Robert Nozick’s 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia' | David Gordon

I'm going to be speaking this afternoon on a very famous book Robert Nozick's Anarchy state and utopia which came out in 1974 I remember very well when the book came out in 1974 of course I was only in my early 50s at that time I to prepare for this talk I reread the book and it brought back many memories to me of going over various points with Nozick and I would sometimes think oh I remember discussing this note with him and had a certain objection here so the it was reliving part reliving the past when I reread the book the book many people find Anarchy state and utopia difficult book because Nozik moves extremely fast over a vast number of arguments in that way he was very much like Murray Rothbard they were both extremely fast and covered great many arguments as you may know they didn't get along personally very well but they were in that way very much alike and as I'll try to be showing Nozick was very much influenced in the way he argued by his study of Rothbart we can see a great deal of the book as a struggle in my view unsuccessful of Nozick to differentiate his own position from that of Rothbart now some people will say about Anarchy state and utopia they don't like it because it's they say oh it's a very unsystematic book it isn't well organized knows it just keeps coming up with one thing after another you never know what's coming next but in fact the book is quite well organized and systematic it's soo in in some ways it's a the strand of the book I'll be discussing today is a very intricate argument it's rather hard father it's a lot of fun trying to figure it out and you'll see it it is a very systematic argument the fundamental principle of the book is that individuals have right there are things that you can't do to individuals without violating those rights so individuals have rights now some people like Thomas Nagel in a famous review of the book that came out in 1975 said well no it just says people have rights but he doesn't give arguments that they have rights but in fact he does this is he does have arguments people have rights one of the ways he tries to defend the view that people have rights is a criticism of utilitarianism or consequentialism and on this view we can make consequentialism would be if you suppose we were trying to determine what is should we do what is morally required in a situation and seemingly natural answer is that we ought to do what's best we ought to do the best take the best alternative that would be what is morally required it seems really common sensical well if we're trying to do what's good we should do what's best and Nozick thought the plausibility that that view stems from an applique of individual rationality application decision theory which he was one of the pioneers his 1963 doctoral dissertation was on decision theory so supposing your particular person you're trying to do what's thinking what's best for you so you would think about the different options available and you'd think well what would be the utility of each one what and then you multiply that by the probability of the that happening so the one with the highest total the highest utility multiplied by the probability what's happening would give you your preferred option this is basic decision theory so he thinks Nozik thinks well the plausibility of the utilitarian view which is you would pick the the moral options the one that has the best consequences overall is that you would apply this principle of individual choice to the society so you'd be saying what is the moral morally best thing to do is what would maximize the best consequences for the society and notice said well what's wrong with that he says here he's following Rawls in justice 1971 he says this doesn't take seriously that we talk about separate individuals there isn't a collective entity that we can talk about maximizing the welfare of that entity say for example supposing you went to the doctor and doctor said unless I amputate your arm you're you're going to die so you would think well it's worth it to give up my arm to serve my life so no they say but this isn't in when we talk about society we can't make trade-offs like that in the same way we can't say sacrificing some people will make society as a whole better off that each person has an independent existence that's entitled to moral consideration now there's some utilitarian who like RM here who've tried to reply to they say well utilitarianism does take the a separate existence of people seriously because it considers each person is counting for one when you're calculating the utility so your utility count that my amount of utility counts the same as mine does but this is really missing Nozik spine that there isn't an entity who's in in which we apply we talk about society there isn't an entity who that we can talk about whose utility is being maximized so what we have is individuals separate individuals and Nosek things it it's plausible to think that individuals have from if we consider the separateness of individuals that individuals have rights that limit our pursuit pursuit of concept consequences because individuals can't be sacrificed for the sake of some total amount of consequences for society we have only separate individuals so these rights are what he calls side constraints rather than maximizing maximizing principle he took this term from they work on computers a good way to understand this for those of you like me who aren't very knowledgeable about computers is to think of these constraints as rules what somewhat like rules in a game for example in the recent soccer world cup you're not allowed to players aren't allowed to grab the ball in their hands and throw it into the net that it isn't they they can't say well if I did that we get so many penalty points but this is to be weighed against whatever the advantages would be in scoring if I did that it's just that's not allowed that limits the action so rights are in nose extreme like that they're constraints on what we can do they limit the choice of options so if we take rights aside constraints then we're not trying to minimize the number of rights violations by people for example here this is a principle some people find hard to understand they said well if rights