Hayek was right: you can’t understand society without evolution

In December the controversial satellite TV channel ReallyTV launches its Christmas season with a flagship reality show called From Homs to Hamburg. A dozen refugees, accompanied by their families, will be given a budget of $500 and two-days’ water in a race to cross the German border using any form of transport. The prize for the winning family is a car and a two-bedroom flat in -Billstedt. The show follows the success of the US reality TV show Monterrey to Monterey,in which Mexican families compete to cross the Rio Grande by hiding in shipping -containers.

Now, before you recoil in disgust, I should just point out that nothing like this programme will be appearing this Christmas, because I made the whole thing up. ReallyTV does not exist.

But what interests me about this thought experiment is that almost every civilised person will regard this programme as repellent. And yet when, for a brief period, the German government announced that they would welcome all refugees who made it to Germany, few noticed that they were effectively creating a version of this competition on a giant scale. Both would cause people to embark on a risky undertaking with potentially fatal costs to those who failed. Yet most people find the TV programme horrible and the government programme admirable.

I wondered whether this showed a scaling problem — whether the moral instincts and intuitions which serve us very well in judging small-scale actions fail when applied to larger groups. Just then, in one of those freakish coincidences, an email arrived from David Sloan Wilson with a transcript of a 1985 talk by Friedrich Hayek.

Hayek: ‘Our basic problem is that we have three levels 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 toward people that we know.