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Robert Nozick: 1

A thinker with wide-ranging interests, Robert Nozick (1938-2002) is one of the most important and influential political , along with , in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. His first and most celebrated book, Anarchy, , and Utopia (1974), produced, along with his Harvard colleague John Rawls’ A Theory of (1971), the revival of the discipline of social and political philosophy within the analytic school. Rawls’ influential book is a systematic defense of egalitarian , but Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a compelling defense of free-market .

Libertarianism

Libertarianism is a political philosophy holding that the role of the state in ought to be severely limited, confined essentially to police protection, national defense, and the administration of courts of law, with all other tasks commonly performed by modern – education, social insurance, welfare, and so forth – taken over by religious bodies, charities, and other private institutions operating in a . Many libertarians appeal, in defending their position, to economic and sociological considerations – the benefits of market competition, the inherent mechanisms inclining state bureaucracies toward incompetence and inefficiency, the poor record of governmental attempts to deal with specific problems like poverty and pollution, and so forth. Nozick endorses such arguments, but his main defense of libertarianism is a moral one, his view being that whatever its practical benefits, the strongest reason to advocate a libertarian society is simply that such advocacy follows from a serious respect for .

As Nozick puts it, “ have rights, and there are things which no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do.” Because people have a right to dispose of their holdings as they see fit, interference is equivalent to forced labour – a violation, not of efficiency, but of the basic moral rights of the individuals. Nozick argues that the society must respect the rights of the individuals as these rights “reflect the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for achieving of other ends without their consent.”

Entitlement Theory

Most critics of the libertarian minimal state don’t complain that it allows for too much government; they say that it allows for far too little. In particular, they claim that a more-than-minimal state is necessary in order to fulfill the requirements of distributive justice. The state, it is held (by, for instance, Rawls and his followers), simply must engage in redistributive taxation in order to ensure that a fair distribution of wealth and income obtains in the society it governs. Nozick’s answer to this objection constitutes his “” of justice.

In defense of his minimalist state theory Nozick produces his ‘entitlement theory’ to provide a justification of the rights of individuals over their legitimate ‘holdings’. A more adequate theory of justice would in Nozick’s view enumerate three principles of justice in holdings. The first would be a principle of justice in acquisition , that is, the appropriation of natural resources that no one has ever owned before. The best-known such principle, some version of which Nozick seems to endorse, is the one enshrined in Locke’s theory of property, according to which a person (being a self-owner) owns his labour, and by “mixing his labor” with a previously unowned part of the natural world (e.g. by whittling a stick found in a forest into a spear) thereby comes to own it. The second principle would be a principle of justice in transfer , governing the manner in which one might justly come to own something previously owned by another. Here Nozick endorses the principle that a transfer of holdings is just if and only if it is voluntary, a principle that would seem to follow from respect for a person’s right to use the fruits of the exercise of his self-owned talents, abilities, and labour as he sees fit. The final principle would be a principle of justice in rectification , governing the proper means of setting right past injustices in acquisition and transfer.

Nozick that if the world were wholly just, only the first two principles would be needed, as “the following inductive definition would exhaustively cover the subject of justice in holdings:

1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding. 2. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding. 3. No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications of 1 and 2.”

1 Presented by Sandipan Sen to PLSA – III Paper V Half 1 Topic 4c

1 Thus, entitlement theory would imply “a distribution is just if everyone is entitled to the holdings they possess under the distribution.” Unfortunately, not everyone follows these rules: “some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them, seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges.” Thus the third principle of rectification is needed.

And here only comes the need for a minimalist state defining the scope of which Nozick says “a minimal state limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; any more extensive state will violate persons’ rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified.”

Refuting

It might be thought that given Nozick’s premises, no state at all , minimal or otherwise, could be justified, that full-blown anarchism is what really follows from the notion of self-ownership. For the activities of even a minimal state would need to be funded via taxation. Wouldn’t this taxation also amount to forced labour and partial ? Nozick thinks not. Indeed, in his view it turns out that even if an anarchistic society existed, not only could a minimal state nevertheless arise out of it in a way that violates no one’s self-ownership rights, in fact such a state would, morally speaking, have to come into existence.

