Assignment task:
The American Robert Nozick (1938-2002) was Rawls's colleague in the philosophy department at Harvard, teaching alongside him when Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971. By 1974, Nozick had published his counterblast, Anarchy, State and Utopia, which is still the most coherent and systematic articulation of libertarian principles around, and one of the most fundamental critiques of Rawls's whole approach. For Nozick, justice is not about agreeing fair principles by imagining that we don't know how lucky or unlucky we have been in the natural or social lottery. It is about respecting people's right to self-ownership and their right to hold property, leaving them free to decide for themselves what they do with what is theirs. The proper role of the state, for Nozick, is not to meddle with the distribution of resources so as to produce some ideally 'fair' distribution. That would involve unjustified intrusions into people's legitimate holdings of private property. Its role should rather be limited to that of protecting people from such intrusions by others. Where Rawls is a 'left liberal' (or an 'egalitarian liberal') advocating a substantially redistributive welfare state, Nozick is a 'right liberal' (or 'libertarian'), committed to the idea of self-ownership and arguing for a laissez-faire 'nightwatchman' state. Like Hayek, his views - or at least versions of them as filtered through various think-tanks and policy units - were influential in the development of the New Right.
Nozick attributes to Rawls, and objects to, the view that we can regard goods as 'manna from heaven'. Were it the case that we had woken up one morning to discover that the world was suddenly full of things that people wanted, then it might be appropriate to adopt Rawls's or similar principles to distribute them. In that case, after all, why should anybody get more than anybody else? But that is not how goods came into the world. They are made by people. They are the result of individual people's work, sometimes in cooperation with others. People create things by combining their own abilities and efforts with the natural world, entering into voluntary agreements with one another for the mutually advantageous exchange of such abilities and efforts, and the things that they thereby create are theirs. They are not like manna from heaven, unowned and up for distribution in accordance with fair principles. They come into the world already owned, by the people who produced them (or by those who have paid for the labour of those who produced them).
Rawls objects to utilitarianism because it fails to take seriously the separateness of persons. Utilitarians think we should maximize overall happiness but that is a mistaken goal, partly because there is no overall person to enjoy that overall happiness. There are just lots of separate people, and it would be wrong to make some unhappy for the sake of creating more happiness in others. This thought underlies the idea of the contract, whereby principles have to be agreeable to each individual considered separately - which Rawls thinks will rule out principles aimed simply at maximizing overall utility (or overall anything else). What if I am one of the people made unhappy for the sake of other people's happiness? Nozick thinks that Rawls does not take the separateness of persons seriously enough. Rawls does not see that each person is individual, separate from others, each one with her own talents and attributes, which belong to her and her alone, and which may not be used to benefit others without her consent. She can choose voluntarily to give the fruits of her labour to others, but the state acts wrongly, failing to respect her separateness, when it forces her to give up some of those fruits to others. Nozick, then, opposes all redistributive taxation. If the wealthy are to give to the poor, they must do so voluntarily, not because the state forces them to.
In Nozick's view, people can do what they like with what is theirs. And there are three kinds of thing that might be theirs: (a) their selves - their bodies, brain cells, etc.; (b) the natural world - land, minerals, etc.; and (c) the things people make by applying themselves to the natural world - cars, food, computers, etc. I'll say something about the idea of self-ownership - that my limbs and brain cells are mine to do what I like with - shortly. And once people own bits of the world, and own themselves, it's easy to see how they might be thought to own what they produce by bringing them together. So let's start by seeing how Nozick thinks bits of the natural world might come to be owned by people. He identifies three ways in which people can acquire a legitimate property holding (or entitlement): initial acquisition, voluntary transfer and rectification.
Initial acquisition refers to the case whereby somebody comes to appropriate - to make their own property - previously unowned bits of the world. Imagine people settling for the first time in an uninhabited continent. In Nozick's view, the land and natural resources of that continent do not belong to anybody, and may legitimately be acquired by individuals on a first-come-first-served basis, as long as nobody is made worse off by their doing so. (This is Nozick's variant on Locke's famous claim - in his Second Treatise of Government (1689) - that people may appropriate property just as long as 'enough and as good' is left for others.) This view has come under substantial and sustained criticism, and it would be fair to say that most political theorists think that Nozick's account of initial acquisition is inadequate. What exactly does one have to do to make previously unowned property one's own: walk round it, draw a circle on a map, put a fence round it? How do we decide whether others are being made worse off? They're clearly worse off in the sense that they are no longer able to appropriate that bit of land. And, in any case, who says that the continent was unowned - up for grabs - in the first place? Maybe it, and all the natural world, is jointly owned by all of us, in which case anybody wanting to use any of it needs permission
Based off of this week's reading, do you think there should be a minimum wage in our society? How about a maximum wage? If you had to, would you rather sacrifice some level of inequality (economic) for freedom, or freedom for inequality? Why?