Prof: So you'll recall
from our discussion on Monday we were working our way through
Nozick's hypothetical social contract story.
The thought experiment he asks
us to engage in as a way of thinking about the social
contract idea as a basis for political legitimacy.
And he asks us,
in effect, to suspend disbelief and work through this story with
him holding out the promise that he's going to show how the state
can be legitimate. And so he said,
"Imagine a hypothetical state of nature,
not consisting of pre-political people,
but of people like you and me in a condition where there was
no government," and we would find that to be
very inconvenient and inefficient because as Locke
said, every single person would have
to be an enforcer of the law of nature.
Everybody would have to look
after their own property. It would be highly inefficient.
That, in turn,
would lead to the creation of kind of block watch
associations, mutual protective associations.
They would also,
though, not be particularly efficient because we all know
from reading Adam Smith that the thing that really increases
efficiency is division of labor. And so some people would go
into the protection business and sell protection full time,
but because coercive force is a natural monopoly,
and we know from the discussion last time Nozick agrees with
Glenn Beck that it's the only natural monopoly,
eventually one of these groups would become dominant.
And that he calls the--one of
his slogans is, that's the "ultra-minimal
state." Now I will just pause here.
You might say, "Hmm,
well if that was true, if coercive force is a natural
monopoly why don't we have a world government?"
I mean, if we went from
militias to nations, why aren't nations just
militias in the world? It stands to reason, right?
It's just the same thing on a
bigger scale. Does anyone wonder what Nozick
might say? Anyone got any idea what Nozick
might say in response to that? Otherwise it doesn't seem very
plausible. Either coercive force is a
natural monopoly or it isn't. No?
Am I missing something here?
What might Nozick say?
He doesn't confront this.
It's not anywhere in the book,
but it seems like a natural question to ask,
no? No?
Anyone want to try this?
Yeah?
Student: He might argue
that because of kind of natural boundaries or even artificial
boundaries that have been created that the two protection
agencies are sort of separated. Prof: Yeah, brilliant.
I think you hit the nail on the
head. I think he would say it's
conditioned by available technologies of force.
So if it becomes possible to
project force all over the world then we might get to the
situation where we will have a world government that indeed
countries are just like bigger militias within a country.
And if there were the available
coercive force to create a world government, it would be done.
The famous pacifist
philosopher, Bertrand Russell, had a kind of Nozickian view of
this. He had opposed World War II.
He had opposed the creation of
nuclear weapons, but as soon as we dropped the
bomb on Hiroshima in 1947, Russell came out and said,
"America should immediately declare a world
government." So he was Nozickian in his
thinking, but what he lacked was the knowledge of a social
scientist. He bought the clear-headedness
of a philosopher, but it wasn't constrained by
the knowledge of a social scientist,
because the mere fact that you have the capacity to destroy the
world doesn't mean you have the capacity to enforce obedience on
the ground. This is a lesson we learned in
Iraq after 2003. Yes, we could obliterate the
Iraqi Army, but that's something quite
different from actually being able to enforce the rule of law
within Iraq on the ground, right?
And it turns out,
we'll go into this in more detail a bit later,
but although there is one respect in which coercive force
is a natural monopoly in that, for it to be a good,
it has to be enforced over a given territory,
otherwise you just have the sort of situations we were
talking about on Monday. Nonetheless,
there are various economies of smallness in enforcement,
and the community policing literature discovered this in
urban context. So it's not as simple as it
looks, but I think just from the point
of view of what we need to complete the thought experiment
here is that Nozick would indeed say that the reason we don't
have a world government is simply that the available
technologies of coercion have not yet evolved.
And so when it takes Hannibal's
elephants to get over the Alps they are a natural boundary in a
way that they are not when you can lob missiles over the Alps.
And so we should always think
when he says "a natural monopoly over a given
territory," to some extent what counts as a
given territory is going to be affected by available
technologies at force. And we could play this out if
you think about the transition from the Italian city-states to
modern Italy, a subversion of that,
the changing technologies of force leads to the creation of
larger units. But as the points I've just
made suggest, this isn't entirely
straightforward and uniform, but it is one basic dynamic.