According to Nozick a minimal state would inevitably arise out of an originally anarchic society, given both practical circumstances and the moral requirements – concerning the prohibition of potentially rights-violating self-defense and compensation for this prohibition – binding on any agency acting to enforce the rights of others. And it would do so in a way that violates no one’s rights of self-ownership. So the anarchist can have no principled objection to it.

Origin of State

Nozick’s conception of the origins of the state is reminiscent of the tradition in political thought represented by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and, in contemporary thought, Rawls. For insofar as the state arises out of a process that begins with the voluntary retention by individuals of the services of an agency that will inevitably take on the features of a state, it can be seen to be the result of a kind of contract. The details of the state-originating process in Nozick’s account are very different from those of other social contract accounts, however; and, most importantly, for Nozick, unlike other social contract theorists, individual rights do not result from, but exist prior to , any social contract, and put severe constraints on the shape such a contract can take. Furthermore, the parties to the contract in Nozick’s conception are to be imagined very much on the model of human beings as we know them in “real life,” rather than along the lines of the highly abstractly conceived rational agents deliberating behind a “veil of ignorance” in Rawls’s “” thought experiment.

The Debate over Distributive Justice

Entitlement theory contrasts sharply with the ‘Principles of Justice’ in Rawls’ , which state that each person has an equal claim to basic rights and , and that inequality should only be permitted to the degree that such inequality is “reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage”. There is a further proviso that such inequalities are only permissible insofar as there is an equality of opportunity to benefit from these inequalities. Nozick instead argues that people who have or produce certain things have rights over them: “on an entitlement view, [production and distribution] are not ... separate questions ... things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them.” Nozick believes that unjustly taking someone’s holdings violates their rights. “Holdings to which ... people are entitled may not be seized, even to provide equality of opportunity for others.” Thus, a system which works to reduce the rightfully earned holdings of some so that they can be equally distributed to others is immoral.

Talk about “distributive justice” is inherently misleading, Nozick argues, in that it seems to imply that there is some central authority who “distributes” to individuals shares of wealth and income that pre-exist the distribution, as if they had appeared like “manna from heaven.” Of course this is not really the way such shares come into existence, or come to be “distributed,” at all; in fact they come to be, and come to be held by the individuals who hold them, only through the scattered efforts and transactions of these innumerable individuals themselves, and these individuals’ efforts and transactions give them a moral claim over these shares. Talk about the “distribution of wealth” covers this up, and unjustifiably biases most discussions of distributive justice in a socialist or egalitarian liberal direction.

In his own words: “The major objection to speaking of everyone’s having a right to various things such as equality of opportunity, life, and so on, and enforcing this right, is that these ‘rights’ require a substructure of things and materials and

2 actions; and other people may have rights and entitlements over these. No one has a right to something whose realization requires certain uses of things and activities that other people have rights and entitlements over.”

Anyone who got what he has in a manner consistent with the three principles of ‘entitlement theory’ would, Nozick says, accordingly be entitled to it – for, his having abided by these principles, no one has any grounds for complaint against him. This gives us Nozick’s entitlement theory of distributive justice: a distribution of wealth obtaining in a society as a whole is a just distribution if everyone in that society is entitled to what he has, i.e. has gotten his holdings in accordance with the principles of acquisition, transfer, and rectification. And it is therefore just however equal or unequal it happens to be, and indeed however “fair” or “unfair” it might seem intuitively to be.

The entitlement theory of justice is historical yet unpatterned: the justice of a distribution is indeed determined by certain historical circumstances (contrary to end-state theories), but it has nothing to do with fitting any pattern guaranteeing that those who worked the hardest or are most deserving have the most shares. What matters is only that people get what they have in a manner consistent with the three principles of justice in holdings, and this is fully compatible with some people having much more than others, unlucky hard workers having less than lazier but luckier ones, morally repulsive individuals having higher incomes than saints, and so forth.

