Moral tradition as a discovery procedure: Hayek and the social epistemology of moral realism

F. A. Hayek’s mature moral philosophy is often read either as evolutionary functionalism or as conservative traditionalism. Both readings face well-documented internal difficulties. This article develops the traditionalist reading by clarifying the epistemic status of moral tradition. Read in epistemic rather than merely functional terms, and joined to a realist commitment of the kind now articulated in contemporary metaethics, Hayek’s account of moral tradition yields a moderately rationalist moral realism: realist in holding that moral truths are objective and grounded in stable features of the human condition, moderately rationalist in holding that such truths are progressively recognised, articulated, and refined by reason once tradition has made them available, rather than derivable a priori by an isolated mind. By extending Hayek’s account of spontaneous order from market coordination to moral enquiry, the article treats tradition as a distributed, intergenerational procedure for testing practical responses to the human condition. So construed, the framework dissolves the tension, identified by Kukathas and Reiner, between Hayek’s professed metaethical scepticism and his substantive normative commitments, and reconnects his critique of constructivist rationalism to the classical conception of practical reason.