So that's, I think,
what he would have said if somebody had raised that
question. And so you get a single
dominant protective association within a given territory,
although we're agreeing that the notion of what counts as a
territory is somewhat in flux and conditioned by technologies
of force. That is, the dominant
protective association has co-opted or marginalized all the
others, and then you have a dominant
protective association which he calls the ultra-minimal state.
But then there are these
people, these independents, and he gives various colorful
examples of them. But as I said, this was 1974.
If we think about it in today's
world you can think about these as people who don't recognize
the legitimacy of the regime. So they could be people like
the gent who flew his plane into a federal building in wherever
it was, Texas, I think, a couple of weeks ago.
It could be Timothy McVeigh who
blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building, or it could be Osama
bin Laden. These people are out there and
they say, "Well, you might have your
dominant protective association, but we don't care because we
don't like it, we don't recognize it,
and we're not part of it." And Nozick wants to say,
"Well, just because coercive force is
a natural monopoly, these protective associations
can't give their members protection if they allow the
Osama bin Ladens and the Timothy McVeighs to run around out
there." So what are they going to do?
They're going to force them to
accept the authority of the state.
They're going to force them to
participate. They're going to say,
"This is the deal. Take it and you can be part of
the association, or leave it and you're going to
be dealt with accordingly. We're going to lock you up.
We're going to kill you.
We're going to do something to
you," right? That's what's going to happen
because it's the case that these associations cannot protect
their members if they don't do anything else.
I'm going to come back to that
in a minute. So it's just,
at this level, it's just a claim about what
would happen, coercive force being what it
is. And then you have what he calls
the minimal state, AKA the classical night
watchman state of liberal theory,
the thing that Glenn Beck has in mind when he says,
"The government should protect us from the bad guys and
nothing else." The government should protect
us from the bad guys and nothing else.
The night watchman state
doesn't do anything else. In particular it does not
redistribute wealth. It does not redistribute income
and wealth. It does not go into those
Pareto un-decidable zones. Think back to the Pareto
diagram. And the reason it doesn't go
back to those Pareto un-decidable zones is that we
have a very robust doctrine of individual rights,
right? Now you might say,
"Well, why should we buy that?"
And I think what Nozick would
say is, he would come back with the doctrine of deep pluralism
of values. There's deep pluralism of
values. We don't agree.
Some of us think we should have
a welfare state. Some of us think we shouldn't.
Some of us think we should have
universal healthcare, some of us don't.
We don't agree about these
things. And because we don't agree
about these things there's not going to be the pressure to
produce a redistributive state. We're going to look at it,
you know, one of his slogans is "rights as side-constraints
on our actions." We think of rights as
side-constraints on what we can do to other people.
We can't elbow them as we go on
our way to maximize our own utility.
Rights are side-constraints.
They're not end-states.
They're not goals.
So I don't want to give you
unnecessary jargon, but I guess I'll give it to you
anyway. I should have put it on a slide.
So the philosophical lingo for
the difference between Nozick and Rawls,
as we'll see later, on the one hand and
utilitarianism, at least in Bentham's variance,
on the other hand is deontological versus
teleological, d-e-o-n-t-o logical,
deontological, versus teleological,
t-e-l-e-o logical. And what is
captured--deontological is a word that comes from the
philosopher Immanuel Kant. We'll talk more about him in
connection with Rawls. I mentioned to you on Monday
the basic notion here is affirm principles that you would be
happy with no matter how they affected you.
They're not hypothetical
imperatives. They're not,
"I'll support private property if it makes me
rich." They're rather,
"If I support private property I'll support it
regardless of whether it makes me rich or poor,"
right? It's not dependent on any
particular empirical conditions. You would affirm it no matter
what. And Kant's famous example of a
categorical imperative is the thing Nozick appeals to.
"Respect people's
autonomy." Don't treat them simply as
means to your own ends, but as ends in themselves.
And he's saying, "Well,
if we want to respect people's autonomy (this is just a very
strong version of Mill's harm principle)--
if we want to respect people's autonomy we can't impose
conditions on them that they don't agree with."
And given this empirical fact
of deep pluralism of values you're not going to get a
redistributive state out of my Robert Nozick's little story.
So that's where it's going to
stop. Now you could say,
"Okay, what is really being established here?
Why is Nozick walking us
through this zigzag? I mean it's,
okay, it's one way to spend a Monday and Wednesday morning
between 10:30 and 11:30, but what is the point?
