Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Encyclopedia
Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a work of political philosophy
written by Robert Nozick
in 1974. This minarchist book was the winner of the 1975 National Book Award
. It has been translated into 11 languages and was named one of the "100 most influential books since the war" by the Times Literary Supplement.
In opposition to A Theory of Justice
by John Rawls
, and in debate with Michael Walzer
, Nozick argues in favor of a minimal state, "limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on." When a state takes on more responsibilities than these, Nozick argues, rights will be violated. To support the idea of the minimal state, Nozick presents an argument that illustrates how the minimalist state arises naturally from anarchy and how any expansion of state power past this minimalist threshold is unjustified.
, influenced by John Locke
, and Friedrich Hayek
, which sees humans as ends in themselves and justifies redistribution of goods only on condition of consent, is a key aspect of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
The book also contains a vigorous defense of minarchist right-libertarianism
against more extreme views, such as anarcho-capitalism
(in which there is no state and individuals must contract with private companies for all social services). Nozick argues that anarcho-capitalism would inevitably transform into a minarchist state, even without violating any of its own non-aggression principle
s, through the eventual emergence of a single locally-dominant private defense and judicial agency that it is in everyone's interests to align with, because other agencies are unable to effectively compete against the advantages of the agency with majority coverage. Therefore, he felt that, even to the extent that the anarcho-capitalist theory is correct, it results in a single, private, protective agency which is itself a de facto "state." Thus anarchy may only exist for a limited period before a minimalist state emerges.
philosophical work," i.e., its presentation as though it were the absolutely final word on its subject. Nozick believes that philosophers are really more modest than that and aware of their works' weaknesses. Yet a form of philosophical activity persists which "feels like pushing and shoving things to fit into some fixed perimeter of specified shape." The bulges are masked
or the cause of the bulge is thrown far away so that no one will notice. Then "Quickly, you find an angle from which everything appears to fit perfectly and take a snapshot, at a fast shutter speed before something else bulges out too noticeably." After a trip to the darkroom for touching up, "[a]ll that remains is to publish the photograph as a representation of exactly how things are, and to note how nothing fits properly into any other shape." So how does Nozick's work differ from this form of activity? He believed that what he said was correct, but he doesn't mask the bulges: "the doubts and worries and uncertainties as well as the beliefs, convictions, and arguments."
shallowness of his "invisible hand" explanation of the minimal state,
deriving it from a Lockean
state of nature, in which there are
individual rights but no state to enforce and adjudicate
them. Although this counts for him as a "fundamental explanation" of
the political realm because the political is explained in terms of the
nonpolitical, it is shallow relative to his later "genealogical"
ambition (in The Nature of Rationality
and especially in Invariances) to explain both the political and the moral by reference to beneficial cooperative practices that can be traced back to our
hunter-gatherer ancestors and beyond. The genealogy
will give Nozick an
explanation of what is only assumed in ASU: the fundamental status of individual rights. Creativity was not a factor in his interpretation.
theory by showing that there are non-redistributive reasons for the apparently redistributive procedure of making its clients pay for the protection of others. Proponents of an ultraminimal state, which would not enforce this procedure, hold that its members' rights are a side-constraint on what can be done to them. So no utilitarianism
of rights can justify the procedure on the grounds that protecting the rights of non-members through the procedure minimizes rights violations in the long run. The side-constraint view, which reflects the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means, requires a different justification for the procedure. (See below.)
Nozick supports the side-constraint view against classical utilitarianism and the idea that only felt experience matters by introducing the famous Experience Machine thought experiment
. It induces whatever illusory experience one might wish, but it prevents the subject from doing anything or making contact with anything. There is only pre-programmed neural stimulation sufficient for the illusion. Nozick pumps the intuition that each of us has a reason to avoid plugging into the Experience Machine forever. This is not to say that "plugging in" might not be the best all-things-considered choice for some who are terminally ill and in great pain. The point of the thought experiment is to articulate a weighty reason not to plug in, a reason that should not be there if all that matters is felt experience.
