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

thank you for coming I I see their great many people here I suppose you're all here you're tired you need to have an afternoon nap and you expect me to put you to sleep I'll do I'll do my best I just hope I don't fall asleep here my own talk I don't want to be like the story in the story about the Duke of Cambridge who dreamed he was speaking to the House of Lords and woke up to find out that he was I'm going to be talking today about a famous book by Robert Nozick Anarchy state and utopia which came out in 1974 how many of you have taken classes in political philosophy ethics or political theory where Nozick his book is studied or oh I I see great many you see in as I mentioned in my first lecture in universities to the extent that libertarianism is taken seriously in political theory or philosophy it isn't as we do here we wouldn't they're not studying very much the works of Mises or Rothbart they're studying Nozick's book Anarchy state and utopia so this is the book they're concentrating on but if we look at the book we can see how much Nozick was reacting to Mert things in Murray Rothbard book we can see he made a very close study of rothbard and he and all various times in the book he's commenting on that remarks Roth pardon me I'll tell you if I'm a rather funny story about them the two of them they were both leading libertarian theorists but they didn't like each other at all it was much more Nozick didn't like rothbard then Rothbart didn't like Nozik and one of the things they quarreled about was in there when their first meetings Rothbart mentioned his view that you can't measure interpersonal utility there's no unit of measure for utility and Nozik was very dismissive of that so it's perhaps a bit unusual to find two people who hate each other because they differ on whether utility is immeasurable in intensive magnitude but that actually happened now I should tell you there some people who don't like Anarchy state and utopia very much for example if you look at the very negative view of Nozick not only an anarchist in Utopia as a philosopher if you look at the forward or introduction that Hans hopper has to the reissue of Murray Rothbard ethics of Liberty Hans takes a very critical view of Nozik he said Nozik wasn't a systematic thinker II didn't take philosophy seriously he was just playing games he really can't be taken as a serious thinker now I think you should certainly read Hans Hoppus introduction because he's a very outstanding thinker I have hawk the highest respect for him what he says is always worth careful thought but I must say I am sorry about that I guess that was Hans coming back at me I take a rather different you I first came across Nozick's work in 1973 when I read his article which was in the personalist magazine magazine it's a philosophy journal called on the Randian argument and then when Anarchy state utopia came out 1974 I was up a couple I was up all night reading the book it is fascinated me ever since and so I in the 45 years that I've been studying the book I must said I don't understand it very well I know a little bit about it but I always find material that is new material now one thing to understand what's going on in the book I think it's central to know Nozick was an extremely fast thinker and he goes over he was extremely was one of the best probably the best at objections to arguments he could always think of a counterexample whatever anyone would say he wouldn't have a counter example and remember you see I said whatever anyone would say he would have a counter example this applied to his own thinking also he would always have counter examples and possible new possibilities even on things he said himself so when he was writing he would have to bring it to a stop he'd have to stop at some point because he would just otherwise he would just keep coming up with objections and new points indefinitely this is a point about him his friend Tom Nagel whose is rather arrival to Nosek in some respect they were also great friends at least until Nagle's famous review of Anarchy state and utopia called libertarians without foundations appeared after that they didn't speak for many years but then they eventually reconciled because they were both ganging up on a different philosopher but so we have to realize Nozick was always coming up with new points and objects ins and he's very hard to pin down the book is actually very systematic it's not disorganized but one thing knows it did when he was writing was he would unlike writers who make it easy for you where they state their basic ideas and then summarize the main points he would often put up put in essential points just in one or two sentences and then expect readers to remember them through the later parts of the book and he really keeps asking all sorts of questions and he expected readers to try to answer the question and try to work out the what he was saying for themselves now the fundamental principle the book he states for the areas that individuals have rights and there are things you can't do it to the individuals without violating these rights and this leads us to ask or what does he mean by a right it's very difficult to come up with an exact definition of a writer even one that's definition that's even approximately correct but one point is that if you have a right to something then you're at liberty to use force to defend yourself against those who take your trying to take your right away or would violate your right so if something if you have a right to your property you can use force to resist those who are trying to take over to steal from you this is for Nosek and also it's true for Rothbart political philosophy is trying to figure out when is force or the threat of force justified this is the fundamental question it's not part of total part of ethics is just part this part of ethics apart dealing with when people may justifiably use force or threaten to use force now I want to spend some time on key notion in understanding rights that knows it use it which what what he calls side constrains what he means by is this we have to see he starts from the point that individuals are separate beings each of