Episode #138 - Transcript

Hello, everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

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Today’s episode’s on the famous political work of Robert Nozick titled Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I hope you love the show today.

So obviously there are a lot of different problems political philosophers were faced with throughout the 20th century. And we’ve talked about most of them so far, but one of the biggest ones we haven’t talked about yet, specifically for political philosophers in the mid to late 20th century, one of the biggest questions facing them was this: When we are hit with problems, big problems that we need to solve collectively as a society, should the state or the government be the primary tool that we use to solve those problems? How much responsibility is wise to give to the government? Does the government solve the problems of a society in the best manner possible, or does giving the government more responsibilities to deal with create more problems than it’s worth?

Another important question to consider about all this when it comes to this episode in particular: When you progressively give the government more jobs to do and more outcomes to guarantee for people, when you have a big, powerful government with a democracy behind it feeding it tasks to complete, does a big government plus a democracy always equal a tyranny of the majority? And do citizens that don’t necessarily agree with the majority or the people currently holding office, do those citizens just need to resign themselves to paying into a tax pool that funds all the things they don’t agree with? Maybe an oversized government makes slaves of people whose views don’t happen to align with the current majority. To me, these are some of the most important and fun questions to think about in all of political philosophy. But let’s take these questions on one at a time.

Should the government be the tool that we use to solve our problems as a society? Now, as you can imagine, when you ask a question like this, one that’s this wide in scope, the answers you’re going to get are going to vary widely as well. Last time we talked about John Rawls and his work A Theory of Justice, and Rawls would be a good example of a later-20th-century thinker who’s more on the side of government being a good solution to our problems. We saw this in his work. He lays out what he thinks is a fair and just distribution of social goods and then suggests that it’s the government’s job to tax and redistribute accordingly to make sure that distribution remains just and is not too imbalanced in one direction or another.

But there are, of course, thinkers out there that would disagree with Rawls. Maybe one of the most extreme examples of someone on the other side would be some variation of anarchy, the exact opposite of believing that government is the best way to solve all our problems. Human beings began in the state of nature. Why should we believe that centralizing power into a single body we call the government is going to produce any better results than we would otherwise produce with private enterprise? But we’ll save that conversation for later when we do our episodes on the anarchist thought of the ‘90s.

Today’s episode’s on a philosopher who falls somewhere in between John Rawls and an anarchist. His name is Robert Nozick, and the book we’re going to be talking about today is titled Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Now, just to give the following conversation a little preliminary structure, that title, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, is referencing the three major sections that the book is divided into. The first section would be “Anarchy,” where Nozick spends a considerable portion of time being understanding of the anarchist’s subversion to government but ultimately making a case that they go too far. The middle portion of the book, “State,” has Nozick laying out the type of state that he thinks is best. And the “Utopia” section is where he describes why his version of a state is the best. “Utopia” is a sort of tongue-in-cheek musing by Nozick. He by no means thinks his system is an actual utopia, but he thinks it’s far better than other systems that have been tried. And he argues for why he thinks that is.

See, Nozick is not a fan of there being a big state with a lot of responsibilities, and he’s not a fan of there being no state at all. So what is he a fan of? How big should the government be, and what exactly should it do? Nozick is a fan of what he would call the “minimal state.” And the best way to start understanding what he means by this is probably to contrast him with both the work of Rawls and the anarchists of his time. And to get us into this mindset of Nozick, let’s start with some general criticisms of Rawls and these bigger government approaches which will then lead us to criticisms of Rawls detailed by Nozick himself.

The first place someone might take issue with Rawls is with his use of the “maximin” principle. That word, “maximin,” as you might remember from last time, is a mixture of the words maximum and minimum. Rawls holds that rational agents, when choosing the structure of society, would reliably choose the option that provided the maximum for the minimum, or the best case scenario for the least advantaged within that society. But some people would reply back to that and say, “Okay, sure. That sounds great, but when you really look at the studies, when you really look at what human beings truly seem to value when it comes to the role of government, they don’t want the best situation for the least advantaged. They want certain basic services guaranteed with a satisfactory quality of life ensured and, then, beyond that, they just want the government to leave them alone and let them live their life.” People don’t want the government telling them what things they should care about or how they should be living. And the larger the government gets, the more the government is asked to do just that.

We’re going to be touching on this at multiple points throughout the next couple episodes, but let this be the first instance of saying that one of the main criticisms people have here is that Rawls wants to do away with markets and instead rely on a predetermined “fixed distribution” of the social goods, which leads some people to think that the “maximin” principle is not obviously what rational agents would choose in the original position, as Rawls suggests, but instead maybe Rawls needs the “maximin” principle for other parts of his theory to work at all, and that there are actually many different options we might see rational agents choosing while structuring society in that place.

