations of expediency can be allowed to limit it.#
• We have thus no choice but to submit to rules whose rationale we often do not know, and to do so whether or not we can see that anything important depends on their being observed in the particular instance. The rules of morals are instrumental in the sense that they assist mainly in the achievement of other human values; however, since we only rarely can know what depends on their being followed in the particular instance, to observe them must be regarded as a value in itself, a sort of intermediate end which we must pursue without questioning its justification in the particular case.#

F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1978)

• [Freud’s] basic aim of undoing the culturally acquired repressions and freeing the natural drives, has opened the most fatal attack on the basis of all civilization.#Quoted in Erwin Dekker, The Viennese Students of Civilization (2016)

James Buchanan, The Calculus of Consent (1962)

• A widespread adoption of Judeo-Christian morality may be a necessary condition to the operation of any genuinely free society of individuals.#
• Christian idealism, to be effective in leading to a more harmonious social order, must be tempered by an acceptance of the moral imperative of individualism, the rule of equal freedom. . . . “Love the neighbor, but also let him alone when he desires to be let alone” may, in one sense, be said to be the overriding ethical principle for Western liberal society.#

James Buchanan, The Reason of Rules (1985)

• The commonality of [a] norm, at least over a large number of persons, is a necessary feature of any operationally useful theory of choice or action that moves beyond the strict individualistic models#

James Buchanan, Economic Inquiry and its Logic (2000)

• The paucity of billboards in the Moscow of 1990 was not primarily attributable to regulatory prohibition. This result emerged directly from the fact that no seller-supplier of any good or service felt any economic pressure to respond to customer interests or to expand the demands for products.#

Jiang Quing, “From Mind Confucianism to Political Confucianism” (2011)

• In traditional society, organizations were comparatively simple and people were relatively isolated from each other. As a result, traditional evils primarily manifested in individuals’ bad behaviors, which could be remedied through individuals’ self-reflection or religious practice. In contrast, modern society is highly organized and specialized, and evils manifest themselves primarily in highly organized or collective forms that cannot be readily cured by ordinary religious beliefs. Such modern evils can only be dealt with through institutional solutions, since only institutions have sufficient power to cope with organized evils.#

Kenneth Boulding, “Economics as a Moral Science” (1969)

• It has been the precise weakness of the institutions that we think primarily of as economic, that is, associated with exchange. . . . that they easily lose their legitimacy if they are not supported by other elements and institutions in the society which can sustain them as integral parts of a larger community.#Quoted in Erwin Dekker, The Viennese Students of Civilization (2016)

Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (2009)

• Enforcing norms is an act of altruism, as the whole group benefits from my attempts to make the transgressor shape up.#
• Guilt and shame are kinds of self-punishments that serve, first, to make it less likely that I will engage in the same transgression in the future, and second, to display to others that I indeed hew to the norm, even if I did not live up to it in this case. . . . Guilt and shame are thus biologically based emotional reactions, which presuppose the kinds of normative (or at least punitive) social environments that humans have constructed for themselves. They are thus particularly good exemplars of the co-evolutionary process between human biology and culture.#

Sam Bowles, A Cooperative Species (2011)

• Once an internalization allele has evolved to fixation, there is nothing to prevent group-harmful phenotypic norms from also emerging, provided they are not excessively costly to the individual, given the strength of the payoff-based updating process.#
• Taking on a general rule of behavior as an objective rather than a constraint or an instrument toward some other end is likely to be costly for two reasons. First, a considerable fraction of the total available time of the members of most societies is spent teaching the young the proper way to behave, rather than providing for the nutritional and other needs of its members. But in addition to the cost of acquiring such a norm, there is a further cost: the rule will not be ideally suited to all situations, and its internalization deprives the individual of flexibility in dealing with such situations on a case-by-case basis.#

Tyler Cowen, “The Costs of Cooperation” (1999)

• [A norm of] citizen cooperation decreases the cost of supplying public goods through government, but it also decreases the cost of supplying abuse through government. #

Yuval Harari, Sapiens (2014)

• How can we square the consumerist ethic with the capitalist ethic of the business person, according to which profits should not be wasted, and should instead be reinvested in production? It’s simple. As in previous eras, there is today a division of labour between the elite and the masses. In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny. Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need.#