What really comes out of this?
Why is he doing this?"
And I think that we need to go
back through it a little bit more carefully now and see.
One of the things that he says
is he's telling us both an explanatory story and a
normative story. What I said here is basically
the explanatory story. He's saying,
"If you took people like us and you said,
'What would happen if there wasn't a state?'
they would create a minimal
state and they wouldn't create anything more."
There's nothing normative in
that yet, at least not obviously so.
They would create Glenn Beck's
utopia and that's all that they would do.
You could argue about whether
or not he's right about that and I'll come back to that in a
minute, but that's not really Nozick's whole agenda.
His real agenda is normative.
What he wants to say is,
"They would do this and this is the only legitimate
state." He wants to convince you that
this kind of a state, the classical night watchman
state of liberal theory, liberal in the
nineteenth-century sense of the term,
libertarian we might think of it, I think,
today, is the only legitimate state.
Now, if you said,
"Well, why? What makes it legitimate?"
the answer is that long and
rather difficult to decipher chapter on compensation.
I'll give you the bumper
sticker version first and then I'll go back and walk through
it. And you might think it's
tendentious, but philosophers' examples often give philosophy a
bad name. They create highly artificial
examples that abstract massively from the real world,
and people generally are not impressed when they try to
connect it to real problems. My priors are to be suspicious
of philosopher's examples, but Nozick is an exception.
He really was a brilliant guy,
and he doesn't do these things gratuitously.
There are some interesting and
consequential points that come out of this.
So here's what he wants to say.
This is the crucial set of
moves, this one and this one. How is it crucial?
What he wants to say is this:
we know that this is going to happen, what could make it
legitimate? We know it's going to happen
because coercive force is a natural monopoly.
In fact, being hardheaded
realists about power, no minimal or ultra-minimal
state is going to permit the bin Laden's and the McVeighs to run
around threatening them. So they're going to force them
to join. What could make it legitimate
for them to do that since these independents haven't agreed to
join, right? And Nozick does want to say
agreement, consent, is the basis of all legitimacy.
Seems like a contradiction.
So he says, "What if we
put it in the following terms? What if we say to the
independent out there, 'You know what,
you don't recognize the legitimacy of our operation,
but it's too bad because there are a lot more of us than there
are of you, and we're going to force you
to, we're going to force you to participate,
but here's the thing. We understand that violates
your rights, you as an independent are
having your rights violated, but we as members are having
our rights violated by our fear that you may blow us up.
Maybe you won't.
Maybe you're just a
philosophical anarchist that wanders around the fields
talking to horses and wants to be left alone,
but we don't know that for sure. We don't really know that,
and there are some people who want to blow us up out there.
We know that.
So everybody in our society,
in our ultra-minimal state, is experiencing a decline of
utility because you're out there and you might blow us up.
Fear, we're experiencing fear.
Now we understand that you,
if you're forced to join, you're going to experience a
rights violation, that's true,
but what if we could compensate you for it?
We're going to force you to
join. What if we could compensate you
for it and still be better off than we were not having
compensated you and experiencing the fear?'"
So it's a somewhat muddled discussion in the chapter.
When people start reading what
he says about compensation, they think he's talking about
the members being compensated rather than the independents,
but the idea is the members could compensate the
independents and still be better off.
Now it doesn't mean the members
actually compensate the independents.
Then there would be an obvious
moral hazard problem, right?
If my choice was to be a member
and pay taxes or to be an independent and get compensated
for being forced to join, nobody's going to be a member.
We might as well be
independents and get compensated.
So he's not talking about
actual compensation. Rather he's saying,
"I'm going to violate your rights;
if in principle I could pay you enough to make you whole and
still be better off than before I violated your rights then
everything's hunky-dory. We're both better off in a
Pareto sense." So what he does in that chapter
is he works his way through various ways this might happen,
and they all fail. They all run into problems.
How would you figure the price,
etcetera, etcetera, right?
And then he says, "Well,
it doesn't really matter that I haven't given a watertight
account of compensation, but just let's assume that some
such account could be given, then we'd have solved the
problem." And he's alluding here to about
forty years of welfare economics that revolved around this idea
of hypothetical compensation tests.
