dog gone. you were doing so good in that first post, and then you crashed.
You are correct: "we get our morality elsewhere," sort of. "Mechanisms" aren't amoral. A hammer is a mechanism. Is it "amoral?" It's designed for a constructive purpose. That in itself is a moral purpose. Can it be used immorally? Of course it can. The mechanism has a moral purpose. Its use depends upon the morality of the user.
You don't need a 2000 year old religion to know that -- honest reflection will teach you -- but that religion certainly knows it and can tell you a good deal more about markets and morality.
You speak of this mechanism as if it is a natural law of some kind, or even self existent. So let's say it is (even if doing so is a bit of a concession at this point). All of creation (or nature, if you prefer) has the principal of life built into it -- it's always growing, pushing through, multiplying, creating and recreating itself (after its kind). There's a hint of morality in that "natural law."
“A hammer is a mechanism. Is it ‘amoral?’ It’s designed for a constructive purpose. That in itself is a moral purpose.”
I don’t think we’re in the same argument, at this point. You know the hammer’s purpose is moral because something, rationality, religion, tradition, whatever, tells you so. You don’t know it from the hammer itself, and that’s why it absolutely is “amoral”. No one learns morality from their hammers.
Again, it isn’t that the market order is impervious to moral judgment. It isn’t that its means and ends are beyond good and evil, or that it cannot be said to conform to any particular moral system. It is that it does not by itself produce a moral system. In fact, it can be rightly said having a market system at all is predicated on a pre-existing moral system. We’d never have the free market in the first place had not a solid moral system evolved in its own.
“You speak of this mechanism as if it is a natural law of some kind, or even self existent.”
It is natural, in a sense. That’s a tricky word, since it’s come to mean primal or instinctual, in recent years. To borrow from F.A. Hayek, the market order, much like religion and other traditional moral systems, lies between instinct and reason. No one knew how to live by it out of the womb, and no one dreamed it up out of their heads. It evolved in practice, gaining steam as the societies that adopted it thrived by it and passed it on to other groups, most importantly the coming generations.
“All of creation (or nature, if you prefer) has the principal of life built into it — it’s always growing, pushing through, multiplying, creating and recreating itself (after its kind).”
I won’t stipulate to that. If it were not for the fact that the market order had outlived and outproduced other manners of living, it wouldn’t be worth studying or defending. It is not that the market order is natural, and possesses the virtue of all life. It is that it’s successful; that it has proven itself.
“There’s a hint of morality in that ‘natural law’”
Once again, no. Unless you automatically associate whatever’s natural with an all-powerful, all-knowing God. We can take or leave any part of nature, as we choose. That’s what morality is: picking and choosing what we like (in a manner of speaking). If we had to accept everything that was because it is, we wouldn’t be moral.
“Is it ‘amoral?’ It’s designed for a constructive purpose. That in itself is a moral purpose.”
Oh, and I forgot to add, you argue that the hammer itself is moral because it was designed with a constructive purpose. Seems to me the morality would adhere to the desing, not the object, and thus the designer, i.e. the human. It has a moral purpose because someone told it to.