The association compensates the non-member for how much worse off the association's action would have made a reasonably prudently acting non-member. Only those disadvantaged are compensated, and they are to be compensated only for their disadvantages. (Nozick's account of compensation leads into an important discussion of punishment. He defends a retributivist view in which punishment deserved is r x H. where H is the amount of harm and r is the degree of responsibility for bringing about H. Self defense invokes a rule of proportionality that omits consideration of responsibility, in a function f of H where f(H) > H. The defender may draw against the punishment deserved, r x H, according to the formula f(H) + r x H. The expenditure amount A in self defense is then subtracted from deserved punishment according to the formula r x H - A.)
on such grouping, taking advantage of everyone else's restraint and going ahead with one's own risky activities. In a famous discussion he rejects H.L.A. Hart's "principle of fairness" for dealing with free riders, which would morally bind them to cooperative practices from which they benefit. You may not charge and collect for benefits you bestow without prior agreement.
"As the most powerful applier of principles which it grants everyone the right to apply correctly," Nozick concludes, the dominant protection agency "enforces its will, which, from the inside, it thinks is correct." Its strength makes it the only enforcer and judge of its clients. "Claiming only the universal right to act correctly," it acts correctly according to its own lights, which happen to be the only lights with the strength so to act. It provides independents with protective services against its clients. It provides this compensation only to those who would be disadvantaged by purchasing protection for themselves, and only against its own paying clients on whom the independents are forbidden from self-help enforcement. This is a disincentive to free riding. "The more free riders there are, the more desirable it is to be a client always protected by the agency." The equilibrium is moved towards almost universal participation in the agency's protective scheme.
Nozick's famous Wilt Chamberlain
argument is an attempt to show that patterned principles of just distribution are incompatible with liberty. He asks us to assume that the original distribution in society, D1 is ordered by our choice of patterned principle, for instance Rawls's Difference Principle. Wilt Chamberlain is an extremely popular basketball
player in this society, and Nozick further assumes 1 million people are willing to freely give Wilt 25 cents each to watch him play basketball over the course of a season (we assume no other transactions occur). Wilt now has $250,000, a much larger sum than any of the other people in the society. The new distribution in society, call it D2, obviously is no longer ordered by our favored pattern that ordered D1. However Nozick argues that D2 is just. For if each agent freely exchanges some of his D1 share with WC and D1 was a just distribution (we know D1 was just, because it was ordered according to your favorite patterned principle of distribution), how can D2 fail to be a just distribution? Thus Nozick argues that what the Wilt Chamberlain example shows is that no patterned principle of just distribution will be compatible with liberty. In order to preserve the pattern, which arranged D1, the state will have to continually interfere with people's ability to freely exchange their D1 shares, for any exchange of D1 shares explicitly involves violating the pattern that originally ordered it.
Nozick analogizes taxation with forced labor, asking the reader to imagine a man who works longer to gain income to buy a movie ticket and a man who spends his extra time on leisure (for instance, watching the sunset). What, Nozick asks, is the difference between seizing the second man's leisure (which would be forced labor) and seizing the first man's goods? "Perhaps there is no difference in principle," Nozick concludes, and notes that the argument could be extended to taxation on other sources besides labor. "End-state and most patterned principles of distributive justice institute (partial) ownership by others of people and their actions and labor. These principles involve a shift from the classical liberals' notion of self ownership to a notion of (partial) property rights in other people."
Nozick then briefly considers Locke's theory of acquisition. After considering some preliminary objections, he "adds an additional bit of complexity" to the structure of the entitlement theory by refining Locke's proviso that "enough and as good" must be left in common for others by one's taking property in an unowned object. Nozick favors a "Lockean" proviso that forbids appropriation when the position of others is thereby worsened. For instance, appropriating the only water hole in a desert and charging monopoly prices would not be legitimate. But in line with his endorsement of the historical principle, this argument does not apply to the medical researcher who discovers a cure for a disease and sells for whatever price he will. Nor does Nozick provide any means or theory whereby abuses of appropriation—acquisition of property when there is not enough and as good in common for others—should be corrected.