violations are bad doesn't this think we should try to minimize the number of rights violations but Nozik says no that's not right an example might be this I which I remember discussing my friend father James Sadowski in the Catholic Church priests are forbidden under any circumstances to violate the secrecy of the confessional if someone confesses a sin to a priest the priest can never disclose what the person has told him so I raised the issue with Sadowski which finally Sadowski which has come up in in a lot of people raising supposing a priest confess to another priest that he regularly violated the secrecy of the confessional and intended to do so in future then if the priest that he confessed to reported him to the authorities you may stop him saying confession so that wouldn't that minimize the number of rights violations because if he keeps it secret then this priest is probably going to go around violating the secrecy of the confessional an indefinite number of times and you're not supposed to do that but this is not the way the principle would be applied in the in the church it's the priest is forbidden under any circumstances to violate secrecy of the confessional so he couldn't report this priest from doing that so that would be an example of the side constraint it's a limit on what you can do you're not trying to minimize number rise violation then we could come up with a even more unusual example supposing if I violated if I violate rights in some way I'd be preventing future rights violations by myself I couldn't do that either it's just that each time if it writes your side constraints I can't violate the right I'm forbidden to do anything against rights that they just a rule stopping me from doing thing so what happens if we have a really catastrophic situation supposing say like in the movie dr. Strangelove unless somebody breaks into a Coke machine then the whole world would be blown up then knows except well then maybe we could that rights would lamps but he doesn't commit himself to that some people have misinterpreted the but they say well he says that if it's a catastrophic situation then rights don't apply anymore but he doesn't really say that he doesn't reject it either he just says that's one thing that has to be you might be and if it were really catastrophic perhaps the rights do laughs now we know if suppose we accept that individuals have such rights this very strong core what are the rights that people have and what knows it comes up with it's a very rough Barty in view with some differences he says well individuals do have rights over their own bodies he uses the phrase self ownership just once in the book where he refers to the classical tradition of self ownership but he doesn't generally use that phrase but it's clear he accepts that principle then he also argues that property rights are individual the world starts out unknown and people have to do things to the world in order to acquire that he doesn't specify what the principle of initial acquisition is what you have to do to acquire property but it's clear he accepts some such principle there are some differences from Rothbart in that I'm not going to go into and that he accepts something called the proviso or the Lockean proviso and Rothbard doesn't that Nozik thinks that before you acquire before people start acquiring property everyone was free to use certain objects but they couldn't stop other people from using them all so they couldn't exclude other people so if you acquire property you're making people worse off in the sense they can't use the objects anymore but it's very easy to in history to meet that proviso the difference in Roth bars you using something just is acquiring it the first user is the one who acquires it so in practice the viewers wouldn't differ that much they both accept this principle of you acquire property by doing something to enhance on an individual basis there's a famous case that Nosek discusses where he's talking about Locke's principle of labour mixture and he gives a famous example he says well supposing you throw a glass of tomato juice in the ocean does this mean you require the ocean obviously not a lot of people unfortunately have taken him to mean that he's rejecting some sort of principle of initial acquisition by doing something to the property but he's just in asking that in sack giving that he's just saying we need to specify what the principle is and he doesn't think people have been really been able to do it yet he's not rejecting such a principle of initial acquisition on the contrary he accepts it and I can say I I know that because he told me that himself so people who argue otherwise or not correct now no zzyx project is a very interesting one we're starting off he says well individuals have rights rights over their own bodies plus strong property rights so this is really identical separately small these minor differences in how we acquire property with Roth Bard's anarchism in Roth boards you we start off with individuals acquiring property in a very similar way to no zzyx you and what Nozick is trying to do is against Rothbart Robert says well if we have these individuals for the strong property rights then we can't have a state because the state is violating people's rights it's say if you have a protection agency it's forbidding competition with that with other agencies or independence with itself plus it's taking resources from people by taxation they have to pay for these protective services if they don't want them so Robert says well you start off with individual rights and the including strong property rights then you can't legitimately get to a state so what knows X project is is to say well we can start off with Rothbard's anarchism then he can show he tries to show by steps that would be to each person's advantage that are morally acceptable that we would arrive at a state or at least what he calls a state like entity from that so you think well we can show there's a series of steps if we start off with what Rothbard postulates we can get to a state in morally legitimate ways that are - everybody's advantage now how does he think this process goes well supposing people are trying to defend their rights and they join protective or organizations who join a defense agency to help enforce your rights so it might turn