Nozick: Beginning with rights

Though Rawls insists on the priority of liberty, the major thrust of his book deals with questions about when allocations of money and goods are just.

Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).

Nozick's aim in the book is to consider the question of the justifica­tion of political authority from the starting point of this claim. Once we know what rights people have, we can ask whether a state could be set up without violating those rights. If it could not, then the jus­tification for the state would require at least that we showed that it offered us something morally valuable to outweigh these rights vio­lations. But even if it could, that would still not show that any actual state is justified, since it might have been set up in a way that vio­lated people's rights.

Like Hobbes, Nozick begins with a state of nature, but unlike Hobbes, it is a state of nature in which people should and do respect certain moral ideas. In fact, Nozick's state of nature is patterned after the one conceived by the English empiricist John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, which was first published in 1690. In this essay, Locke wrote that the state of nature was a state of per­fect freedom and equality.

But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence.

to quit his station wilfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.

Nozick's list of rights also includes the right not to be attacked or killed when you are doing no harm and the right to keep your prop­erty and to do with it what you like so long as you don't violate any­one else's rights in the process.

Nozick agrees with Locke—and disagrees with Hobbes—that even without government these rights exist and that we have the right to enforce them in this way. But he and Locke also agree that there are many “inconveniences of the state of nature.” Locke immediately argues that the “proper remedy” for these inconven­iences is “civil government,” but Nozick sets out to ask whether there is anything less than the institution of a state that will do the job.

One reason that Nozick adopts this more conservative approach is that he takes anarchism—the claim that the state can never be jus- tified—to be a serious option. Against an anarchist, especially one who agrees with Locke that we have many rights in the state of nature, it would be important to show how a state of a certain sort could arise without violating anyone's rights. Otherwise the anar­chists really might be right in thinking that the state was morally unjustifiable.

Since you know how Hobbes and Rawls justified the state, you might expect Nozick to defend his theory by arguing, like them, that people would choose in the state of nature to hand over certain rights to the state, and come by agreement to “institute the com­mon-wealth.” But Nozick proceeds in a different way.

He begins by considering how rational and self-interested people in the Lockean state of nature could come to make deals with each other to form what he calls “protective associations.” These are groups of people who agree to help each other to deal with anyone outside the organization who poses a threat to anyone within it, and to settle conflicts between members of the association where neces­sary. The key point that distinguishes protective associations from organized banditry is that such associations seek to enforce rights that people have in the state of nature and to enforce them accord­ing to the laws of nature.

Using the idea of a protective association, Nozick offers an expla­nation of the origins of the state in the state of nature. He seeks to show how

without anyone having this in mind, the self-interested and rational actions of persons in a Lockean state of nature will lead to single protective agencies dominant over geographical territories.

The dominant protective association of a region will claim, accord­ing to Nozick, a monopoly of the sort of authority that I said at the beginning of this chapter characterizes the state. A dominant pro­tective association of Nozicks kind he calls a “minimal state.” It is minimal because it is “limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts and so on.” This puts it in stark contrast with Rawls' ideal state, where the govern­ment spends a lot of its time on issues of distribution of income in order to ensure that the difference principle is obeyed.

Now, the reason why Nozick seeks to show that something very like a state can develop in this way is that he is convinced that a the­ory of justice must be based on historical principles. And the only way you can tell if a state is justified on historical principles is to see whether it was produced by a just process.

Plainly, if Nozick is correct in saying what our rights are in the state of nature, and correct in arguing that we could end up with a state without violating those rights, then he has made a convincing case against anarchism. He has not shown that any particular actual state is justified, but he has shown that the anarchist is wrong to claim that no state could be justified.

But Nozick also claims that the sort of state that would be derived in this way from the Lockean state of nature is the only sort of state that can be justified, and that is a much more doubtful claim.

Just how minimal the minimal state is—and just how restricted are the moral considerations that Nozick brings to bear—becomes clear if we turn from Nozicks account of the minimal state to his theory of distributive justice.

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