Nozick concludes that "Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people's lack of understanding of economics."
has criticized Anarchy, State, and Utopia in his essay "Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State" http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/1_1/1_1_6.pdf on the basis that:
at Harvard
in 1971, called Capitalism and Socialism. 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".
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 "truth 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 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 "voluntary slavery"
.
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.
criticized Nozick in his 1979 article Unspeakable Ethics, 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 licence 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.
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
written by Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick was an American political philosopher, most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia , a right-libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice...
in 1974. This minarchist book was the winner of the 1975 National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
. It has been translated into 11 languages and was named one of the "100 most influential books since the war" by the Times Literary Supplement.
In opposition to A Theory of Justice
A Theory of Justice
A Theory of Justice is a book of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls. It was originally published in 1971 and revised in both 1975 and 1999. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempts to solve the problem of distributive justice by utilising a variant of the familiar device of the social...
by John Rawls
John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University....
, and in debate with Michael Walzer
Michael Walzer
Michael Walzer is a prominent American political philosopher and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he is co-editor of Dissent, an intellectual magazine that he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at...
, Nozick argues in favor of a minimal state, "limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on." When a state takes on more responsibilities than these, Nozick argues, rights will be violated. To support the idea of the minimal state, Nozick presents an argument that illustrates how the minimalist state arises naturally from anarchy and how any expansion of state power past this minimalist threshold is unjustified.
Theory
Nozick's Entitlement TheoryEntitlement Theory
Entitlement theory is a theory of distributive justice and private property created by Robert Nozick in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia...
, influenced by John Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
, and Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich August Hayek CH , born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought...
, which sees humans as ends in themselves and justifies redistribution of goods only on condition of consent, is a key aspect of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
The book also contains a vigorous defense of minarchist right-libertarianism
Right-libertarianism
Right-libertarianism names several related libertarian political philosophies which support capitalism. The term is typically used to differentiate privatist based forms of libertarianism from Left-libertarianism; which generally supports forms of economic democracy and...
against more extreme views, such as anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
(in which there is no state and individuals must contract with private companies for all social services). Nozick argues that anarcho-capitalism would inevitably transform into a minarchist state, even without violating any of its own non-aggression principle
Non-aggression principle
The non-aggression principle , or NAP for short, is a moral stance which asserts that aggression is inherently illegitimate...
s, through the eventual emergence of a single locally-dominant private defense and judicial agency that it is in everyone's interests to align with, because other agencies are unable to effectively compete against the advantages of the agency with majority coverage. Therefore, he felt that, even to the extent that the anarcho-capitalist theory is correct, it results in a single, private, protective agency which is itself a de facto "state." Thus anarchy may only exist for a limited period before a minimalist state emerges.
Philosophical activity
The preface of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) contains a passage about "the usual manner of presentingphilosophical work," i.e., its presentation as though it were the absolutely final word on its subject. Nozick believes that philosophers are really more modest than that and aware of their works' weaknesses. Yet a form of philosophical activity persists which "feels like pushing and shoving things to fit into some fixed perimeter of specified shape." The bulges are masked
or the cause of the bulge is thrown far away so that no one will notice. Then "Quickly, you find an angle from which everything appears to fit perfectly and take a snapshot, at a fast shutter speed before something else bulges out too noticeably." After a trip to the darkroom for touching up, "[a]ll that remains is to publish the photograph as a representation of exactly how things are, and to note how nothing fits properly into any other shape." So how does Nozick's work differ from this form of activity? He believed that what he said was correct, but he doesn't mask the bulges: "the doubts and worries and uncertainties as well as the beliefs, convictions, and arguments."
Why state-of-nature theory?
He gestures towards perhaps the biggest bulge when he notes (in Chapter 1, "Why State-of-Nature Theory?") theshallowness of his "invisible hand" explanation of the minimal state,
deriving it from a Lockean
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
state of nature, in which there are
individual rights but no state to enforce and adjudicate
them. Although this counts for him as a "fundamental explanation" of
the political realm because the political is explained in terms of the
nonpolitical, it is shallow relative to his later "genealogical"
ambition (in The Nature of Rationality
The nature of rationality
The Nature of Rationality is an exploration of practical rationality written by Robert Nozick and published in 1993. It views human rationality as an evolutionary adaptation...
and especially in Invariances) to explain both the political and the moral by reference to beneficial cooperative practices that can be traced back to our
hunter-gatherer ancestors and beyond. The genealogy
Genealogy
Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members...
will give Nozick an
explanation of what is only assumed in ASU: the fundamental status of individual rights. Creativity was not a factor in his interpretation.