Another common criticism of Rawls, he talks about the people in the original position structuring a society through a veil of ignorance. How would people structure a society if they couldn’t know their age, gender, race, income level, family, level of intelligence, etc. And there are people out there that would reply back to this and say, once again, “That sounds really nice, but doesn’t that take away practically everything about what makes a person a person?” These aspects of our identity matter. They’re part of the composite that makes us a human being. And political institutions need to be structured to deal with the problems of human beings, not these nameless, faceless rational agents of Rawls that don’t actually resemble a human being at all.

But maybe the biggest point of departure between Nozick and Rawls comes down to the way they see rights. Nozick opens Anarchy, State, and Utopia with this famous line. He says, “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them.” Nozick wants to focus heavily on our rights as citizens. And the reason he wants to pay such close attention to them is because he wants to get away from what he thought was a huge misstep in the work of John Rawls. Rawls talks a lot in his work about fairness. Justice is fairness to Rawls. When you’re born into an estate worth a billion dollars, you don’t deserve that billion dollars any more than you deserve the negative consequences of somebody falling in front of your car by chance. Both outcomes are morally arbitrary. But Nozick’s going to say that none of this stuff matters when it comes to the state because Rawls is asking the wrong questions. The job of the state is not to determine what people deserve or what things are fair or not. The job of the state is to determine what people are entitled to and then to enforce that.

Let’s say your great-grandma Beatrice tragically passes away. Let’s also say that throughout the last five years of her life, her daughter took care of her and made sure she was safe. Grandma Beatrice in her will tries to leave everything she owns to her daughter but makes some sort of error on the legal form. And, through some random sequence of events, her possessions get passed on to her son who, for the sake of the example, has always hated Grandma Beatrice and hasn’t spoken to her for years. The role of the state is not to be an episode of Judge Judy where they sit there and reprimand Grandma Beatrice’s son for not being in her life more. The role of the state is not to tell him that it’s not fair or that he doesn’t deserve what was left for him. The job of the state is to determine what he is entitled to and then to make sure that he gets it. The state should be focused on entitlements and rights.

Nozick thinks there are certain rights that all human beings would agree upon whether they’re in a state of nature or in the most advanced society on the planet. He calls the values that ground these rights “moral side constraints,” and, in short, they set the parameters for what can be done to a person without violating their rights. One of the most important “moral side constraints” for Nozick is this: that no person should be harmed without their consent. Seems pretty reasonable. But, as we’ll see, it’s this “moral side constraint” in particular -- it’s truly taking the rights of people seriously that will eventually lead Nozick to unavoidable problems with the work of both the anarchists and John Rawls.

Let’s start with the problems this leads to with the work of the anarchists laid out in the “Anarchy” section of the book. So, if one thing we can all agree upon is that no human being wants to be harmed against their will, then Nozick says, when you consider the hostile, dangerous environment of the state of nature and you think about how human beings would behave in that scenario, what would naturally emerge are private services that provide people with protection from other people that want to hurt them. At the most basic level, you’d pay a fee and then you’d have your own personal security guard whose job it is to make sure that nobody tries to hurt you or your family or take any of your stuff. But, feasibly, not everybody can have their own private security guard, so these guards would have to take on multiple clients, probably people that are in a similar proximity to each other.

But then another problem comes up, Nozick says. The whole thing becomes a convoluted mess. When you have hundreds or thousands of competing security-guard factions all trying to enforce the rules of the people who happen to be paying for them, there’s no codified set of rules that all the security guards are enforcing. It’s going to be a nightmare for these guards to have to figure out in real time who’s a client of theirs versus who isn’t, which set of rules they’re enforcing today versus tomorrow, which rules correspond with which client. What happens when there’s a conflict between what two different clients want? Not to mention, Nozick says, what’s going to happen when to settle a dispute one person’s security guard has to fight another person’s security guard? Well, one of them is going to win, and then everyone from the losing security guard’s detail is going to want to be protected by the other security guard now.

This may seem like a weird hypothetical for Nozick to be spending so much time on, but the argument he’s ultimately making here is that what naturally emerges in the state of nature is a local monopoly over the protection services of a region. Another way of putting that would be to say that what naturally emerges is a very basic kind of state that allows people to pay a fee in exchange for basic protection and the enforcement of contracts. This is one of the reasons why he thinks the anarchist takes their aversion to government too far because, even without any sort of formally organized state, this inevitable monopoly over protection services effectively creates the same thing. This version of an extremely minimal state, one that provides basic protection for people and makes sure that contracts are enforced, this is the standard from which any conversations about the role of government need to proceed.

