Philosopher views

Life And Work

Robert Nozick was born November 16, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Columbia, where he received a BA in 1959, and Princeton, where he received his Ph.D. in 1963. Both of these schools were, at the time of Nozicks education, hotbeds of debate about such issues as communism, racism, and the failure of market economies to deliver an equitable distribution of goods and political power to all citizens. It must have been just a bit unpopular for the young doctoral candidate to present a dissertation which revived long-abandoned classical notions of capitalist ethics. But Robert Nozick did just that: His dissertation was entitled The Normative Theory of Individual Choice, and thus from the beginning of his career, Nozick would champion individual rights and eschew or reject any statist intervention against them.

Moral Libertarianism

Nozick supports a minimal state to ensure the protection of individual rights, but his leeway for state action stops there, just as it did for Locke. Nozick believes that a minimal state, that is, a state with very little power to do anything (especially with no power to acquire material goods beyond that which is needed for light maintenance) will dissuade machiavellian politicians from flying to gain a disproportionate share of power. After all, what is to be gained from being at the head of a state which can do nothing but enforce individual rights?

So what ethical system does this minimal state enforce? The principle, Nozick’s “acquisition principle,” is simple: Goods are legitimately owned if they are legitimately acquired. If I work to earn money, that is my money. The state can no more take that money from me (even in order to give it to someone less fortunate) than can some individual. To those who argue that the state should have greater rights to tax or capture acquisitions than individuals, Nozick replies that the state is merely a collection of individuals, and that it should be of no moral consequence that particular groups of individuals have the title “government” written on their badges. The moral principle is the same: Just as no individual may take what rightfully belongs to me, no group of individuals, representatives of the state or not, may do it either.
Nozick compares taxation to forced labor; he points out that a person who is forced to work without pay can be metaphorically (and somewhat literally) equated with a person who is taxed for the benefit of others; in the first case, the labor is for the satisfaction of someone besides the worker. In the second case, the pay for the labor which is taxed amounts to a portion of labor done for the satisfaction of someone besides the worker.
Now, at this point, many will raise moral arguments about how those less fortunate are entitled to some compassion and charity. Nozick, however, agrees with this. He argues that it is absolutely moral, even to the point of being morally obligatory, for those with more than they need to share with those who have less than they need. But the moral duty of charity does not equate to the compulsion or power of the state to enforce this obligation, any more than a moral duty to help an old person across the street should land a young person in jail if he or she fails to do so. it is simply unjust to take things from one person and give them to another. Moreover, the moral obligation of charity, in fact, can only be fulfilled voluntarily. Again, if I help an elderly person across the street because I want to, I have committed a moral act; if I do it because someone has a gun to my back and will shoot me if I fail, then my act cannot be considered moral, only pragmatic.

Some Objections

Although critics place Nozick squarely in the camp of anti-government libertarians, one of the two main criticisms of the theory put forward in Anarchy. State and Utopia comes from an even more liberty-minded camp: Anarchists wonder why Nozick even supports a minimal state. Anarchism holds that any government, any hierarchy, is responsible for a disproportionate share of repression and should be rejected. Anarchists reason that if Nozick believes in completely free association and free exchange, then Nozick should himself be an anarchist

Nozick, however, feels he has good reasons for supporting a minimal state. He points out that Locke’s theory of minimal but effective government has never really been refuted. Absent the ability to prevent things like theft and murder, people’s hard work may be for nothing, as groups with greater power might simply destroy or steal the works of those with lesser power. While it might be possible for wealthy folks to ‘buy security,” say, by hiring armed guards or building secure fortresses, Nozick’s libertarianism prides itself on the opportunity for the less fortunate to work harder to become more fortunate. Without a state apparatus to secure property and prevent criminal intimidation, a free society might become just as oppressed as a society encumbered by a heavy-handed state.
The second major objection comes from camps more closely associated with statist liberalism (pro-welfare liberals) and socialists. The argument is that any individual rights must be subordinate to the general welfare of society. If this is true, then property rights, especially the right to keep the wealth one earns, must be subordinated to the social needs created by the existence of poverty. Because the amelioration of poverty is a social need, and because an individual’s right to keep his or her wealth is only an individual need, the social need trumps the individual need. This seems so obvious to utilitarian-minded social philosophers that for a long time the argument was simply asserted rather than reasoned through.
Nozick, however, does not believe in social entities. That is to say, a group of people might exist, but they have no more moral standing as a group than any one of them has individually, especially when it comes to acquisition. Only individuals count; this means that saying there is a “social entity” is only tantamount to saying there are several individuals, each of whom might want or need more wealth than they have. But since no one individual’s need can trump another individual’s right to keep what they legitimately acquire, it makes no difference to the acquisition principle that there are many or few individuals “in need.” In every case of the government taking and redistributing wealth, what happens is one individual, who has legitimately acquired his or her wealth, has it taken away from them to satisfy the needs of another individual. Unless it can be proven that this type of action is permissible (and Nozick goes to painful lengths to show that it cannot), it does no good to paint redistribution in utilitarian colors.

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