The state of nature
A rational response to the "troubles" of a Lockean state of nature is formation of groups of individuals into mutual-protection associations, in which all will answer the call of any member. It is inconvenient that everyone is always on call, and that the associates can be called out by members who may be "cantankerous or paranoid". The logic of the situation dictates that entrepreneurs will go into the business of selling protective services, and that a dominant protective association will emerge in a given geographical area. This is something "very much resembling a minimal state". Nozick judges that Locke was wrong to imagine a contract as necessary to establish civil society. He prefers the invisible-hand explanation, showing how it would lead to the association's preventing individuals from enforcing their own rights, and how it would protect all individuals within its domain.Moral constraints and the state
Nozick arrives at the night-watchman state of classical liberalismClassical liberalism
Classical liberalism is the philosophy committed to the ideal of limited government, constitutionalism, rule of law, due process, and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets....
theory by showing that there are non-redistributive reasons for the apparently redistributive procedure of making its clients pay for the protection of others. Proponents of an ultraminimal state, which would not enforce this procedure, hold that its members' rights are a side-constraint on what can be done to them. So no utilitarianism
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...
of rights can justify the procedure on the grounds that protecting the rights of non-members through the procedure minimizes rights violations in the long run. The side-constraint view, which reflects the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means, requires a different justification for the procedure. (See below.)
Nozick supports the side-constraint view against classical utilitarianism and the idea that only felt experience matters by introducing the famous Experience Machine thought experiment
Thought experiment
A thought experiment or Gedankenexperiment considers some hypothesis, theory, or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences...
. It induces whatever illusory experience one might wish, but it prevents the subject from doing anything or making contact with anything. There is only pre-programmed neural stimulation sufficient for the illusion. Nozick pumps the intuition that each of us has a reason to avoid plugging into the Experience Machine forever. This is not to say that "plugging in" might not be the best all-things-considered choice for some who are terminally ill and in great pain. The point of the thought experiment is to articulate a weighty reason not to plug in, a reason that should not be there if all that matters is felt experience.
Prohibition, compensation, and risk
The procedure that leads to a nightwatchman state involves compensation to non-members who are prevented from enforcing their rights, an enforcement mechanism that it deems risky by comparison with its own. Compensation addresses any disadvantages they suffer as a result of the prevention. Assuming that non-members take reasonable precautions and adjusting activities to the association's prohibition of their enforcing their own rights, the association is required to raise the non-member above his actual position by an amount equal to the difference between his position on an indifference curve he would occupy were it not for the prohibition, and his original position.The association compensates the non-member for how much worse off the association's action would have made a reasonably prudently acting non-member. Only those disadvantaged are compensated, and they are to be compensated only for their disadvantages. (Nozick's account of compensation leads into an important discussion of punishment. He defends a retributivist view in which punishment deserved is r x H. where H is the amount of harm and r is the degree of responsibility for bringing about H. Self defense invokes a rule of proportionality that omits consideration of responsibility, in a function f of H where f(H) > H. The defender may draw against the punishment deserved, r x H, according to the formula f(H) + r x H. The expenditure amount A in self defense is then subtracted from deserved punishment according to the formula r x H - A.)
The state
Non-member independents might group together and agree to a procedure for private enforcement of rights, so as to reduce the total danger to a point below the threshold at which the association would be justified in prohibiting it. This procedure fails because of the rationality of being a free riderFree rider problem
In economics, collective bargaining, psychology, and political science, a free rider is someone who consumes a resource without paying for it, or pays less than the full cost. The free rider problem is the question of how to limit free riding...
on such grouping, taking advantage of everyone else's restraint and going ahead with one's own risky activities. In a famous discussion he rejects H.L.A. Hart's "principle of fairness" for dealing with free riders, which would morally bind them to cooperative practices from which they benefit. You may not charge and collect for benefits you bestow without prior agreement.
