[Robert Nozick by Ralf M. Bader (Continuum, 2010, xii + 136 pp.)]
Ralf Bader—a distinguished Swiss philosopher and authority on Kant—wrote an excellent guidebook to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) in 2010, and in this week’s article, I’d like to discuss some of Bader’s central arguments.
Bader has an extremely high opinion of ASU. It was “the unfolding of a philosophical position by one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.” According to its critics, such as Thomas Nagel, though, the libertarian political theory advocated in the book lacked foundations. Nozick, the critics claimed, simply postulated controversial libertarian rights and failed to show why anyone not already inclined to libertarianism should accept these rights.
As Bader aptly notes, Nozick did not claim to offer such foundations, but he nevertheless had ideas of great value about the basis of rights. Unless people have rights which are treated as “side constraints” (i.e., rules not to be violated in pursuit of the good or even in an attempt to minimize violations of these very rights themselves), their status as autonomous persons capable of giving meaning to their lives has not been respected:
The Kantian principle tells us to treat individuals as ends, rather than merely treating them as means. This requires us to treat them as beings that have dignity, beings that freely choose how to act and that can set ends for themselves.… Coercion involves making people do things they have not chosen to do.… Since individuals ought to be treated as ends and not mere means, it follows that they should not be coerced to do things against their will.
But why should we accept the Kantian principle? Nozick answers that (quoting from ASU):
…persons are beings who can shape their lives according to a conception or plan that they themselves have framed. They thereby possess the capacity to impart meaning to their lives and it is because of this that they are inviolable, that they should be treated as ends and not as mere means.
Samuel Scheffler has endeavored to use Nozick’s appeal to the capacity for meaning to overturn his libertarian conclusions. If the point of rights is to enable people to seek meaning in their lives, don’t we have a justification for welfare rights as well as the liberties that libertarians find more congenial? Don’t people need resources in order to pursue effectively almost any plausible conception of meaning? And, if some people lack such resources, don’t we have a case for redistribution to them from those better off?
Bader’s response to Scheffler’s objection is to my mind the best thing in the book. In Nozick’s theory of rights, Bader says,
...rights are not means for ensuring that people can live meaningful lives, which is what Scheffler assumes in his favoring welfare rights over negative rights. It is not the case that living a meaningful life is the goal that is to be achieved and that rights are the means that permit us to attain this goal. Rather, it is in virtue of the fact that human beings are agents whose lives can have meaning that we need to respect their choices, that we have to let them decide how to live their lives.
Scheffler’s objection thus depends on a different conception of rights from Nozick’s; he has not successfully undermined Nozick’s view from within.
If Nozick makes a plausible case for rights as side constraints, this does not suffice to get us to libertarianism. For that, a theory justifying individual property rights is required; and here Nozick stands ready with his “entitlement theory of justice.” Bader rightly notes that Nozick’s theory rests on a principle of initial acquisition but that Nozick neither claims to nor succeeds in putting forward such a principle:
Without a theory of acquisition, the entitlement theory would break down.… Nozick raises a number of forceful objections against Locke’s theory of appropriation, which states that property can be acquired by mixing one’s labor with something that is unowned. However, he does not put forward a positive theory to replace the one proposed by Locke. Instead, he simply gives a revised version of the Lockean proviso.
In one respect Bader goes too far. Though Nozick did indeed raise objections—most notably his example of throwing a can of tomato juice into the sea—to Locke’s view of initial acquisition, I don’t think he intended these objections to be taken as reasons to reject Locke’s approach altogether. Rather, he meant by their use to show that a Lockean principle of acquisition needed to be more exactly specified than has hitherto been done. At least that is what Nozick told me.
If Nozick is correct, people have rights, and these rights include property rights. How may these rights be secured and enforced? Nozick had the great merit of realizing that it is not obvious that the answer lies in the state. On the contrary, the existence of the state is problematic and requires justification. He endeavored to supply in the first part of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and Bader offers a careful account of Nozick’s argument.
In one place, though, I think that what he says is slightly mistaken. As he notes, Nozick imagines a state of nature in which a dominant protection association has emerged in competition with other agencies. As Bader tells the tale:
Nozick argues that independents can be prohibited from enforcing their rights since this kind of private enforcement is risky.… In this way we end up with a de facto monopoly. This is not a de jure monopoly since everyone has the same rights. It is not the case that the dominant agency has a special right that others lack. Instead, everyone has the same right of prohibiting others from using risky and unreliable methods. It simply happens to be the case that the dominant agency is in a position in which it is the only one who can make use of that right.
What I think isn’t made clear in this passage is that the dominant agency can prohibit others from imposing risky procedures only against its clients: it has no right to ban such procedures altogether. Further, it is consistent with Nozick’s account that a non-dominant agency can prohibit still less powerful agencies from imposing on its own clients procedures it views as risky. This possibility to my mind weakens Nozick’s claim that he has genuinely arrived at a “state-like entity.”
Rothbardians will be glad to see that Bader views with much sympathy anarchist objections to Nozick’s derivation of the minimal state. In particular, competition among protection agencies will, contrary to Nozick’s supposition, probably not result in a dominant agency imposing by force its view of decision procedures on all others. On the contrary, the competing agencies will be likely to agree on peaceful ways to resolve disputes among them. Nozick naturally had thought of this, but he wrongly supposed that such agreements would result in “one unified federal judicial system of which they are all components” (quoting ASU). Bader points out that instead, “there can be different arbitration agencies and different protective agencies which compete with each other. There can still be large differences between the agencies.”
Bader’s book was a major contribution to libertarian political theory. We have to respect the choices of libertarians who won’t read Nozick and Bader, perhaps because doing so would divert them from the study of writers they wrongly think are more important, but they are making a big mistake.