Those of you who are interested
the famous people were Kaldor, Hicks, Scitovsky,
Samuelson, and many others. All were trying to figure out a
compensation test that was compatible with the Pareto
system as you know it. So a way of thinking about it
is we go back to our Pareto diagram and what we were doing
when we were talking about neoclassical utilitarianism.
Remember we said let's suppose
X is the status quo. We know this is Pareto superior.
We know this is Pareto
inferior, and we can't say anything about the
Pareto-undecidables, right?
So the question is,
is Y better than X for society. There's no answer to that
question, and Nozick's endorsing that, right?
He saying, "B will think Y
is better. A will think X is better.
Who are we to adjudicate
between them? There's no way to do it."
But the people who are worrying
about compensation were thinking about a different question.
They were saying,
"Well okay, we know we can't say that Y is
better than X for society, but couldn't we say that Z is
better than X. Although Z is Pareto
un-decidable, it's on the possibility
frontier." Remember the possibility
frontier was the locus of points where it's not possible to
improve, right? So the compensation theorists
were actually interested in these two parts of the Pareto
diagram. They were saying,
"Can't we come up with some way to say that Z is a
social improvement on X even though it's Pareto un-decidable
because it's on the possibility frontier?
Isn't there some way to say if
you move from off the possibility frontier to on the
possibility frontier you can say it's a social improvement?"
So in the lingo of welfare
economics that was the project from Kaldor and Hicks,
Scitovsky, Samuelson, and all of the others.
They were looking for a way to
do that that did not involve interpersonal comparisons of
utility; really important that it not
involve interpersonal comparisons of utility because
if you make interpersonal comparisons of utility you're
violating consent, right?
If you say, "Well,
Z is better than X, but A doesn't agree,"
you're violating A's rights. So is there some way to do that?
And we see this all the time in
eminent domain cases when the city buys up property forcibly
against somebody's will to build a road.
There's this endless to-ing and
fro-ing about what is the value of the house,
and the question is, can you figure that out without
doing interpersonal comparisons of utility?
And the problem with what
Nozick is doing is that the answer is no.
The answer is every
compensation test that's ever been devised involves coming up
with a common metric, namely money,
in terms of which you do the compensation,
and because of that, you're implicitly making
interpersonal comparisons of utility.
So the project of finding a
compensation test that didn't violate the interpersonal
comparisons criterion failed, and you can't actually do what
Nozick wanted us to do. Now you could say--here's,
again, an example of-- the whole architectonic theory
doesn't work, but there still might be
important insights that survive its failure.
So you could say,
for instance, "Okay,
once we're aware of that, we can say that even in the
creation of a minimal state, there are some interpersonal
comparisons of utility, namely those involved in
judging whether or not it's legitimate to incorporate the
independents." And Nozick might make the
following defense of what he's done.
He might say,
"Well okay, it was a nice try,
but still what's left of my argument is the following."
Another Kantian dictum is,
"Ought entails can." Anyone want to tell us what
that means? What does it mean to say,
"Ought entails can?" Anyone know?
When we say,
"Ought entails can," anyone want to guess?
Yeah?
Student: The normative
statements that we may make may create bright lines by which we
can determine whether an action is or is not acceptable,
and that's like--by saying that we should or should not do
something we create this bright line where on one side we should
and on the other side we can. Prof: You're in the
right direction. You're making it more
complicated than it needs to be. The basic idea is we can't have
a moral obligation to do something that's impossible.
We can't have a moral
obligation to do something that's impossible,
that's the way in which "ought entails can"
is usually interpreted. Now some people say we
shouldn't interpret Kant that way.
We should interpret Kant to
mean when he says, "Ought entails can,"
that if we ought to do something,
we should find a way. I once had a graduate student
who wrote a dissertation in which he said,
"'Ought entails can' means that,
'Ought entails must try as hard as possible.'"
Well, that's one way you could go
with this, but that's not what I have in
mind here. What I have in mind here,
that Nozick, I think, would say when
confronted with the failure of the compensation tests to work
without interpersonal comparisons,
I think Nozick would say, "Well,
'ought entails can' in the conventional sense.
We can't expect people to do
something that's impossible, and for that reason what drives
us, really, is the natural monopoly
of force argument." Another way you could see this,
you could say, "Well, so the problem with
the compensation argument, compensating the independents
is, we could equally say if the independents could compensate
the members for their fear and still be better off that would
be just as good, right?"
