Robert Nozick Notes

Robert Nozick on Self-Ownership and Historical Entitlement

INTRODUCTION

Theories of justice address the problem of ‘distributive justice’: how certain goods that arise from our participation in a ‘cooperative venture for mutual advantage’ [Rawls] should be justly allocated.

For libertarians, however, to speak of distributive justice is to presuppose that all goods are a ‘manna from heaven’ awaiting (re)distribution by some central authority. Written in response to A Theory of Justice by John Rawls*, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) epitomizes the contemporary libertarian position, arguing that ‘whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just’.

Scope

This essay discusses whether it is ever morally permissible to prevent two people from exchanging things they legitimately own. I focus on challenging the notion of ‘legitimate ownership’ with reference to Nozick’s historical entitlement theory, as well as various critiques. I conclude that not all ‘infringements of liberty’ are morally impermissible.

NOZICK ON RIGHTS

• Like Rawls, Nozick grants primacy to individual rights as side-constraints on the pursuit of social goals like utility-maximization.

• Unlike Rawls, who concludes that a due respect for the ‘separateness of persons’ precludes imposing losses on individuals for the sake of general welfare; Nozick concludes that it precludes imposing losses on individuals for the sake of any conception of the overall social good, including deeply distribution-sensitive conceptions.

• ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)’ [Nozick]

THE PRINCIPLE OF SELF-OWNERSHIP & SLAVERY

• Libertarians ground the institution of property on ‘self-ownership’, famously defined by Locke as ‘every man having a property in his own person’. Each person is the morally rightful owner of their bodies, talents, labour and the fruits thereof; which generates a claim-right to non-interference in private property affairs.

• The derived rights of self-ownership include:

1. Rights of use/exclusion

2. Rights to compensation if used non-contractually

3. Authority to transfer such rights to others by sale, rent, gift or loan

4. Immunity from expropriation with respect to one’s body and labor. Accordingly, self-ownership precludes any duty to help others.

• Self-ownership is intrinsically valuable because it provides a moral bulwark against forced slavery, fraud, expropriation, etc. appropriate to the separateness of persons.

NOZICK’S HISTORICAL ENTITLEMENT THEORY

Nozick is interested in a ‘historical’ theory of justice: a theory that judges the ‘moral permissibility’ of distributive outcomes in terms of the procedures which occasioned it (not some structural criterion of just distribution as in ‘end-state’ and ‘patterned’ principles).

A derivative distribution of holdings is ‘just’ if, and only if, the holding arises from:

1. An act of just initial acquisition

2. An act of just initial acquisition followed by one or more acts of just transfer (via charity, inheritance, gift, etc.)

3. An act of just rectification that counteracts an unjust taking of a just holding.

Wilt Chamberlain example

• Assuming that a ‘just’ allocation of holdings exists according to one’s favourite patterned principle (D1), readers are to imagine that 1 million fans voluntarily transfer 25c each to watch popular basketballer, Wilt Chamberlain (WC) play, thus generating $250,000 in surplus (D2) that upsets D1.

• He argues that ‘if D1 is just and D2 arises from D1 through voluntary exchange, D2 must also be just’. Any intervention to restore D1 (e.g. welfare state redistribution) is therefore unjust, and merely ‘creates rights to interfere with the rights which it has created’ [Mack, 2002]. Hence, patterned principles of just distribution are incompatible with liberty.

• For this reason, Nozick endorses a minimal state – ‘a state limited to the protection of the rights of person, property and contract’ – as the only state that can arise without violating rights.

Locke’s proviso

• According to Locke’s proviso, the initial appropriation of unowned resources is just if it leaves ‘enough, and as good, in common for others’. However, this is based on the assumption of non-scarcity and homogenous quality of land. By claiming that any case where A is no longer at liberty to appropriate X is morally impermissible, the proviso becomes ‘too stringent’.

• Doesn’t all appropriation make others worse-off since they are deprived of the right/liberty to appropriate a specific unowned resource?

• Nozick offers a ‘revised’ proviso which compensates for the ‘net loss of reasonably expected wellbeing incurred by others as a consequence of their loss of liberty to use that object’ [Steiner]; as compared to a ‘state of nature’ where X remains in general use.

CRITIQUE

Self-ownership

• Self-ownership ‘entails the extreme denial that any genuine enforceable obligation to aid or aggregate social utility is ever generated’ [Arneson]

• Not all non-contractual obligations are slavery

For Cohen, there is a normative difference between a limited dose of ‘forced labor’, and life-long servitude. Following Joseph Raz, Cohen demonstrates that absences of self-ownership need not be presences pro tanto of slavery with the following example:

• Although I might be obliged to assist my ailing mother, she might have no right to absolve me from that obligation and therefore, no more right that I in deciding whether my capacity to...

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