Hayek Does Not Claim That "Greed Is Good"; He Claims That Greed Can Have Good Consequences

His writings on markets bring out the way in which the liberal ‘great society’ that he favours rests upon actions which may be morally unlovely. It also involves the operation of rules which may generate consequences which are morally problematic. Hayek is not arguing that, in the phrase from Wall Street, ‘greed is good’. Rather, he is arguing, with Mandeville, that greed can have good consequences—which is a rather different matter. Similarly, Hayek argues, with Hume, that the system of justice upon which a ‘great society’ rests may also generate specific legal decisions which may look grim, from a moral point of view. . . .

Why this matters is brought out by the other theme in Hayek’s work with which we will again here be concerned: the way in which the kind of society that he favours—and which he argues is the best that we can attain—is maintained by the actions of individuals who are, for the most part, blind to the systematic consequences of their actions.

--Jeremy Shearmur, introduction to Hayek and After: Hayekian Liberalism as a Research Programme, Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought 1 (London: Routledge, 2003), 10.