"As the most powerful applier of principles which it grants everyone the right to apply correctly," Nozick concludes, the dominant protection agency "enforces its will, which, from the inside, it thinks is correct." Its strength makes it the only enforcer and judge of its clients. "Claiming only the universal right to act correctly," it acts correctly according to its own lights, which happen to be the only lights with the strength so to act. It provides independents with protective services against its clients. It provides this compensation only to those who would be disadvantaged by purchasing protection for themselves, and only against its own paying clients on whom the independents are forbidden from self-help enforcement. This is a disincentive to free riding. "The more free riders there are, the more desirable it is to be a client always protected by the agency." The equilibrium is moved towards almost universal participation in the agency's protective scheme.
Further considerations on the argument for the state
A discussion of pre-emptive attack leads Nozick to a principle that excludes prohibiting actions not wrong in themselves, even if those actions make more likely the commission of wrongs later on. This provides him with a significant difference between a protection agency's prohibitions against procedures it deems unreliable or unfair, and other prohibitions that might seem to go too far, such as forbidding others to join another protective agency. Nozick's principle does not disallow others from doing so.Distributive justice
Nozick's discussion of Rawls's theory of justice raises the dialogue between libertarianism and liberalism to an epic level. The entitlement theory is sketched. In slogan form it states, "From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen". It comprises a theory of (1) justice in acquisition; (2) justice in rectification if (1) is violated (rectification which might require apparently redistributive measures); (3) justice in holdings, and (4) justice in transfer. Assuming justice in acquisition, entitlement to holdings is a function of repeated applications of (3) and (4). Nozick's entitlement theory is a non-patterned historical principle. Almost all other principles of distributive justice (egalitarianism, utilitarianism) including Rawls's "difference principle" are patterned principles of justice. Such principles follow the form, "to each according to..."Nozick's famous Wilt Chamberlain
Wilt Chamberlain
Wilton Norman "Wilt" Chamberlain was an American professional NBA basketball player for the Philadelphia/San Francisco Warriors, the Philadelphia 76ers and the Los Angeles Lakers; he also played for the Harlem Globetrotters prior to playing in the NBA...
argument is an attempt to show that patterned principles of just distribution are incompatible with liberty. He asks us to assume that the original distribution in society, D1 is ordered by our choice of patterned principle, for instance Rawls's Difference Principle. Wilt Chamberlain is an extremely popular basketball
Basketball
Basketball is a team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules...
player in this society, and Nozick further assumes 1 million people are willing to freely give Wilt 25 cents each to watch him play basketball over the course of a season (we assume no other transactions occur). Wilt now has $250,000, a much larger sum than any of the other people in the society. The new distribution in society, call it D2, obviously is no longer ordered by our favored pattern that ordered D1. However Nozick argues that D2 is just. For if each agent freely exchanges some of his D1 share with WC and D1 was a just distribution (we know D1 was just, because it was ordered according to your favorite patterned principle of distribution), how can D2 fail to be a just distribution? Thus Nozick argues that what the Wilt Chamberlain example shows is that no patterned principle of just distribution will be compatible with liberty. In order to preserve the pattern, which arranged D1, the state will have to continually interfere with people's ability to freely exchange their D1 shares, for any exchange of D1 shares explicitly involves violating the pattern that originally ordered it.
Nozick analogizes taxation with forced labor, asking the reader to imagine a man who works longer to gain income to buy a movie ticket and a man who spends his extra time on leisure (for instance, watching the sunset). What, Nozick asks, is the difference between seizing the second man's leisure (which would be forced labor) and seizing the first man's goods? "Perhaps there is no difference in principle," Nozick concludes, and notes that the argument could be extended to taxation on other sources besides labor. "End-state and most patterned principles of distributive justice institute (partial) ownership by others of people and their actions and labor. These principles involve a shift from the classical liberals' notion of self ownership to a notion of (partial) property rights in other people."