us has her own life to live and he contends that their views contrasting views to his own such as utilitarianism that don't take seriously the differences between people now utilitarianism as you know if you taken philosophy of course is the view that we're trying to maximize happiness the greatest happiness principle we're trying to maximize save a population what will produce the greatest happiness we shouldn't say greatest happiness of the greatest number because that gets you into different problems because you're trying to maximize to [Music] magnitudes at the same time you get into big difficulties there so let's take utilitarianism just to mean the greatest happiness over a certain population so what Nozick says is well on this principle we could make some people sacrifice you could sacrifice some people to make other people happier I mean supposing we find say somebody is a real pain in the neck he's always causing trouble like me for example we could get say getting rid of me would make everybody else much happier of course I have my not wanting to be gotten rid of would have to be taken into account but this could be swamped if many people were happier with my demise won't have to wait that long anyway but so what is wrong with this according to Nozik it was wrong with this way of thinking well no success this is in here he's following John Rawls and Rawls wasn't the one who originated this criticism either but here both of the famous Harvard philosophers Rawls in knows chicory usually often opposed or agreed on this they said if your reason in that way then you're acting as if there's a single entity collective entity and you're making you're making the whole entity better off by sacrificing part of the entity that the purse one person is being sacrificed for the whole ng you said this would be say say you have an individual say we have a case like this you're going to the dentist and the dentist is giving you some very painful procedure so you say well I'm going to Sakura Sakura Feist this undergo this pain because it'll make me better off in the long run of course people who think that way don't know dentists very well but they don't know the drill but sorry about that but oh I have many worse than that but so here it's a single individual in the individuals it make perfect sense for the individual to say I can give up sacré some part of myself say imagine we have another case a doctor said I have to amputate your arm so that you live makes perfect sense is somebody to sacrifice part of himself for his own total welfare but this isn't the case for sacrificing some individuals for the whole society because there isn't a collective entity that's whose welfare is being maximized there are only individuals no it was acceso we can't reason in this way so these rights or what he calls side constraints rather than maximizing principles what he means I guess he took this from side constraint was taken from certain work in in building computers I think where Seiken straight is a restriction on how the machine operates it isn't it isn't in other words the machine has to function following these constraints it's something like a rule in the game I mean supposing for example you were playing chess as they say he said you say well according to the chess rules I I can only move my pawn one or two squares but I don't care about that I'll forget about that I can win the game moving in a different way you can't do that in this in this game and say well I'm just going to balance observing the rules against my own my own advantage and try to come up with uh some kind of maximizing move in that way sometimes there are some games where people do that for example and I think in basketball people will deliberately foul others which is violation of the rule because they think they can get some advantage in doing that but in in a side constraint you you don't view the rules in that way so if you take site aside constraint you write you don't say how can you're not trying to maximize anything you're just saying I required because of this view rights aside constraints to not to violate rights now an indication of how people tend to read knows it carelessly people say oh well Nozick says that in cases I think of catastrophic moral horror then you don't have any rights and in the passage that where it knows are supposed to save he says I hope largely to avoid this kind of complication not to deal with this and people will say oh he says well in these cases then the rights don't exist anymore and he didn't say that so there's a tendency among many people who read Nozik I think because the book is so complicated just to not as quote accurately what he's saying now one thing about aside constraints view remember I so far I've contrasted that utilitarian view we said we're trying to we're trying to promote the total happiness we're trying to maximize happiness with a view we have to observe right society constraint now you might raise this point well if we're trying to we think that it's people should respect each other's rights we value respecting rights shouldn't we then have a principle we should try to maximize the extent to which rights are respected or minimize rights violation so this is also ruled out by the way knows it takes a side constraint you now let me give you an example perhaps as a rather difficult notion but let me give you an example in the Roman Catholic Church when people had been taught I've been told this by to my great friends who were Jesuit priests it's absolutely forbidden under any circumstances for a priest to violate the secrecy of the confessional this is absolutely ruled out you just can't do it now supposing the following case came up so you can see violating this secrecy the confessional is viewed very extremely negative value this is really bad on this view now suppose priest confessed to another priest that irregularly violated the secrecy of the confessional and he wasn't sure that he could he could keep refraining from doing it in future would do his best but he just wasn't sure he could he could do it so supposing the you might think well if what's important is to stop is to prevent priests from violating the secrecy of the confessional