there are several possibilities it might turn out that one agency is much better than other agencies in protecting people's rights so if that happens there'll be a cascading effect where people will tend to join that agency because this agency is better than the others so people will try it will converge that knows it compares this to the process that Mises writes about in theory of money and credit and human action about how if you start off with commodities and have barter some will people some media of exchange will be more better than others people will converge on them and then will eventually have money so Nosek suggests that a protection agency might turn out to be something like that that might be one is better people will converge on it then we'll join that so we'll just end up with one protection agency now one thing we have to be careful here supposing no zzyx right and everybody joined one protection agency then we wouldn't have a state we just have everybody member of the same protection agency all problem with Nozik is that he needs to be the case that there are some people who don't join the protection agency because then as we will see later thinks there's some there things we can this the dominators they can do to those people the results in the rather state like entity but if everybody joins the agency then the whole process wouldn't result in a stake so it's rather a tension not a contradiction Nosek sorry buddy said well here's a motive for people to that would apply for people joining this single agency but at some point it's not this motive won't work fully so some people won't join it it's a bit of a tension there I suppose that does happened I was posing there isn't a single agency that is dominant in that sense then knows it suggests well it's likely either that there'll be some agencies that are dominant in one area and others will be dominant in a different area and they'll be borderline areas where there will be struggles or differences in how dominant each one is so then yet another possibility is that we could have a series of agencies that they each or they have a procedure what happens if they come into conflict they'd have a procedure and what to do in case of conflict say they'd agree on an appeals procedure and then Nozik thinks then in that case they'd be forming a single agency just because they established a process for what to do in case of Appeals it could be question what why does this make them one agency maybe because that's very similar to what Rothbart says that'd be a appeals procedure if for different protection agencies came into conflict but why should we call that one agency but I don't think much turns on that that's just a semantic point so Nozik really has rather if you if you take this last option Nozik is really defying the domination see into existence and says that he's calling an appeals arrangement a single dominant agency I don't find that plaus mothers I say it doesn't affect the substance of the argument very much uh so obvious si I've already covered that he thinks the reason for the that they'll cut you have this balance of agencies where one isn't stronger the other they'll find it in their interest to come up with an appeal procedure rather than fighting it out among themselves that'll be very costly so they'll come up with a appeals procedure now now we come to the fun part which is oK we've got this dominant agency now he embarks on an extremely complicated argument to show that the doubt agency will first transform itself into what he calls the ultra minimal state once it's done that or at the same time it's obligated morally to go from ultra minimal state to the minimal state and if it does that then you'll have the state like entity so now we start the complicated argument what happens if somebody violates your right supposing say somebody just comes up to you and somebody comes up steals your car while you're at this lecture your part counts on you go oh you discovery someone who's driven away with your car what happens then well you're clearly entitled to compensation you can get your car back plus or if your car isn't available anymore somebody's already dismantled it and sold all the parts you're entitled to the value of the car plus various other items such as whatever the cost of searching for the person who's done this plus may be psychological cost to you so wait whatever however you want to compute these but you're entitled to compensation and the question comes up is this enough is it enough that you get compensation for a rights violation now here we arrive at central misunderstanding of the argument anarchy state opiate some people say look Nosek really gives up on rights because he started off he has an extremely strong view rights or side constraints once you have rights that's it you can't violate them except maybe in a catastrophe but then he bangs that then he says well it's alright you can violate rights as long as you compensate people as long as you restore them to their previous utility or welfare level so he's really abandoning his position on rights because he's saying as long as you you're freed of relate rights as long as you compensate the person for the rights violation and ironically some of the people raised the subject she's knows Excel knows it's terrible because he's abandoning right some of those people favor a pure restitution theory of punishment so they're the ones who are in fact guilty what they're accusing knows it go but knows it that isn't no excu rather what he said he's not saying you're free to violate rights as long as you compensate people he's asking the question what happens if you do violate rights and he says compensation usually isn't enough why not supposing somebody stole your car why wouldn't it be enough if the thief had to pay you back for your car plus everything you've lost by it well first there's a problem we could call gains from trade supposing say if the thief hadn't stolen your car so you just wanted the car and he approached you said I like to buy this car you might not be willing to trade it for whatever the current Blue Book value of the car is you might want much more for the car than that there be why should they be a the the trade you why should you just be put in the same utility level as before from an exchange why shouldn't