Hayek endorsed ranking human lives by their utility to the community

Evidence

In his final book, Hayek referred to Hardin in a section titled “the calculus of costs is a calculus of lives.” Expanding on his ideas of cultural evolutionary progress measured in the quality and quantity of lives, Hayek suggested that humans could be ranked by utility: “The good hunter or defender of the community, the fertile mother and perhaps even the wise old man may be more important than most babies and most of the aged.” “The requirement of preserving the maximum number of lives,” he wrote, “is not that all individual lives be regarded as equally important.” — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 29

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Directly challenges the comfortable image of Hayek as a purely procedural/organic-order liberal — worth placing against his more widely-quoted defenses of individual liberty.
• SEED: An essay could trace how the ‘calculus of lives’ sits inside Hayek’s late work on cultural evolution and whether later MPS figures amplified or muted it.

Related

• In his final book Hayek endorsed ranking human lives by utility (similarity 0.94)