maybe the priest should turn the other one in because otherwise if he doesn't it's likely that there'll be a lot more violations of a secrecy of the confessional and what your view this is it really a really bad thing so wouldn't you try to not to stop that by turning the person in but this is not the way it's taken in the Catholic Church you couldn't violate the secrecy confessional even then so it's a side constraint it's an absolute restriction on what you can do and it can't be turned into a maximizing view there are a couple footnotes in the book where knows it considers various complicated ways where somebody could try to turn this side absolute side constraint into maximizing everybody thinks they wouldn't succeed now we can cap have a further complication to this is supposing we had a case like this supposing you thought of yourself you were very likely to violate other people's rights say you just couldn't resist stealing from people you don't say you saw someone had left his car key car unlocks you couldn't resist going in and seeing her seni thing you wanted inside inside the car so only thing you thought you know you're going to keep violating people's rights oh and you want to minimize rights violation so supposing you thought well if you steal something very openly or do something that violates somebody's right then you'll be sent to prison and there you won't be tempted to violate rights because you're saying you don't think you be very successful in trying to deal with the other prisoners so even in this case if you take a side constraints view you couldn't you couldn't violate somebody right somebody's rights even if it minimize your own rights violations so to some some people to some people this view doesn't make sense they say well if you've got a goal if you want something that is automatically a goal if say you don't want rights to be violent that's your goal so it doesn't make sense to have a side constraint view but Nozick was decidedly the other way said no respect for persons requires treating them as as as not ones whose rights can be violated if you do that even for the purpose of reducing other people's rights violations you're unacceptably viewing them as a means rather than an end now in no zzyx we've talked about rights now what are these rights the rights that Nozick takes are very will be very familiar to those who studied Rathbun I suspect no Zeke has taken a lot of hit the structure is theory from Roth but he's also he made a very close study of Locke Second Treatise and he has all sorts of things to say about how very various passages could be of that book can be interpreted but I think you'll find the whole structure of his rights theory is very similar to Rothbart so individuals have rights including rights over their own bodies Nozik is really accepting what Roth are called the principle of self ownership although knows it doesn't tend not to use that term self ownership he does use it at one I think in one passage of the book but not usually but he accepts the basic notion doesn't matter really what you call it as the one he accept so what he starts off with is that the the world starts off unknown but people have to do something to the land and natural resources to acquire it they have to do something to appropriate the property but what they have to do he doesn't specify doesn't think that he has some proposals for a principle of initial acquisition but he doesn't think he can formulate it in a satisfactory way I'll just say there's a famous passage where Nozik says imagines this situation he says supposing that it shows you say you acquire property by mixing your labor with it so no success well supposing you throw a glass of tomato juice into the ocean would we say you acquired the ocean by throwing the tomato juice in you just say you lost your tomato juice so a lot of people take Nosek to be saying he's rejecting this principle of labour mixer he's rejecting the principle of procreation but he he isn't doing that he's just saying that he thinks the principle has to be very carefully stated he's not that he's not giving any weight to laboring on property to acquire it and and now you might ask why do I say that's what he meant and he answered that is that he told me that's what he meant so I I take him at his word on that now you have remembered we've said it right you have if you have rights it means at least in part that you are at liberty to defend your rights against those who violate them by using violence against against your rights or threatening violence and in knows Experion similar to Rothbart you probably would find this is very difficult to do on your own so you would make sense to join some sort of protective organization to help you enforce your rights you would delegate that to them instead of say supposing somebody steals from you instead of trying to catch the thief yourself you would go to your local protective agency their association and get them to deal with the matter now Nozick now and he takes which the principle project of the first part of anarchic state utopia he has a very diff called project I don't think ultimately a successful one but he makes enormous efforts to show that he starting off from an individualist anarchist position like that a Roth wife and say like pretty much identical with Rothbart in what he wants to show is that from the starting point a state like entity might justifiably arrive so he's saying to Rothbart well you know you don't believe in the state but I can show or at least I'll try to show that starting from what you consider the correct starting point the individual would add to their advantage in the result would be a series by series of step we'd arrive at something that is a state or very close to a state and in doing so the individuals wouldn't be violating anybody's moral rights so he says well I can come up with some I can show you that from your starting point you'll get to where I want to be you'll get from having anarchism just a number of private protection agencies you'll get to a situation where there is a dominant agency which becomes what he calls the minimal state or the Nightwatchman state and this state has a moral duty to transform it's that