So, if you have any ambitions about fun or creative services that you think it’s the government’s job to provide for people, you’re going to have to do some major convincing, to Nozick, if you want to make a case for the government being the appropriate thing to carry those services out because not only is this not what the government is good at doing -- because it has a complete monopoly over the services and, thus, can be embarrassingly inefficient with no consequences -- but this also isn’t what the government should be doing, to Nozick. The more stuff we ask the government to do, the more money they’re going to need from you to inefficiently execute that plan. Why is it the government’s job to tell people how to live their lives outside of following the laws? Nozick thinks we need to take answering this question very seriously and be extremely cautious of commissioning the government to solve our problems because giving a centralized body like the government more and more power and more and more stuff to do comes with very real consequences.

This is clearly a point of disagreement between the different views of Nozick and Rawls because Nozick thinks, whenever you advocate for a state that’s supposed to redistribute wealth from one group of people to another, you are fundamentally going against that “moral side constraint.” You are doing harm to someone who has not consented to be harmed. Let me explain what he means. Nozick understands where Rawls is coming from here. I mean, he gets it. The idea is that you’re part of a group; you have benefited in some way from that group. So, therefore, you now owe a debt to that group, and you’re obligated to pay it through higher taxes.

Well, Nozick gives a counter example in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. A bit of paraphrasing here, but he would say, imagine you’re at home one day. You’re cleaning your house. And it’s a nice day outside, so you open up the window. And from down the street you can hear your neighbor playing instruments, practicing music with their band in their garage a few houses down. So you decide to get a glass of lemonade, sit on the couch, take a break, and listen to the music for a while. Now, imagine the next day that person from down the street comes to your door and demands payment because you listened to their music. Would you say that you owe this person money because you listened to their music? Of course not, Nozick says. The only way you’d owe them money is if you consented to pay them for the music before they started playing.

Forcing somebody to pay into a system that will then redistribute their income to whatever cause it wants, regardless of whether or not the person consents to support that cause, to Nozick, is a backhanded, covert way of implementing forced labor on your citizens. For somebody paying 40 percent of their income in taxes, you are asking them to go to work every day and produce value for the state for 40 percent of their time. For almost three and a half hours out of an eight-hour shift, they are not working towards improving their life. They are raising funds for the government to spend on whatever vision for society they might have today. The fact that this money sometimes goes towards people who are in need really has nothing to do with it to Nozick because, when you truly take people’s rights seriously and don’t harm them without their consent, then you realize that doing something wrong is never okay just because you think it’ll lead to good results. To Nozick, you can’t just conveniently ignore one person’s rights because you think doing so will make things better for other people. This is, of course, in direct contrast to the long tradition of political philosophy being centered around utilitarianism.

To illustrate his point further, Nozick gives one of the most famous examples from his work. Just imagine for a second if you were a slave under the control of a brutal slave master that abuses you and treats you like dirt. Now, we would all agree that this is not a way anybody should be treated. And we would certainly not say that this slave is a free person. But then, Nozick says, imagine another scenario. Imagine you’re still a slave, but your slave master doesn’t abuse you. You work long hours, but you’re allowed to have a family. You’re allowed to have your own modest place to live. Would that be an okay way to treat someone? Would we consider that a free person? No, we wouldn’t. How about if you’re still a slave but your slave master doesn’t really need your help all that much? You can live on a farm out in the country by yourself. You can raise your kids. You can go to the store and buy stuff. But, nonetheless, you are still the property of that slave master. We would say, clearly, this is still wrong. This person is still owned by somebody else. They are not a free human being in any real sense of the word.

Nozick walks this example all the way back to living a modern life under a government that taxes and redistributes and a culture behind it that tells you what sort of job you’re going to have, what causes your tax dollars are going to go towards, how much you need to work, how many vacations you go on, what you buy. Nozick’s question here is, when you’re living in a society where the government has so many tasks that aim at ensuring specific outcomes for people, do we really own ourselves fully. As the size of government increases, does our ability to be truly free decrease in a similar proportion? The question Nozick wants answered is at what point in his example does the slave truly experience self-ownership. This is the reason Nozick is an advocate of the “minimal state.”

Rawls had great intentions with his work, but one of his biggest problems for Nozick was that he aimed for what he called a “patterned distribution of social goods,” or the idea that the distribution of goods must follow a particular pattern that we’ve decided is good beforehand. Philosophers of this time typically called for a “patterned distribution” if they were trying to get away from markets, usually because they were trying to get away from the inequalities often produced by market systems. But Nozick thinks aiming for things like “equality across the board” or “the best for the least advantaged across the board” is wrong on many different levels, not the least of which is -- Let’s say that you have a certain “patterned distribution” that you want to achieve, total equality, for the sake of the example. Let’s say one day you achieve that goal of total equality. Well, what happens the second after that goal is achieved? Well, somebody sells something or gives a gift to someone or someone gets sick and can’t work. In other words, things aren’t equal across the board anymore. So what necessarily needs to happen is the government has to step in and restore the balance of that pattern.