Nozick's saying the members
experience the fear, they force the independents to
join, and if they could compensate
them and still be as well-off then it's legitimate,
but you could do the exact opposite.
You could say,
"If the independents could compensate everybody,
pay everybody a certain amount so that they stop experiencing
fear and still be better off."
In effect Osama bin Laden did
this when Al-Qaeda made a deal in the 1980s.
They promised the Saudis that
they wouldn't do any terrorism in Saudi Arabia,
and then the Saudi government left them alone.
I mean, that eventually
unraveled, but so essentially you could
say that was a version of compensating the Saudi
population for the fear and still being better off.
So Nozick would have to be
indifferent between those two things if all that's driving it
is the compensation. I think what he would say is,
"Well, in principle,
yes, but in practice, because of the natural monopoly
of force, it's the independents who are
going to lose. It's the independents who are
going to lose. There are fewer of them,"
right? And in the event,
just pursuing this example, in the event since both the
Saudis and everybody else knew that Al-Qaeda's ultimate
objective is regime change in Saudi Arabia,
it wasn't a very credible promise, and indeed there were
Al-Qaeda operations in Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s.
So it wasn't a very credible
promise, and eventually after 9/11 the
Saudis smelled the coffee and got onboard with the operation
to try and stomp out Al-Qaeda. So yes, in principle,
if the independents could compensate blab-de-blah,
and just be as well-off, we would be indifferent,
in practice, because of the natural monopoly
of force, the independents are going to
lose. So ought entails can.
It's not possible to imagine a
state of affairs in which the independents are tolerated,
so we'll accept that that is legitimate.
In other words,
the violation of rights in unavoidable, and therefore it's
not illegitimate. That would be the claim.
Now Nozick would then say,
"So my argument survives. My argument survives,
because we've now supplemented the natural monopoly of force
with ought entails can. There's no way not to have the
ultra-minimal state become the minimal state,
so its legitimacy can't be criticized for the violation of
the rights of the independents."
In a way it's a bit reminiscent
of Locke's argument about majority rule that we're going
to talk about when we get to the last part of the course in more
detail. What you know already about
Locke from what I've told you in the past is that Locke says when
there are disagreements about what natural law entails there
is no earthly authority who's allowed to settle them.
Remember we went through this,
right? So each person,
in effect, has the right to enforce the law of nature,
and indeed the responsibility to enforce the law of nature.
God speaks to us all
individually when we read the scriptures,
and if you read them one way and I read them the other way,
there's no pope, there's no king,
there's no magistrate who can tell us who is right.
It's one of the sources of
Locke's egalitarianism. Another thing that Locke says,
that I haven't talked about yet but will get into more detail,
is, so what actually happens in practice when people disagree?
He says, "If you think the
state is violating natural law not only do you have a right,
you actually have an obligation to resist,
but if nobody else agrees with you what's going to happen?
You're going to be out of luck,
right? As Locke puts it he says,
"You should look for your reward in heaven,"
i.e. if you take the view that the
government is not legitimate, and you're going to resist it,
and nobody else agrees with you,
you're going to wind up being tried for treason and executed.
That's what's going to happen,
but this life is short and the next one's eternal,
so why worry, right?
It's essentially Locke's view
of the matter, right?
So the Nozickian independent is
in the same position as a Lockean person who reads the
scriptures to say that they must resist the state and very few
others agree with them. They're just going to get their
reward in the next life. So be it.
But if lots of people agree
with you then you're going to have 1688, then you're going to
have a revolution. You're going to get rid of the
monarch, right? So you can't know for sure that
people are going to agree with you, but that's what's going to
happen. And in a way,
that is exactly the same point Nozick is making.
He's saying,
"There are a lot more people in the ultra-minimal
state than there are in independent,
so it's going to go that way."
There it is.
It's the nature of power,
the nature of coercive force, and ought entails can,
bingo. What about that?
How many people find that
convincing? Nobody?
Nobody's convinced?
How many people find it
unconvincing? Nobody.
There are zero convinced,
two unconvinced, and 136 undecided,
like Massachusetts voters, you people.
What's wrong with it?
Anyone want to...?
Student: Well,
it seems that forcing the independents to submit to the
minimalist state directly contradicts the pluralistic
deontological values that it's espousing,
so it undermines the state at its very core.