Nozick illustrates and defends the entitlement theory in a famous thought-experiment involving the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain. Imagine a society in which the distribution of wealth fits a particular structure or pattern favored by a non- entitlement conception of justice – suppose, to keep things simple, that it is an equal distribution, and call it D1. Nozick’s opponent must of course grant that this distribution is just, since Nozick has allowed the opponent himself to determine it. Now suppose that among the members of this society is Wilt Chamberlain, and that he has as a condition of his contract with his team that he will play only if each person coming to see the game puts twenty-five cents into a special box at the gate of the sports arena, the contents of which will go to him. Suppose further that over the course of the season, one million fans decide to pay the twenty-five cents to watch him play. The result will be a new distribution, D2, in which Chamberlain now has $250,000, much more than anyone else – a distribution which thereby breaks the original pattern established in D1. Now, is D2 just? Is Chamberlain entitled to his money? The answer to these questions, Nozick says, is clearly “Yes.” For everyone in D1 was, by hypothesis, entitled to what he had; there is no injustice in the starting point that led up to D2. Moreover, everyone who gave up twenty-five cents in the transition from D1 to D2 did so voluntarily , and thus has no grounds for complaint; and those who did not want to pay to see Chamberlain play still have their twenty-five cents, so they have no grounds for complaint either. But then no one has any grounds for a complaint of injustice; and thus there is no injustice.

What this shows, in Nozick’s view, is that all non-entitlement theories of justice are false. For all such theories claim that it is a necessary condition for a distribution’s being just that it have a certain structure or fit a certain pattern; but the Wilt Chamberlain example (which can be reformulated so that D1 is, instead of an egalitarian distribution, a distribution according to hard work, desert, or whatever) shows that a distribution (such as D2) can be just even if it doesn’t have a particular structure or pattern.

Moreover, the example shows that “ upsets patterns,” that allowing individuals freely to use their holdings as they choose will inevitably destroy any distribution advocated by non-entitlement theories, whether they be socialist, egalitarian liberal, or some other theory of distribution. And the corollary of this is that patterns destroy liberty , that attempts to enforce a particular distributional pattern or structure over time will necessarily involve intolerable levels of coercion, forbidding individuals from using the fruits of their talents, abilities, and labour as they see fit. As Nozick puts it, “the socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.” This is not merely a regrettable side-effect of the quest to attain a just distribution of wealth; it is a positive injustice, for it violates the principle of self-ownership.

Distributive justice, properly understood, thus does not require a redistribution of wealth; indeed, it forbids such a redistribution. Accordingly, the minimal state, far from being inconsistent with the demands of distributive justice, is in fact the only sure means of securing those demands.

Self-Ownership

The philosophical foundation of Nozick’s ideas rests on his concept of ‘self-ownership’. In contrast to the Utilitarian argument both Rawls and Nozick agree that treating people as equals requires limits on the ways that one person can be used for the benefit of others, or for the benefit of society in general. But they differ on the question of which rights are most important in treating people as ends in themselves. For Rawls, one of the most important rights is a right to a certain share of society’s

3 resources. For Nozick, on the other hand, the most important rights are rights over oneself – the rights which constitute ‘self- ownership’.

Nozick takes his position to follow from a basic moral principle associated with and enshrined in Kant’s second formulation of his famous Categorical Imperative: “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.” The idea here is that a human being, as a rational agent endowed with self-awareness, , and the possibility of formulating a plan of life, has an inherent dignity and cannot properly be treated as a mere thing , or used against his will as an instrument or resource in the way an inanimate object might be.

In line with this, Nozick also describes individual human beings as self-owners (though it isn’t clear whether he regards this as a restatement of Kant’s principle, a consequence of it, or an entirely independent idea). The thesis of self-ownership, a notion that goes back in political philosophy at least to , is just the claim that individuals own themselves – their bodies, talents and abilities, labour, and by extension the fruits or products of their exercise of their talents, abilities and labour. They have all the prerogatives with respect to themselves that a slaveholder claims with respect to his slaves. But the thesis of self- ownership would in fact rule out slavery as illegitimate, since each individual, as a self-owner, cannot properly be owned by anyone else. Indeed, many libertarians would argue that unless one accepts the thesis of self-ownership, one has no way of explaining why slavery is evil. After all, it cannot be merely because slaveholders often treat their slaves badly, since a kind- hearted slaveholder would still be a slaveholder, and thus morally blameworthy, for that. The reason slavery is immoral must be because it involves a kind of stealing – the stealing of a person from himself.