you be able to say look I'm not going to get this give you the car unless you give me more than that in you could get the insist on more of the gains from trade than simply putting you back to your initial level of wealth for our utility so that would be one resent releasing again saying compensations enough now another problem is certain kind of fear supposing you knew that someone in the neighbor in your neighbor was going around breaking people's arms you just like going around snapping people's arms hey but you also knew that if if the person did that to you you would get full compensation for breaking the person's breaking your arm again including all the psychological costs you say you made you afraid because you were just you just thinking about being injured made you physically afraid so you'd be compensated for that too but so supposing though you know someone's in the neighbor is going to do that but in fact the person doesn't break your arm you'd still feel the fear you'd be afraid he's going to break your arm but he wouldn't have done anything so you wouldn't get any compensation for your fear so this is a reason it's very important ozox argument why he thinks compensation in this kind of case isn't enough for rights violation because some people would be subjected by certain kinds of rights violation some people would be subjected to a particular kind of fear that it isn't morally legitimate to impose on them but they wouldn't be compensated for that because their rights wouldn't in fact be violated so given the problems posed by full compensation then the question comes up why don't we just prohibit all rights violation and here again this is another very big misunderstanding of Nosek he isn't asking me I said why can't we just prohibit all rights violation see he isn't saying well why can't we say violations of Rights are always wrong that isn't what he means by prohibition prohibition means the imposition of an additional penalty besides caught in addition to compensation so the question he's asking is why can't we say that besides say having to pay the full compensation for rights violation why shouldn't why shouldn't we always say that the rights filing has to suffer some other penalty as well why don't you have to pay something extra and he thinks setting many cases this extra penalties prohibition is justifiable so but to answer the question though why don't we always prohibit rights violations again in this sense of imposing an additional penalty for right violation his answer is that is it isn't always possible to get prior consent of the person that whose rights you might have reason to buy like supposing say take a famous example you're lost you're climbing a mountain you're lost in a snowstorm and you see someone's cabin you need to break into the cabin order to stay alive but you can't locate the owner would we say you could be if you do break in you'd have to compensate the owner for any damage you do to the cabin but what we want to say you can have an additional penalty imposed on you because you didn't get his permission even though that you weren't able to get the permission it doesn't elysian knows if you always seem plausible to say we should have as additional penalty besides full compensation so now we we have after going through this material about risk now we can apply this to the question of the competing protection agencies now what happens if you're in a dot client of this dominant agency we can imagine there's a single agency or group of agencies that is the strongest one particular area and you get into conflict with someone who isn't a client of that agency so no it says well they the people the one who isn't in that agency might decide to impose what knows it calls a risky decision procedure on you that's to say if an agency or pert you imagine someone's violated your rights and you want to take action against this person you think say somebody stolen your car you go after the person who you think has stolen it then how do you determine the guilt of that person before you start taking action against them you might employ a procedure that isn't that is risky in the sense that it it it has what some people would consider too much of a chance to find guilty people who aren't guilty their various what procedures people could you each one will balance finding some people guilt finding people who are guilty who aren't guilty with finding people innocent who in fact are guilty so there'll be various ways of balancing those factors so it might be that the people will impose a procedure on client of donor agency that is too risky from the point of view of people in the dominant agency so what happens that now in Rothbard's view just the procedures doesn't matter the question justice is the person guilty or not if you apply whatever procedure you want the person turns out to be not guilty then you're liable for compensation or punishment or whatever for violating that person's right but the procedure doesn't matter there aren't any procedural rights but nosy questions as he thinks that we it's if someone applies a risky decision procedure to you you would have the right to resist it and why is that this is precisely because this problem of fear that I mentioned you might think that if you know that an agency might apply risky decision procedures you might feel fear because suppose they say we're go we find you guilty of crime will execute you or say you're guilty of theft will impose these it will require you to pay compensation if you can't will we can force you to labor so you can pay so you might feel fear that they're going to apply the risky decision procedure to you and you will feel this fear even if they don't so if say they apply the procedure to you and in fact you turned out to be not guilty then you'd be compensated for it but what if they didn't apply the procedure to you then you would still feel fearful and you wouldn't be compensated because they haven't done anything to you just you'd feel fearful about it so he knows it's you that dominated agency can prohibit other agencies or independents from applying these risky decision procedures to its clients it can say to them if you apply these principles to our clients we're going to impose a penalty on you for doing that because of this problem of the risky decision