Nozick then briefly considers Locke's theory of acquisition. After considering some preliminary objections, he "adds an additional bit of complexity" to the structure of the entitlement theory by refining Locke's proviso that "enough and as good" must be left in common for others by one's taking property in an unowned object. Nozick favors a "Lockean" proviso that forbids appropriation when the position of others is thereby worsened. For instance, appropriating the only water hole in a desert and charging monopoly prices would not be legitimate. But in line with his endorsement of the historical principle, this argument does not apply to the medical researcher who discovers a cure for a disease and sells for whatever price he will. Nor does Nozick provide any means or theory whereby abuses of appropriation—acquisition of property when there is not enough and as good in common for others—should be corrected.
The Difference Principle
Nozick attacks John Rawls's Difference Principle on the ground that the well-off could threaten a lack of social cooperation to the worse-off, just as Rawls implies that the worse-off will be assisted by the well-off for the sake of social cooperation. Nozick asks why the well-off would be obliged, due to their inequality and for the sake of social cooperation, to assist the worse-off and not have the worse-off accept the inequality and benefit the well-off. Furthermore, Rawls's idea regarding morally arbitrary natural endowments comes under fire; Nozick argues that natural advantages that the well-off enjoy do not violate anyone's rights and therefore have a right to them, on top of which is the fact that Rawls's own proposal that inequalities be geared toward assisting the worse-off is in itself morally arbitrary.Original position
Nozick's opinions on historical entitlement ensures that he naturally rejects the Original Position since he argues that in the Original Position individuals will use an end-state principle to determine the outcome, whilst he explicitly states the importance of the historicity of any such decisions (for example punishments and penalties will require historical information).Equality, envy, exploitation, etc.
Nozick presses "the major objection" to theories that bestow and enforce positive rights to various things such as equality of opportunity, life, and so on. "These 'rights' require a substructure of things and materials and actions," he writes, "and 'other' people may have rights and entitlements over these."Nozick concludes that "Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people's lack of understanding of economics."
Demoktesis
Demoktesis is a thought-experiment designed to show the incompatibility of democracy with libertarianism in general and the entitlement theory specifically. People desirous of more money might "hit upon the idea of incorporating themselves, raising money by selling shares in themselves." They would partition such rights as which occupation one would have. Though perhaps no one sells himself into utter slavery, there arises through voluntary exchanges a "very extensive domination" of some person by others. This intolerable situation is avoided by writing new terms of incorporation that for any stock no one already owning more than a certain number of shares may purchase it. As the process goes on, everyone sells off rights in themselves, "keeping one share in each right as their own, so they can attend stockholders' meetings if they wish." The inconvenience of attending such meetings leads to a special occupation of stockholders' representative. There is a great dispersal of shares such that almost everybody is deciding about everybody else. The system is still unwieldy, so a "great consolidational convention" is convened for buying and selling shares, and after a "hectic three days (lo and behold!)" each person owns exactly one share in each right over every other person, including himself. So now there can be just one meeting in which everything is decided for everybody. Attendance is too great and it's boring, so it is decided that only those entitled to cast at least 100,000 votes may attend the grand stockholders' meeting. And so on. Their social theorists call the system demoktesis (from Greek δῆμος demos, "people" and κτῆσις ktesis, "ownership"), "ownership of the people, by the people, and for the people," and declare it the highest form of social life, one that must not be allowed to perish from the earth. With this "eldritch tale" we have in fact arrived at a modern democratic state.A framework for Utopia
The utopia mentioned in the title of Nozick's first book is a meta-utopia, a framework for voluntary migration between utopias tending towards worlds in which everybody benefits from everybody else's presence. This is meant to be the Lockean "night-watchman state" writ large. The state protects individual rights and makes sure that contracts and other market transactions are voluntary. The meta-utopian framework reveals what is inspiring and noble in this night-watchman function. They both contain the only form of social union that is possible for the atomistic rational agents of Anarchy, State and Utopia, fully voluntary associations of mutual benefit. The influence of this idea on Nozick's thinking is profound. Even in his last book, Invariances, he is still concerned to give priority to the mutual-benefit aspect of ethics. This coercively enforceable aspect ideally has an empty core in the game theorists' sense: the core of a game is all of those payoff vectors to the group wherein no subgroup can do better for itself acting on its own, without cooperating with others not in the subgroup. The worlds in Nozick's meta-utopia have empty cores. No subgroup of a utopian world is better off to emigrate to its own smaller world. The function of ethics is fundamentally to create and stabilize such empty cores of mutually beneficial cooperation. His view is that we are fortunate to live under conditions that favor "more-extensive cores", and less conquest, slavery, and pillaging, "less imposition of noncore vectors upon subgroups." Higher moral goals are real enough, but they are parasitic (as described in The Examined Life, the chapter "Darkness and Light") upon mutually beneficial cooperation.Rothbard
