Is There a Public Interest?
ABELSON, RAZIEL
Is There a Public Interest? Anarchy, State and Utopia By Robert Nozick Basic Books. 367 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Raziel Abelson Professor of Philosophy, New York University This book is a...
...no considerations can override it, and injustice is thought intolerable...
...He offers no argument to prove that these are the only natural rights...
...Because the tendency to buy and sell the best protection at the lowest price will filter out all but the most efficient protective group...
...and (2) that this state could arise out of free and fair transactions, without violating anyone's natural rights...
...At the risk of falling into a similar inconsistency, I would like to pay tribute to the strength and decency of Nozick's libertarian ideal of personal autonomy...
...Rawls also maintained-inconsistently, as Nozick points out-that his principles of distribution satisfy the concept of formal justice, on the ground that self-interested rational agents would agree upon those principles as the rules of social organization...
...How much freedom of choice is available to the millions of starving peasants and impoverished slum-dwellers...
...This account is suggestive and illuminating, but Nozick refuses to draw the obvious corollary that persons have equal rights to the goods and services necessary to strive for their life-goals...
...Rawls, on the other hand, prefers the substantive interpretation...
...Part III undertakes to show that the minimal state has more moral and esthetic glamor than it is usually given credit for...
...Elsewhere, however, he suggests that natural rights are grounded in the Kantian principle that people should not use each other exclusively as means to their own ends, and he defines a person as a being who pursues long-term goals that give meaning to his life...
...The most dubious assumption of all, though one on which much of the book's argument depends, is that the only proper function of a state is to protect the rights of individuals within it...
...Yet must such agencies arise in the first place...
...Marxists, following Hegel's criticism of Kant for overemphasizing formal rights (Nozick's entitlements), have tended to avoid appeals to justice (except in propaganda tracts...
...Robert Nozick writes so persuasively, combining technical sophistication in economics and game theory with imagination and wit, that his contentions must be met lest one feel compelled to commit Marx and Keynes to the flames and vote for Ronald Reagan in 1976...
...He professes to see no rational support for egalitarian conceptions of justice...
...He assumes, too, that reasonable people are bound to recognize the need for protective associations, and that these organizations will develop and merge into a state...
...Still, if being a person is, as he claims, the ground for having rights, then surely equality of rights follows from equality of personhood...
...As for his first point, Nozick asks us to envision a situation in which each individual is free to do as he wants, to dispose of the products of his labor, and to defend himself against aggressors...
...But protective associations that specialize in police work and judicial processes are needed mainly for the defense of capital holdings, not personal property...
...He postulates, for example, that the natural right to dispose as one likes of personal property (clothes, dwelling, tools, work-products) extends automatically to capital accumulations like land, factories, banks, stock holdings, etc...
...How such capital accumulation could exist in a state of nature (that is, without legislation and administration) he does not explain, nor can I imagine...
...How he can find beauty in a moral theory that, according to him, justifies forced labor is not easy to understand, except as a manifestation of his vacillation between the two notions of justice...
...Nozick begins his critique by offering a definition of social justice in terms of "entitlement," arguing that equity has nothing to do with who winds up with how much, only with how owners come into possession of their property...
...His slogan, "from each as he chooses and to each as he chooses" is, other things being equal, a fine principle to keep in mind...
...But to say that Marx takes the market price as a more or less reliable measure of the value of labor is not to say that he defines necessary labor by competitive pricing...
...of how beautiful a whole theory can be"-at the same time that he expresses violent moral disapproval of the welfare state...
...So it would be well to keep in mind from the start just how fictitious Nozick's assumptions are...
...Because Nozick apparently does not believe in a "public interest," he insists that "the state has no special rights...
...Part II, the most important and strongly reasoned section, tries to demonstrate that welfare-capitalism and socialism alike are morally unacceptable because they violate individual rights...
...Most of his fire is directed at John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, which he rightly considers the best formulation of contemporary welfare liberalism...
...Part I is an attempt to refute anarchism by proving that government is both necessary and justifiable...
...Reviewed by Raziel Abelson Professor of Philosophy, New York University This book is a powerful argument against welfare-state liberalism, socialism and anarchism, and a reasoned defense of the classical libertarian ideal of a minimal state, where property rights reign supreme...
...As Aristotle observed, justice can be understood either formally, as consistency with accepted rules, or substantively, as morally right action...
...One may welcome a libertarian insistence on limiting the state's power to curtail personal freedom (and it is an urgent problem for political philosophy to define those limits) without blinking the fact that a public interest exists beyond the sum of individual preferences...
...In the substantive sense, justice includes all moral values...
...Merely one value among many, formal justice is prima facie desirable, but may be overriden by other considerations, like saving life, alleviating suffering, rectifying past wrongs, or furthering the public interest...