procedures will impose risk of fear on our clients now an objection here that I'm sure will have occurred to nearly everybody is why does the dominate agency have more rights and other people why can't other agencies say well we're gonna prohibit the domination see from imposing what we consider risky decision procedures on us why this asymmetry but as usual knows that he's thought of this objection he says no this isn't right he's not claiming that the domination see has more rights than other people it isn't of domination see can impo prohibit risky decision procedures on its clients but other agencies or independents can't they can too they can operate on in terms of their own conception of risky decision procedures but if there's a conflict the dominant agency by hypothesis is going to win because it's the strongest one so it will be able to impose its view of what the risky decision procedures are so you see it isn't that there it has more rights it's just that its view of the matter will prevail so if a diamond agency does this it will be what knows it calls an ultra minimal state because it will be deciding on what the acceptable decision procedures are for determining whether people are guilty of rights violations so it can stop other agencies or independence from applying these procedures that it doesn't accept to its clients but here we have a problem because the independence in applying such procedures aren't doing anything morally wrong they're just following their own ideas of what proper decision procedures are it's just they differ from those of dominant agencies and no that suggests well since they're not doing anything wrong they're owed some kind of compensation the dominant agency has to compensate them in some way because it's prohibited them from applying what their conception of risky decision procedures to its client where they're doing so isn't doing something that's that's morally wrong now one now we got it as if this weren't complicated enough we get into even more complications as you can see this is really tremendous amount of fun they're few they're there few books that really as enjoyable as Anarchy state and utopia I must tell you the how do we determine what the compensation is the dominant agency doesn't have to negotiate a market price in knows Xu for prohibiting independence meaning by independence people aren't clients or the agency from applying risky decision procedures to its clients why not here we got into another concept what knows it calls a productive exchange productive exchange is kind of a standard exchange where both people are better off say if I have oranges and you have apples say we exchange my oranges for your apples we're doing this because we have reverse preferences and so we're better off as a result of the exchange we both want to make this change and we're better off so that's what knows it calls a productive exchange but there are also cases of what knows it calls unproductive exchanges which is you're making exchange and you're better off making exchange the not making exchange but you'd be still better off the other person didn't exist at all for example in this is no objection to fundamentals exceptions at blackmail he says supposing he mentions Rothbart's argument a black in blackmail the blackmailer is selling the service of withholding information for a price so aren't the two people better off because of the exchange and you know it's exciting yes but you beat the blackmail victim would be still better off if the that exchange weren't offered with the blackmailer didn't exist at all so I don't think this is really a valid restriction on an exchange on a shank but that is the view knows it take so he says well here the domination see would be would be better off if these other independents didn't exist with their own conceptions decision procedures so they can don't have to pay a full market compensation what they can do instead is offer cut-rate policies to these independents they could say we'll protect you from with our agency because you won't be able to protect yourself you don't have to buy our policy but if you do you'll you won't be very well off because then you won't be able to protect yourself I think they're some I'll just conclude there's quite a few problems with no derivational minimal State supposing he's right that people would be fearful if risky decision procedures were imposed on them so they have this fear this doesn't show what knows it needs that isn't sufficient to get too nosey where Nozik ones risk including because he has to show not just that people would be fearful if risky decision procedures were imposed on them but he'd have to show that the marginal reduction of fear from prohibition as against full compensation would make a significant difference and he hasn't proved that would be the case he hasn't shown that prohibiting these procedures would rather than having full compensation wouldn't make people substantially less fearful another problem would be the ultra minimal state might find Eva's clients wanted these procedures to be prohibited it wouldn't pay them to do that it would be more worth more it's the agency to keep allow the risky decision procedures rabb and provide services low-cost services to the people and it whose procedures are prohibited and the last problem is that supposing Nozick's argument is all right he still wouldn't gotten to a stake because there might be people who were not able to protect themself to threaten other people at all say they're too weak to credibly credibly to threaten other people so they don't pose any risk of imposing risky decision procedures on them so in that case the state would be under no the ultra minimal state would be under no obligation to protect them at all and we wouldn't have the universal coverage that Nozick requires for the existence of a state so in conclusion I don't think argument knows it's argument for the minimal state works but you can see I hope the great complexity and analytic interest of his argument in in Anarchy state utopia thank you you

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 9,595

Rating: 4.9111109 out of 5

Keywords: Gordon, Anarchy, State, Utopia, Nozick, Politics

Id: 31pTBdm5qLk

Length: 47min 39sec (2859 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 02 2018