Robert Nozick's Derivation of the Minimal State
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1The Strengths and Limits of Philosophical Anarchism
THE STRENGTHS AND LIMITS OF 1 PHILOSOPHICAL ANARCHISM THE BASIC DEFINITION of state legitimacy as the exclusive right to make, apply, and enforce laws is common, clearly visible in Max Weber and contemporary political philosophy and found less explicitly in the classical contract thinkers.1 A. John Simmons, drawing on Locke, writes that “A state’s (or government’s) legitimacy is the complex moral right it possesses to be the exclusive imposer of binding duties on its sub- jects, to have its subjects comply with these duties, and to use coercion to enforce the duties” (Simmons 2001, 130). Similar definitions—whether vis-à-vis legitimacy or authority—with slight alterations of terms and in conjunction with a series of other ideas and conditions (for example, “authoritativeness,” background criteria, the difference between force and violence) can be found in Robert Paul Wolff (1998, 4), Joseph Raz (2009), Richard Flathman (1980), Leslie Green (1988), David Copp (1999), Hannah Pitkin (1965, 1966), and others. The point is that the justification of state legitimacy and the (corresponding) obligation to obey involve, more often than not, making, applying, and enforcing laws: political power. Often left out of these discussions—with important exceptions—are the real practices of legitimate statehood, and perhaps for good reason. What philosophers who explore the question of legitimacy and authority are most often interested in—for a variety of reasons—is the relation of the individ- ual to the state, that is, whether and to what extent a citizen (or sometimes a noncitizen) has an obligation to obey the state. As Raz notes, part of the explanation for this is that contemporary philosophical interest in questions of political obligation emerged in response to political events in the 1960s (Raz 1981, 105). -
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia Peter Vallentyne, University
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Missouri: MOspace Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia Peter Vallentyne, University of Missouri-Columbia in The Twentieth Century: Quine and After (Vol. 5, of Central Works of Philosophy ) edited by John Shand (Acumen Publishing, 2006), pp. 86-103 Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), along with John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), radically changed the landscape in analytic political philosophy. For much of the preceding half-century, under the influence of logical positivism’s heavy emphasis on empirical verifiability, much of moral philosophy was taken up with meta-ethics (e.g., the semantics of moral discourse)—with little attention given to normative moral theories. Moreover, to the extent that normative theories were considered, utilitarianism was the center of attention. This all changed with the publication of Rawls’s articulation and defense of liberal egalitarianism and Nozick’s libertarian challenge to the legitimacy of anything more than the night-watchman state. At the core of Nozick’s book are two arguments. One is that a night-watchman state (which protects only against violence, theft, fraud, and breach of contract) could be legitimate, even without the consent of all those to be governed. The other is that nothing more extensive than the night-watchman state is legitimate, except with the consent of all. The argument is complex, and Nozick often inserts long—and very interesting—digressions. Below I shall focus only on his core argument. I shall thus not address his discussions of Rawls’ theory of justice (Ch. -
Beyond the Principles of Bioethics: Facing the Consequences of Fundamental Moral Disagreement
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1677-2954.2012v11n1p13 BEYOND THE PRINCIPLES OF BIOETHICS: FACING THE CONSEQUENCES OF FUNDAMENTAL MORAL DISAGREEMENT H. TRISTRAM ENGELHARDT (Rice Universtiy / USA) ABSTRACT Given intractable secular moral pluralism, the force and significance of the four principles (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress must be critically re-considered. This essay examines the history of the articulation of these four principles of bioethics, showing why initially there was an illusion of a common morality that led many to hold that the principles could give guidance across cultures. But there is no one sense of the content or the theoretical justification of these principles. In addition, a wide range of secular moral and bioethical choices has been demoralized into lifestyle choices; the force of the secular moral point of view has also been deflated, thus compounding moral pluralism. It is the political generation of the principles that provides a common morality in the sense of an established morality. The principles are best understood as embedded not in a common morality, sensu stricto, but in that morality that is established at law and public policy in a particular polity. Although moral pluralism is substantive and intractable at the level of moral content, in a particular polity a particular morality and a particular bioethics can be established, regarding which health care ethics consultants can be experts. Public morality and bioethics are at their roots a political reality. Keywords: Bioethics. Pluralism. Moral disagreement. Ethical particularism. RESUMO Dado o pluralismo moral secular intratável, a força e o significado dos quatro princípios (autonomia, beneficência, não maleficência e justiça) de Tom Beauchamp e James Childress precisam ser reconsiderados criticamente. -