But if individuals are inviolable ends-in-themselves (as Kant describes them) and self-owners, it follows, Nozick says, that they have certain rights , in particular (and here again following Locke) rights to their lives, liberty, and the fruits of their labour. To own something, after all, just is to have a right to it, or, more accurately, to possess the bundle of rights – rights to possess something, to dispose of it, to determine what may be done with it, etc. – that constitute ownership; and thus to own oneself is to have such rights to the various elements that make up one’s self. These rights function, Nozick says, as side-constraints on the actions of others; they set limits on how others may, morally speaking, treat a person. So, for example, since you own yourself, and thus have a right to yourself, others are constrained morally not to kill or maim you (since this would involve destroying or damaging your property), or to kidnap you or forcibly remove one of your bodily organs for transplantation in someone else (since this would involve stealing your property). They are also constrained not to force you against your will to work for another’s purposes, even if those purposes are good ones. For if you own yourself, it follows that you have a right to determine whether and how you will use your self-owned body and its powers, e.g. either to work or to refrain from working.

So far this all might seem fairly uncontroversial. But what follows from it, in Nozick’s view, is the surprising and radical conclusion that taxation , of the redistributive sort in which modern states engage in order to fund the various programs of the bureaucratic , is morally illegitimate. It amounts to a kind of forced labour , for the state so structures the tax system that any time you labour at all, a certain amount of your labour time – the amount that produces the wealth taken away from you forcibly via taxation – is time you involuntarily work, in effect, for the state. Indeed, such taxation amounts to partial slavery , for in giving every citizen an entitlement to certain benefits (welfare, social security, or whatever), the state in effect gives them an entitlement, a right , to a part of the proceeds of your labour, which produces the taxes that fund the benefits; every citizen, that is, becomes in such a system a partial owner of you (since they have a partial property right in part of you, i.e. in your labour). But this is flatly inconsistent with the principle of self-ownership.

The various programs of the modern liberal welfare state are thus immoral, not only because they are inefficient and incompetently administered, but because they make slaves of the citizens of such a state. Indeed, the only sort of state that can be morally justified is what Nozick calls a minimal state or “night-watchman” state, a government which protects individuals, via police and military forces, from force, fraud, and theft, and administers courts of law, but does nothing else. In particular, such a state cannot regulate what citizens eat, drink, or smoke (since this would interfere with their right to use their self-owned bodies as they see fit), cannot control what they publish or read (since this would interfere with their right to use the property they’ve acquired with their self-owned labour – e.g. printing presses and paper – as they wish), cannot administer mandatory social insurance schemes or public education (since this would interfere with citizens’ rights to use the fruits of their labour as they desire, in that some citizens might decide that they would rather put their money into private education and private retirement plans), and cannot regulate economic life in general via minimum wage and rent control laws and the like (since such actions are not only economically suspect – tending to produce bad unintended consequences like unemployment and housing shortages – but violate citizens’ rights to charge whatever they want to for the use of their own property).

4 Utopia: the Ideal State

The minimal state might seem, even to those sympathetic to the arguments for it, to make for a rather austere vision of political life. But Nozick insists that we ought to see it as “inspiring, as well as right.” Indeed, the minimal state constitutes in his view a kind of utopia . For, among all models of political order, it alone makes possible the attempt to realize every person’s and group’s vision of the good society. It is often thought that libertarianism entails that everyone must live according to a laissez faire capitalist ethos, but this is not so; it requires only that, whatever ethos one is committed to, one not impose it by force on anyone else without his consent. If some individuals or groups want to live according to socialist or egalitarian principles, they are free to do so as far as Nozick is concerned; indeed, they may even establish a community, of whatever size, within the boundaries of the minimal state, and require that everyone who comes to live within it must agree to have a portion of his wealth redistributed. All they are forbidden from doing is forcing people to join or contribute to the establishment of such a community who do not want to do so.

The minimal state thus constitutes a “framework for utopia” – an overarching system within the boundaries of which any number of social, moral, and religious utopian visions may be realized. It thereby provides a way for people even of radically opposed points of view – socialists and capitalists, liberals and conservatives, atheists and religious believers, whether Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus – to make a go of implementing their conceptions of how life ought to be lived, within their own communities, while living side by side in . This gives us, in Nozick’s view, a further reason to endorse it.