Fellow right-libertarian (but anarcho-capitalist) Murray RothbardMurray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
has criticized Anarchy, State, and Utopia in his essay "Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State" http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/1_1/1_1_6.pdf on the basis that:
- No existing State has been "immaculately conceived" in the way envisaged by Nozick;
- 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;
- Therefore Nozick, on his own grounds, should become an anarchist and then wait for the Nozickian invisible hand to operate afterward; and
- Even if any State had been founded immaculately, the fallacies of social contractSocial contractThe social contract is an intellectual device intended to explain the appropriate relationship between individuals and their governments. Social contract arguments assert that individuals unite into political societies by a process of mutual consent, agreeing to abide by common rules and accept...
theory would mean that no present State, even a minimal one, would be justified. - 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.
Walzer
Anarchy, State, and Utopia came out of a semester-long course that Nozick taught with Michael WalzerMichael Walzer
Michael Walzer is a prominent American political philosopher and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he is co-editor of Dissent, an intellectual magazine that he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at...
at Harvard
Harvard College
Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...
in 1971, called Capitalism and Socialism. 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 occassional 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 "truth 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
The Law of Peoples
The Law of Peoples is American Philosopher John Rawls's work on international relations. First published in 1993 as a short article , in 1999 it was expanded and joined with another essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" to form a full length book...
, 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
Modus vivendi
Modus vivendi is a Latin phrase signifying an agreement between those whose opinions differ, such that they agree to disagree.Modus means mode, way. Vivendi means of living. Together, way of living, implies an accommodation between disputing parties to allow life to go on. It usually describes...
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 Sen's Liberal Paradox
Liberal paradox
The liberal paradox is a logical paradox advanced by Amartya Sen, building on the work of Kenneth Arrow and his impossibility theorem, which showed that within a system of menu-independent social choice, it is impossible to have both a commitment to "Minimal Liberty", which was defined as the...
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 "voluntary slavery"
Voluntary slavery
Voluntary slavery is the condition of slavery freely entered into. In ancient times this was a common way for impoverished people to provide subsistence for themselves or their family and provision was made for this in law...
.
Although not actually a response, in Justice as Fairness
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement is a book of political philosophy by John Rawls, a revision of his classic A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2001. This shorter summary of the main arguments of Rawls' political philosophy was edited by Erin Kelly...
, 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.
Leff
The American legal scholar Arthur Allen LeffArthur Allen Leff
Arthur Allen Leff was a professor of law at Yale Law School who is best known for a series of articles examining whether there is such a thing as a normative law or morality...
criticized Nozick in his 1979 article Unspeakable Ethics, 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 licence 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.
See also
- American philosophyAmerican philosophyAmerican philosophy is the philosophical activity or output of Americans, both within the United States and abroad. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that while American philosophy lacks a "core of defining features, American Philosophy can nevertheless be seen as both reflecting and...
- Constitutional economicsConstitutional economicsConstitutional economics is a research program in economics and constitutionalism that has been described as extending beyond the definition of 'the economic analysis of constitutional law' in explaining the choice "of alternative sets of legal-institutional-constitutional rules that constrain the...
- Rule according to higher lawRule according to higher lawThe rule according to a higher law means that no written law may be enforced by the government unless it conforms with certain unwritten, universal principles of fairness, morality, and justice...