The Rule of Law and the Limits of Anarchy
Legal Theory, 27 (2021), 70–95. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work. 0361-6843/21 doi:10.1017/S1352325221000045 THE RULE OF LAW AND THE LIMITS OF ANARCHY Carmen E. Pavel* Kings College London, London, England Abstract Anarchy is often contrasted with law, order, or security. But anarchist societies, by which I mean societies that lack a monopoly of coercive force, need not be lawless. They can develop sophisticated legal systems that regulate the behavior of their mem- bers and protect their rights. International law, market anarchism, and other models of anarchism such as the one proposed by Chandran Kukathas already exhibit or could plausibly exhibit complex legal rules and institutions. I will show that insofar as these models rely on consent, they all share similar structural flaws, namely, that they can- not meet basic rule-of-law values such as equality before the law and access to legal remedies for wrongs that embody and respect individual moral equality, even mini- mally conceived. The implication of this argument is not to vindicate state-based legal systems. Rather it is to show that legal systems, state-based or not, must have a strong nonconsensual, coercive element: the process of making, applying, and enforcing law must, to some extent, be severed from consent if law is to perform its function of providing for minimal justice. -
Rethinking Anarchy and the State in IR Theory: the Contributions of Classical Anarchism*
Rethinking Anarchy and the State in IR Theory: The Contributions of Classical Anarchism* Alex Prichard University of Bristol © Alex Prichard School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies, University of Bristol Working Paper No. 03-10 Dr Alex Prichard gained his PhD from Loughborough University in 2008. His research brings to light the international political theory of the anarchist Pierre- Joseph Proudhon, and will be published by Routledge in 2011 in the 'New International Relations' series as The International Political Theory of Pierre- Joseph Proudhon: A World Without Sovereigns. He is founder and convenor of the PSA Anarchist Studies Network and is co-editor of 'Contemporary Anarchist Studies', a new book series to be published by Continuum from 2010. Dr Prichard was a teaching fellow and research officer at the University of Bath (2008-2009) and is currently an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol. He will be a teaching fellow in International Political Theory at the LSE from September 2010. *Please do not cite without the author’s permission. Comments welcome to [email protected] Rethinking Anarchy and the State in IR Theory: The Contributions of Classical Anarchism Abstract: In this paper I intervene in an ongoing debate between Colin Wight and Alex Wendt regarding the nature of the state. The current debate revolves around whether the state is an agent or a structure and seems to have become stuck as regards to the ontological status of groups. For Wendt the state is a person; for Wight the state is a structure that constrains and enables individuals. -
Wiley, A.Terrance. "Introduction." Angelic Troublemakers: Religion and Anarchism in America. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014
Wiley, A.Terrance. "Introduction." Angelic Troublemakers: Religion and Anarchism in America. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 1–14. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501306730.0005>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 01:35 UTC. Copyright © A. Terrance Wiley 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Introduction Few political philosophies are as misunderstood as anarchism. The term conjures images of disorder for many, even though only a minority of anarchists has advocated the use of violence of any sort. At least three factors have affected how many imagine anarchism. First, anarchism has often been reduced to the terrorist ethos that marked the political movement (namely anarcho-syndicalism or anarcho-communism) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where anarchist labor activists turned to assassination as a method of social change. Second, many anarchists have been “militant atheists,” often hostile toward religion. This hostility probably reached its height around the time of the Spanish Civil War, where while controlling Spain’s Catalonia (“Anarchist Catalonia”) region from 1936 to 1939, a contingent of anarchists demolished Catholic buildings and murdered clerics. And fi nally, a third factor shaping the perception of anarchism among many is that some anarchists, such as the egoist Max Stirner, have been proponents of nihilism. This book is about three anarchists of a different sort. The main interpretive chapters, descriptive ethical case studies, are devoted to analyzing the religious ethics, political philosophies, and social activism of Henry David Thoreau, Dorothy Day, and Bayard Rustin in terms of an anarchist conceptual scheme that promises to elucidate the implications of particular varieties of religious radicalism for the modern territorial state and our normative relation to it. -