Criticisms

Walzer

Anarchy, State, and Utopia came out of a semester-long course that Nozick taught with at Harvard in 1971, called Capitalism and . The course was a debate between the two; Nozick’s side is in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and Walzer’s side is in his Spheres of Justice, where he argues for “complex equality”.

Rawls

Although Anarchy State and Utopia has been construed as a response to Rawls’s A Theory of Justice , Rawls never provided a direct and sustained rebuttal. In later works, however, he offered occasional observations and remarks respectfully critical of Nozick’s theories, and of right-libertarian theory in general.

In Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy , Rawls notes that Nozick assumes that just transactions are “justice preserving” in much the same way that logical operations are “ preserving”. Thus, as explained in Distributive Justice above, Nozick holds that repetitive applications of “justice in holdings” and “justice in transfer” preserve an initial state of justice obtained through “justice in acquisition or rectification”. Rawls points out that this is simply an assumption or presupposition, and requires substantiation. In reality, he maintains, small inequalities established by just transactions accumulate over time and eventually result in large inequalities and an unjust situation.

In The Law of Peoples , speaking of right-libertarianism generally, he maintains that this accumulative inequality not only tends to result in an unjust society, but also lacks “stability for the right reasons.” The phrase “the right reasons” refers to the citizenry’s upholding of justice because they are convinced it is right and works for all, as opposed to it being a mere modus vivendi that allows them to function until one or the other gets the upper hand. In this regard Rawls maintains that right- libertarianism fails to respect the “criterion of reciprocity”, by which citizens expect each other to propose and support only those laws that they sincerely believe would be acceptable to free and equal individuals without taking advantage of any inequalities that may exist.

In the article “Social Unity and Primary Goods”, republished in his Collected Papers , Rawls notes that Nozick handles Amartya Sen’s Liberal Paradox in a manner that is similar to his own. However, the rights that Nozick takes to be fundamental and the basis for regarding them to be such are different from the equal basic liberties included in justice as fairness and Rawls conjectures that they are thus not inalienable. This conjecture seems to be supported by Nozick’s reputed support for “”.

5 Although not actually a response, in Justice as Fairness , Rawls uses the NBA draft system to illustrate why a system of periodic or generational redistribution may be reasonable and just, a referential retort to Nozick’s use of Wilt Chamberlain as an example in Anarchy State and Utopia .

Rothbard

Murray Rothbard, a libertarian but unlike Nozick an anarcho-capitalist, criticizes Anarchy, State, and Utopia in his essay “Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State” on the basis that:

1. No existing State has been “immaculately conceived” in the way envisaged by Nozick; 2. On Nozick’s account the only minimal State that could possibly be justified is one that would emerge after a free-market anarchist world had been established; 3. Therefore Nozick, on his own grounds, should become an anarchist and then wait for the Nozickian to operate afterward; and 4. Even if any State had been founded immaculately, the fallacies of social contract theory would mean that no present State, even a minimal one, would be justified. 5. His claim that “liberty upsets patterns” is inconsistent with his own view of liberty. Nozick holds a “Lockean” conception of liberty, where liberty is simply “the right to do, that which you have a right to do”. Thus a restriction only infringes upon liberty if it infringes upon rights. Thus to examine whether enforcing a pattern violates liberty we must examine whether the pattern includes the right freely to transfer goods in whatever way the holder wishes. But there is no reason to suppose that all patterns include this right. Thus enforcing a pattern need not restrict liberty at all.

Leff

The American legal scholar Arthur Allen Leff criticized Nozick in his 1979 article “Unspeakable , Unnatural Law”. Leff stated that Nozick built his entire book on the bald assertion that “individuals have rights which may not be violated by other individuals”, for which no justification is offered. According to Leff, no such justification is possible either. Any desired ethical statement, including a negation of Nozick’s position, can easily be “proved” with apparent rigor as long as one takes the license to simply establish a grounding principle by assertion. Leff further calls “ostentatiously unconvincing” Nozick’s proposal that differences among individuals will not be a problem if like-minded people form geographically isolated communities.

Reference:

• Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) • Will Kymlicka, “Libertarianism” in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction , OUP: New Delhi, 2005, Ch. 4

Source:

Edward Feser, “Robert Nozick: 1938-2002” in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Last updated: May 4, 2005, Sourced on 23.09.2012 from: http://www.iep.utm.edu/nozick/

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