Hayek’s Fatal Concession: Evolution Without Ethics

Hayek’s Fatal Concession: Evolution Without Ethics

     Defenses of Hayek often begin with a diversion: that his critics—Rothbard and Hoppe—misread him as a relativist. But the issue is not misinterpretation; it is internal design. Hayek’s liberalism rests on epistemic humility and collapses under moral scrutiny. He replaced principle with process, rights with results, and property with outcomes. Civilization, he claimed, arose from the survival of effective rules rather than from the recognition of justice. Yet endurance is no proof of legitimacy; coercion and conquest endure too.

By grounding ethics in evolution, Hayek made liberty a biological accident. If moral norms are validated by adaptation, then slavery or taxation could also pass as “successful.” Hoppe dismantles this premise: any attempt to justify rules presupposes self-ownership and peaceful discourse—reason itself implies non-aggression. Rothbard, through natural law, arrives at the same point: property and liberty are not byproducts of history but preconditions of human action.

The same conceptual slip reappears in Hayek’s economics. By reducing prices to “signals,” he drained them of their moral content. Prices are not neutral data—they are appraisals made by owners assuming risk. Mises showed that socialism fails not from ignorance but from the abolition of ownership itself.

Hayek’s epistemic modesty thus produced a liberalism able to describe freedom but not to defend it. Rothbard and Hoppe restore what he abandoned: liberty is not what happens to work—it is what must hold, if man is to act, argue, and own.

For the full treatment, see: “A Rebuttal to ‘A Refutation of Rothbardian and Hoppean Critiques of F.A. Hayek’”