the ultra minimal state I should say and this ultra minimal state has a duty moral duty to transform itself into the minimal state so what do you suggest is if people are in different protective agencies these agencies will very often come into conflict say imagine your you are client of one agency and then somebody from it was a calling of a different agency aggresses against you so you want to try they have the person who crest against you brought to trial and punished by your agency but the other agency said no no we're going to try the case so there'd be all sorts of conflicts in this instance Nosek suggests well if there are these different these conflicts there'll be a tendency for one agency to win one agency will be better at winning these conflicts and if that happens there'll be a cascading effect where a lot of most people will join that agency because if you want protection you want to go with an agency that will protect you it's more likely to protect you will that will win these conflicts you don't want to be in an agency where you're going to lose out but then he said well what if this doesn't happen then you might have there two possibilities you could have a situation where one agency is stronger in one area and one agency in a different area or now you could have and if this doesn't happen all it knew those happen suppose you don't have one agency that always wins or you don't have a kind of one agency stronger in one area one other then you could have kind of a balance where the agencies don't really neither one none of the agencies has superiority over the other so any sense well then in if effect they make some sort of agreement on what to do in cases of conflict so they they really be part of the same agency so you really just have one dominant agency because they'd all agree on an appeals procedure what would happen if the agencies come in conflict now this is I must say so rather odd claim I mean why suppose you had an appeals procedure why would that make them one agency supposing you could imagine cases where they're completely separate but they just decide to hire independent arbic arbitrators to settle disputes between it seems that Nozik is really trying to here pull a bit of a fast one in just defining this situation is one of single aid racine it's a bit ironical there's one footnote where he quotes rothbard as saying he thought it was likely Rothbart thought it was likely if agencies conflicted they would have an appeals procedure and then there would be kind he thought that would be likely they'd agreed on a kind of a stop to levels up in the appeals and knows except well rothbard says this but he doesn't come up with a real argument that that's necessarily what was going to happen but no Zeke himself had suggested they come up with an appeals arrangement who should make them one agency so I think Nosek is here giving his own purpose attacking Roth barber for what he's in fact his own proposal so I think this is a bit unfair on no zzyx part but as I've told you he really hated rock boards so maybe that was why he didn't he didn't notice the problem there so supposing though Nozik was right to put this objection aside even if he was right would have just a single dominant agency we just have say most people are decided to join this protection particularly protection agency why would that be anything like estate now here is where the nosey gets into an extremely complicated argument as I mentioned he's trying to show that this dominant Protective Association or agency would transform itself into what he calls the ultra minimal state and then once it's in the ultra minimal state it's morally obligated to transfer to transform itself into the minimal state so now what happened now we'll get into the complicated argument the part so far that giving lecture is the simple part now we're getting into the really good stuff the complicated part so suppose someone violates your rights say yeah someone someone steals your wallet when you're just comes up steals your wallet what can you do about it well you're you're entitled to compensation you're entitled to get back what the person has stolen and if this isn't available you're entitled to the value of what the person is stolen now the question knows it raises it is this always enough now people have often misunderstood nosey hey you find this is really really quite amazing the way knows we miss time you're still here people will say well no it starts off with this extremely strong for you about rights he says rights or side constraints you can't violate people's rights or absolute or near absolute maybe situations of catus Terry catastrophic moral horror we would have to we might be justified violet in the rights with lapse but otherwise the right through absolute so he starts off with this but then he says okay you can violate somebody's rights as long as you compensate them meaning you returning them to the same utility level but they have before nosy and talk about utility level Aziz talks about indifference curves which as you all know Austrians are not indifferent to the use of indifferent curves they don't like them at all but that's not really central to the argument so people say well look Nozik really abandons his belief in absolute right because he says that all you have to do is return the person to the same utility level and they're very good philosophers who take knows it this way for example Eric Mac but it's a Miss reading of the book and it's ironic that some of the people who use this criticism against knows if I remember George Smith who is a leading libertarian philosopher some people may know him for his he's written on free thought he was involved with the Objectivist Nathaniel Brandon for a long time he's one who raises this crazy man it's ironic because in his own view of punishment he favors a pure restitution theory where if you violate somebody's rights what you have to do is give back just what you've taken so it's odd that somebody would criticize Nozick for abandoning rights in favor of returning people same utility levels when a person in the critic himself favors of pure restitution theory but the misunderstanding is knows it is not arguing that all