...Yet it seems clear to me that the claim to whatever products of social cooperation one needs to develop as a healthy human being provides an adequate moral ground for state-enforced redistribution of wealth, and so undermines Nozick's whole argument...
...Government is a "nightwatchman," nothing more...
...A "just society" for him means a morally good society, and in A Theory of Justice, he offered a sketch of the institutional structures he thought essential to fulfill his moral ideal...
...Is it not possible that people, perhaps after some bloody feuds, would decide that punishing aggressors is not worth the cost, especially when they begin to wonder who will protect them from their own power-hungry Mafia...
...These persons, he contends, would form "protective associations" that, according to the laws of supply and demand and game theory, would eventually merge into one dominant agency...
...By eliminating or absorbing all competitors, this body would constitute a de facto state, and in achieving its monopoly of coercive power without violating individual rights, it might become a de jure state...
...At this point, I should say that while Nozick's second point seems to me sound, it is hardly sufficient to counter anarchism, since anarchists are not obliged to deny the construction of a guiltless state, only its survival against the forces of competitive capitalism...
...Even Nozick's own example, the night watchman, enjoys privileges essential to his role, such as the right to carry a weapon, to demand identification and to enter places forbidden to the public...
...Nonetheless, Nozick's entire discussion up to this point is an aperitif to whet one's appetite for Part II of Anarchy, State and Utopia, an onslaught against the more-than-minimal states of welfare liberalism and socialism...
...This story is told with considerable charm, enough to lull the reader into sleepy acceptance, until he is rudely awakened by the author's bugle call to libertarian arms against taxation, welfare and public ownership...
...Other things, though, are not equal...
...Ultimately, I believe, Nozick's basic fallacy is his frequent shift between two conceptions of justice...
...Other natural rights that may override these-such as the right recognized by John Locke of any person's "title to so much of another's plenty as will keep him from extreme want"-are briefly acknowledged, but Nozick does not consider them worth more than passing mention...
...But Nozick also seems to me guilty of inconsistency, and to a more serious degree, in first limiting justice to formal entitlement and then arguing that departures from these entitlements are morally wrong...
...Since this framework is equally palatable to democratic socialists, anarchists and libertarians, it does not appear to add support to the controversial claims of the first two parts, so I shall say no more about it...
...At least this is the case if Robert Nozick's vision is ever to be realized for more than a few...
...Thus, Nozick attacks Marx for defining socially necessary labor time "in terms of the results of competitive markets" and thereby contradicting his labor theory of value...
...Throughout all this, attention is focused exclusively on property rights, or what Nozick calls "justice in holding...
...Distributive justice is purely a matter of legitimacy of acquisition and transfer, of determining, for each person or group, his or its "fair share" of a community pie...
...Who would not want unlimited freedom of choice...
...In the formal sense, an action can be just, yet morally wrong...
...Nozick then compares his definition with Rawls' two principles (Equality of Liberty, and Differences that Benefit the Least Advantaged), and contends that Rawls' insistence on a pattern of distribution requires that the state infringe on individual rights by forcible income redistribution...
...Moreover, Nozick praises Rawls' book-as "a new and inspiring vision of what a moral theory may attempt to do and unite...
...Nozick's ideal is appropriate for a society that has already solved its economic problems, a society where, as Marx prophesied in his Critique of the Gotha Program, the coercive state will have "withered away...
...Anarchists, socialists and libertarians can all share that moral vision of the future...
...Nozick further assumes that Locke's catalogue of natural rights (liberty of action, disposal of property and self-defense) is an adequate foundation for a theory of justice...
...In the meantime, defeating poverty and ignorance, dealing with overpopulation and depletion of natural resources, must take precedence over the right to amass wealth and dispose of it independent of the public interest...
...Or does Nozick think some persons are more equal than others...
...To proceed in this way, confusing formal and substantive justice, results in moral absurdities such as Nozick's pronouncement that "Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor...
...Yet where there are particular duties to be performed, there must be particular rights accorded the agents who perform them, rights that have not simply been transferred by persons who previously possessed them...
...Here, Nozick argues for an open, pluralistic society, with diverse groups building their own experimental Utopias and everyone being free to join and to leave...
...Nozick's critique, like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, is developed in three parts...
...A few shots are taken at Marx as well, without, I think, really striking home...
...But a brief glance away from Nozick's protective associations and toward institutions performing positive services, such as university administrations, professional societies, sports associations, and business managements, should remind us that an administrative structure is necessary to pursue the shared goals we call the "public interest...
...Nozick offers a two-pronged rebuttal to anarchism: (1) That free associations in a Lockean state of nature would tend to produce, by an "unseen hand," a minimal or libertarian state...
...Are individuals in a state of nature so much more afraid of raids on their property than of supporting an institution that may one day enslave them...
Vol. 58 • April 1975 • No. 8