1 Politics 9503A/Philosophy 9119A: Central Problems in Political Theory
Politics 9503A/Philosophy 9119A: Central Problems in Political Theory September-December 2020 Tuesday Zoom meetings 3:30-5:20 Charles Jones, 661-2111 x85060, [email protected], SSC 4129 Zoom Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:30-3:00 & by appointment This course examines some central problems in political theory: political authority, property and the market, distributive justice and equality, liberty, and democracy. We will study both classic works and recent scholarship on these issues. By the end of the course, students will be able to: (1) Describe the problem of political authority and explain (and evaluate) the main arguments in its favour, (2) Assess the case for and against private property rights, (3) Explain the pros and cons of markets in goods and services as a means of organizing an economy, (4) Describe the problem of distributive justice (‘who should get what?’) and explain the relative merits of competing approaches to this problem, (5) Evaluate the value of equality and sufficiency as competing goals of just distribution, (6) Explain the arguments on both sides of the debate between distributive egalitarians and relational egalitarians in their answers to the question, ‘What is the point of equality?’, (7) Identify the competing conceptions of liberty in the history of political theory and adjudicate between them, (8) Evaluate the case for and against ‘libertarian paternalism’ as an approach to public policy, and (9) Outline the most important arguments against and for democracy as a form of public and private decision-making. Texts Course readings will be posted on the OWL site. There is one book to purchase: Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about it), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. -
Self-Ownership and the Limits of Libertarianism
Self-Ownership and the Limits of Libertarianism 1. Introduction In the longstanding debate between liberals and libertarians' over the morality of redistributive labor taxation, liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin have consistently taken the position that such taxation is perfectly compatible with individual liberty,^ whereas libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard have adopted the (very) contrary position that such taxation is tantamount to slavery.^ I will demonstrate over the course of this paper that their debate over redistributive labor taxation can be usefijlly reconstituted as a debate over the incidents (or components) of self-ownership, with liberals making the case for a nar- 'i use the term liberal as a shorthand for liberal egalitarian throughout the paper. I defme libertarians as a type of classical liberal, distinguished from other classical liberals by their extreme positions on personal liberty issues and by their style of political theoriz- ing, which is characterized by the rigorous deduction of political positions from first princi- ples such as self-ownership. Libertarians may be further subdivided into right-libertarians (such as the Robert Nozick of Anarchy. State, and Utopia and Murray Rothbard), who op- pose any form of redistribution, and left-libertarians (such as Hillel Steiner, Michael Otsuka, and Peter Vallentyne), who support the redistribution of natural resources but gen- erally oppose redistributive labor taxation. For more information on left-libertarianism, see Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner (eds.). The Origins of Left Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings (New York: Palgrave Publishers, 2000) and Left Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Palgrave Publishers, 2000). -
A Critique of John Rawls' Social Justice Theory and the Fate Of
Journal of Law, Policy and Globalization www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-3240 (Paper) ISSN 2224-3259 (Online) Vol.28, 2014 A Critique of John Rawls’ Social Justice Theory and the Fate of Nigeria’s Politics in the 21st-Century and Beyond Elijah Okon John, Ph. D. (Senior Lecturer) Department of Philosophy , University of Uyo, P. M. B. 1017, Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria E-mail: [email protected] Abstract In the present, one of the major problems plaguing the Nigerian society is that of social justice. And great thinkers from time immemorial have attempted to discuss the meaning of and the need for social justice in a society like Nigeria. But recently, a contemporary American social and political thinker, John Rawls, is his advocacy for social justice, is very vocal in the need and eventual formation of the social theory concept. Thus, this paper attempts to give a philosophical critique of Rawls’ conception and the necessity of the application of his social justice theory in the Nigerian political landscape. This work does not intend to present Rawls’ position as the most logical, perfect social and political arguments in the consideration of social justice. But it intends to point out some defects about Rawls’ social justice. But the main consideration shall be on the need and relevance of it to the Nigerian nation. In this way, it shall effectively point to the evils that can accompany its negligence. Keywords: Social Justice, Political Stability, Social Freedom, and Rawls’ Theory. 1. Introduction Ever since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, John Rawls (1921-2002), an American philosopher, educator and a foremost contemporary social and political thinker, has not ceased to attract the admiration of many. -