that compensation is enough he in fact he goes on to argue that in most cases compensation isn't enough so it's odd that people say well Nozik is saying he's reducing rights to just the right to be a certain utility level when the point of the whole point of this complicated chapter is we're talking about now this faint chapter four of the book chapter 4 and chapter 6 you're probably the most difficult in the book where it gets the most complicated but what knows if you say compensation is normally not enough but there are some circumstance which it is now what does he mean when he says it's not enough well he should say first why isn't it enough well supposing he's asking question he's not saying you're free to violate rights but what happens if you do violate rights both again suppose I steal your walk you say and then let's say ice I have to give you back the money or why or why isn't that why isn't enough that I'd give you back but all right let me give you a better example much better than exposing a business man wants to build a building that needs your property in order to complete his building so he says well I'll give this purse and the full value of their property the market value of their property and then I can just take it over and they're no worse off they are before they get the full market value or their property but now I can use it for my purposes so one problem here is supposing I had to buy the property from from the person who owns it then you might the person might ask for more money there'd be if I say I'm in an exchange with you we know from basic Austrian principle we both benefit from the exchange if I exchange apples for oranges we both benefit for from the exchange but we can ask their gains from trade so generally almost I can't say to you well I'm going to take what you have and just return you to the same utility level you're wrong you're not any worse off but I'm better off why can't I I why don't I have to bargain with you so but the benefits from trade don't go nearly all to me why don't we have to bargain for this so you get at least more of the benefits so this is you you might you should you might be able to get and get the right only if you paid more compensation wouldn't be enough and now there's another problem is one that's key to this argument is fear certain kinds of fear supposing so I suppose you know somebody in your neighborhood is going to break your arm so in future you not going to tell you when he'll do this was going to sometimes going to go around yet breaking your arm you would feel fearful about that even if you knew that you'd be compensated for it would just you just get it be afraid of that so even if you recompensate it you would still be fearful now you might say well then you could just increase the compensation payment so to take town of this fear but then nosey cuz you'll expect has another complication it says supposing that it was known that this policy would be applied to a lot of people and anyone who was who was whose arm was broken would be compensated but some people's arms weren't broken they would still feel feel fearful but they wouldn't be compensated so Nosek suggests that if certain kinds of rights violations are risk of rights violations arouse fearing people compensation isn't enough you would be able to prohibit these activities by prohibit he means come up with some additional penalty besides full compensation and now I'll go through very rapidly because I'm running out of time how this applies to the minimal the ultra minimum the dominant agency said well people might be afraid that agencies what other agencies would impose unreliable decision procedures on them and we supposing say an agency had a different view of requirements for fair trial from your agency exposing say an agency just required a jury vote of majority vote rather a unanimous vote to convict you people you might feel fear that other this agency would if they were in a dispute with you would subject you to penalties and you be afraid of that and even if they that didn't happen you would still be fearful so Nozik thinks you can prohibit that in the set the agency could prohibit that in the sense that they could they could say if you do this will impose some further penalty rather than just full compensation now every everyone has this right every agency every person has the right to according to nosing to prevent this kind of decision procedure unreliable decision procedures from being imposed on them but the dominant agencies you will win in cases of conflict so he says well then the dominant agency will get its way and then it will be able to prohibit other agent other people from imposing decision procedures it doesn't approve of so then if that happens well other people have been into independents have been deprived of the ability to enforce their rights a that people aren't clients they've been deprived of the ability to enforce their rights so they're owed some sort of compensation for that but this is since for various complicated reasons this this isn't a case where they're they're required to have much compensation they only get very limited compensation and the compensation consists of getting low cost protection policy from the dominating so it's the key if you don't like the dominant agency they you don't want to get involved with it you get as a special benefit you get a that protection policy from the dominant agency doesn't seem like very much compensation so it's it's really if we go through this in detail we'll really really see the enormous effort to which Nozik has to resort to avoid accepting the individualist anarchist perspective of Rothbart and I think it's a tribute to Rothbart that even someone who knows it's extraordinary extraordinary intelligence and ingenuity wasn't able to pull this off but the book is well worth very careful attention I hope I'm eventually able to understand at least a little bit of it thanks very much [Applause]

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Keywords: Mises, Mises University, David Gordon, lecture, Nozick, Anarchy, State, Utopia, Rothbard

Id: UFqaFMZiS5c

Length: 49min 53sec (2993 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 29 2019