What you are signing yourself up for, to Nozick, is an endless spree of government coercion, where they constantly have their fingers inside of your life, constantly trying to produce certain outcomes and a certain type of citizen. To Nozick, the bigger the government, the more utilitarianism starts to creep in, the more we start ignoring the rights of the few under the assumption that it’s good for the rest of the population. But Nozick wants to respect people’s rights on a level most political philosophers weren’t willing to. This is why Nozick thinks it’s none of the government business what people deserve. The question they should be asking is “What is legal, and what are people entitled to?”

So, when Rawls talks about the moral arbitrariness of being born into a billion dollar estate, how if you aren’t putting that money towards the least advantaged in society then we can’t really consider you having that money as justice, Nozick’s going to say that the only question the government should be concerned with is “Did you get that money in a legal way?” There is a just way to get that money, and there is a just way for it to be transferred from its previous owner. As long as it follows these two criteria, then the ownership of that billion dollars is just. We need to respect people’s rights, and we need to respect our legal system. When someone finds a way to make a billion dollars while following all the legal parameters set up to protect people along the way, Nozick would ask, how can we say that that outcome is not just when every step taken to get there was just under our legal system?

Nozick thinks Rawls’s big mistake here is that he’s thinking about people’s property as though when they die it enters some sort of purgatory where it’s not owned by anyone and then it just falls into someone else’s lap. But these possessions were already legally acquired and owned by people and then given to someone else through a legal process. Nozick compares the way Rawls is looking at society to the way people would look at being stranded on a dessert island. How do you treat the limited resources that you have once you realize you’re stranded on an island? Well, you take an inventory of what you have. You distribute it the best you can. And, when Tom Hanks finds a volleyball, smears his blood all over it, and calls it his good pal Wilson, there is nobody out there that is saying, “Well, technically that belongs to the Wilson Volleyball Factory. That, th-, that is not your property, Mr. Tom Hanks.” No, nobody would say that. But here’s the thing, Nozick would say, we don’t live stranded on a dessert island. This is not a state of emergency. People inherit things that were already owned for having produced extreme value in former societies. Say all you want as an individual about whether that’s fair or whether they deserve it. But, when it comes to the state, they should only go as far as asking what people are entitled to and whether they achieved it through legal means. When the path to get there was just, the outcome is just.

To Nozick, the beauty of his system lies in the fact that there isn’t some “patterned distribution” that the government’s guaranteeing through coercion, that there aren’t a handful of specific outcomes that the government’s nurturing more than others with everyone’s tax dollars. The “minimal state” allows for a level of freedom and self-ownership that a big government system can’t offer. When you don’t have a busy, powerful government with a tyranny of the majority directing it, Nozick thinks that leaves room for types of lifestyles that are incompatible with a big government approach because, while the big government approaches have very specific outcomes they’re trying to ensure, the minimal state allows you to run any experiment you want as long as you’re not harming the people around you.

So, under the minimal state, if you wanted to buy some land, band together with a bunch of friends, and start a communist compound because it’s just the type of society you want to live in, you can do it. Think the liberals are ruining the world? Think the conservatives are ruining the world? Start a community where you cut either of them out completely, and then see how it goes for you. The beauty of Nozick’s “minimal state” is that it allows the world to act as a laboratory where we can run any kind of experiment that we want and then learn from the successes and failures of other strategies.

Now, Nozick would say, this is far from a perfect system but, at the very least, it’s a system that truly respects people’s rights. And this leads Nozick to reference Leibniz and jokingly refer to his system as the “best of all possible worlds” from Leibniz’s Theodicy that we talked about on this show.

The book Anarchy, State, and Utopia offers a unique argument in favor of libertarianism, which at the time was in many ways a different solution to 20th-century political problems that were going on.

Next episode we’re going to be talking about the philosopher Friedrich Hayek. And it’s been said that, while Nozick offers a defense of libertarianism from the perspective of rights, Hayek offers a defense of libertarianism from the perspective of markets. But both of them, it should be said, take extreme issue with the idea that we should be planning what our society is going to look like beforehand and then using the government as a tool to coerce that into existence, whether that’s a “planned distribution of social goods,” whether that’s a planned economic system with specific outcomes like socialism; whether that’s a planned idea of what a citizen of a particular society is going to be like, how much they’re going to work, how much they’re going to make, etc. Whatever plan you may have beforehand of how society should look, when the enforcer of that plan is a centralized monopoly of concentrated power like the government, you may be creating more problems than you’re solving.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.