In Response to the Autonomy-Based Anarchist
IN RESPONSE TO THE AUTONOMY-BASED ANARCHIST CHALLENGE TO POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY By Elena Pokrovskaya Submitted to Central European University Department of Political Science In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts CEU eTD Collection Supervisor: Professor Janos Kis Second Reader: Professor Andras Bozoki Budapest, Hungary 2008 Table of Contents Introduction............................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Wolff’s Approach to the Key Concepts ............................................................ 7 1.1 The Obligation to Obey........................................................................................7 1.1.1 Origin of the conceptual conflict: authority.................................................................7 1.1.2 Authority: de jure and de facto....................................................................................9 1.1.3 The initial inconsistency ...........................................................................................11 1.1.4 Raz’s normal justification thesis ...............................................................................15 1.2 The Duty of Autonomy............................................................................................17 1.2.1 Origin of the conceptual conflict: autonomy..............................................................17 1.2.2 Autonomy as a moral duty........................................................................................19 -
Ucl Department of Political Science
POSITION PAPER The Autonomy Challenge in Wolff and Raz: A critique in defence of a priori philosophical anarchism April 10, 2018 Juan A. Soto ANALYSIS The notion of political authority is strongly disputed, and very few have brought into consideration the problems surrounding it better than R.P. Wolff in his In Defense of Anarchism. This essay consists of a critique of Raz’s Normal Justification Thesis (hereinafter NJT) as a response to the autonomy challenge presented in Wolff’s a priori anarchism. Wolff defines authority as “the right to command, and correlatively, the right to be obeyed” (1998:4), and autonomy as the state of a “man who possesses both free will and reason [and thus] has an obligation to take responsibility for his actions” (1998:13) being both incompatible: “The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled (…) there can be no resolution of the conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the putative authority of the state.” (Wolff, 1998:18). Raz, on the contrary, resolves the autonomy challenge by offering an instrumentalist approach of political authority. It is not that Raz does not value autonomy. In his own 1 words, “the ideal of personal autonomy is the vision of people controlling (…) their destiny” (Raz, 1986:369). However, in his attempt to meet Wolff’s challenge, he submits one’s autonomy to authority because one complies better with his duty by doing so. That is to act responsibly. Consequently, this implies the rejection of the duty of autonomy which is essential in Wolff’s argument. -
Traces of a Libertarian Theory of Punishment
TRACES OF A LIBERTARIAN THEORY OF PUNISHMENT ERIK LUNA* I. Libertarians love free markets. An individual's right to exchange his property by mutual agreement with others is considered a first principle of libertarianism and the basis for the creation of wealth and the achievement of social prosperity. In fact, there are very few circumstances in which consensual deals among rights-holders would be impermissible. When problems arise in business dealings, libertarians find attractive the voluntary settlement of conflicts in lieu of legal action, possibly through mechanisms of alternative dispute resolution. Litigation is costly and unproductive, impeding free-market transactions and interposing the judgments of those who have no rightful claim over the dispute. Given the backlog in courts and a general distaste for centralized decision making, "it makes sense to try to work problems out without having a third party impose a solution."' The same arguments would seem to apply in the arena of criminal justice and, in particular, to plea bargaining, the dominant means of resolving criminal cases in America today. Plea bargains are preferable to mandatory litigation... because compromise is better than conflict. Settlements of civil cases make both sides better off; settlements of criminal cases do so too. Defendants have many procedural and substantive rights. By pleading guilty, they sell these rights to the prosecutor, receiving concessions they esteem more highly than the rights surrendered.2 * Hugh B. Brown Chair in Law and Professor of Law, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. Co-Director, Utah Criminal Justice Center. My thanks to Troy Booher, Timothy Lynch, Alice Ristroph, and conference participants for their comments, to Bethany Rabe for research assistance, and to Michael O'Hear and Andrea Schneider for inviting me to participate in Marquette University Law School's plea bargaining conference.