Professor Ian Shapiro:
And what does it contradict, the value of consent?
Student: Excuse me?
Professor Ian Shapiro:
You say it directly contradicts the intellectual values he's
espousing--which value, the value of consent?
Student: The value of consent
and how you said it should be minimalist because he believes
in pluralism and because you can't force someone,
and like the Pareto thing, you don't know.
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Right, but his answer is ought entails can.
It would be lovely if we could
get everybody's consent, but there's no way to get
everybody's consent. Student: Well then from that
follows that the government should be able to enact other
kinds of policies where ought may entail can and they can
force people to do things. Professor Ian Shapiro:
So what would be an example? They would have to just
tolerate these independents out there, yeah?
There's a little book I used to
teach in this course sometimes by a philosopher called Robert
Paul Wolff called In Defense of Anarchism,
and he basically goes the way you were going.
He says, "Consent is the
wellspring of legitimacy. You can't get unanimous consent
for any state, so no state is
legitimate," at least he's consistent,
right? You can't get legitimacy for
any state so no state is legitimate.
All states are illegitimate,
finished, end of story. Here's, I think,
what Nozick would say. He would make two points.
He would say,
"Robert Paul Wolff is an airhead because he's forgetting
about the difference between the philosophical game we're
playing, the thought experiment and the
real world because in the real world there are two things that
are different. One is the natural monopoly
force argument we've already talked about,
and the ought entails can limitation that puts on what's
possible." And you might not buy that
because you might say, if we had time to go back and
forth, you might just say, "I just don't buy that.
States could protect themselves
from independents without wiping out the independents.
They could have policies of
containment." I even wrote a book about that.
So we could go back and forth
about that. But I think the other thing
that Nozick might say to Robert Paul Wolff is this.
It would involve buying the
critique of the social contract metaphor.
He would say, "Well,
we're behaving as though not having collective action is
really an option, but it isn't because it's
always the case that we have some collective action
regime." The question is just, which one.
So in any given situation if
you require unanimity you privilege the status quo.
We know that, right?
The garbage-in/garbage-out
problem, and if some people want to have
a state and some people don't want to have a state,
if you start with a state then requiring unanimity to change,
it harms the people who don't want a state.
But if you start without a
state and requiring unanimity to change it, it harms the people
with a state. So in either case you're going
to be harming somebody's rights, violating somebody's rights.
So the bottom line is that
anarchy, even if it existed,
if we had anarchism, wouldn't meet Wolff's criterion
of respecting everybody's autonomy because there would be
some people who didn't want that.
Okay, we've got two minutes
left so I'm going to leave you with what's the beginning of a
deeper puzzle about Nozick that we'll pick up on Monday with.
You could say,
"Okay, we'll grant it. We'll grant everything you're
saying, Nozick." But then, what if people start
to say, "Okay, we're now a minimal
state, but a lot of us are afraid of
unemployment, we see recessions come and go,
and unemployment can suddenly shoot up to ten percent.
I could lose my job,
not be able to pay my mortgage."
That fear reduces a lot of our
utility, so we're going to create unemployment insurance,
and some people don't like it. Some people would rather take
the risk, internalize the risk, but you know what?
We're going to treat them in
just the way you treat independents.
So we're going to say,
"Well, we know you don't like funding
unemployment insurance, you'd rather internalize the
risk, but you know what, there are a lot more of us than
there are you and we believe we could compensate you for the
cost in principle. "Of course,
we don't compensate in practice.
We believe we could compensate
you in principle for the rights violation of forcing you who
doesn't want to pay for unemployment insurance to pay
for unemployment insurance and still be better off.
So tough luck,
you're going to pay for unemployment insurance and then
all of us will be happier because we'll be back on a
higher indifference curve than when we were worrying about what
might happen if we lose our job."
And so the trouble with you,
Nozick, is you're too clever for your
own good because either your argument doesn't establish
enough or it establishes too much,
because if we give you this type of reasoning to get to the
minimum state we can hijack exactly the same reasoning to
get to the welfare state. We can just put it in this
idiom of compensation for fear, and we can justify a more
extensive state than you want. And so either your argument
doesn't get you the minimal state or it gets you too much of
a state. We'll start with that next time.
