Locke + Nozick = Locke

If the point of the Chamberlain example is that “given any initial allocation of property rights, there are potential gains from trade and that voluntary trade between two parties will make them both better off” and that this is totally fine and dandy and unobjectionable and whatever else you might to say about people’s willingness to fork over small sums of money individually to one person who enjoys the aggregate of all the sums, but is not intended to show that taxation or any other specific feature of a system of property is unjust (which, as you’ve presented it, anyway, it is not), then the observation that the actually obtaining system that enriched Chamberlain includes obligation to pay taxes seems irrelevant. I’m sure it’s true that Nozick has nothing interesting to say about why taxation is unjust but the rest is hunky-dory but I can’t at all see how there’s a self-refutation lurking in this example.

“As the history of sport demonstrates, marginal differences in the structure of property rights could produce very different outcomes.”

I think this is an interesting observation. Not so much about the sports since I don’t really follow sports, but the idea of marginal changes making very different outcomes, like the butterfly effect.

I was reading a link someone posted on Facebook about Joseph Stiglitz talking at the International Summit of Cooperatives in Quebec, where he was saying how reviving and increasing the numbers of co-ops in the economy could help reduce inequality and risk which have grown with neoliberalism over the past few decades:

“He said that alongside changes in the political landscape, such as Brexit and the upcoming elections in the USA, the world faced economic issues which are beyond the control of individuals and even national governments.

“These are problems which the private sector won’t solve – partly because the private sector created these problems,” he said. “Co-ops and the social economy provide a key third pillar. That’s one of the reasons why I was particularly happy to address you this morning.”

Many countries are witnessing growing inequality which was the result of “the laws of men”, he added.

“Growing inequality is a result of how we have structured the market economy – in particular how we have restructured it in the last third of a century,” he said. “Inequality has been a choice.”
….
“Citizens know that the establishment has either lied to them or been totally incompetent. They feel that the economic system is rigged. They have lost trust in government and in the fairness of the political and economic system.”

What is the role of co-ops in addressing this inequality? Prof Stiglitz thinks they represent a better way of responding to the risks presented by the society.

“There are alternatives to the current system, even if some suggest there are not,” he said. “Some suggest at most we need minor tweaks on the system. But problems are deep and fundamental. Minor tweaks won’t solve it.””

http://www.thenews.coop/110090/news/business/joseph-stiglitz-proposes-co-ops-models-alternative-trickle-economics/

1. Yes it was Jerry Cohen in his article “Marxism and Contemporary Political Philosophy, or, why Nozick exercises some Marxists more than he does any egalitarian liberals.” A version of which is ch.6 of Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality and is imho one of his most interesting papers. He was also very concerned with the baseline question you identify.

2. I don’t think it is correct for you to say that Nozick’s baseline is a Hobbesian state of war, rather it is a condition before any private appropriation has taken place. On this, I think his discussion of Fourier in a footnote is of some interest (and reveals that Nozick is in a bit of a tangle about this question).

3. You say rights are social structures. (Well yes, but so are beehives and wasps nests.) I find your focus on property as created by the laws of particular societies problematic in part because it suggests that particular societies and their legal systems are the locus of justice, which rather naturally (though not inevitably) leads to an anti-cosmopolitan view of global justice. The whole social democratic/egalitarian liberal project, with its stock response to natural rights libertarians on property rights, rather easily slips into a nationally limited view of things.

As a bit of trivia apropos to not much, the rules of a game cannot in fact be copywrighted. This fact has caused a lot of consternation for modern corporate game-makers (Games Workshop, etc).

Games workshop license out their warhammer product to others. Fantasy flight games just stopped producing their (excellent) range of warhammer fantasy role playing games because they could not get a new license. WFRP2 was also licensed out (to black industries I think) and included the rules. So I suspect that the uk also allows game copyrights of some kind.

That Nozick could make a good living as a bad philosopher examining the justice of winning the lottery of life, because his philosophy suited the interests of a few immensely rich and greedy folks deserves more scrutiny than the anatomy of Wilt Chamberlain’s career.

+1

Presumably that’s something that we value doing.

“Something” in this case is the rebuting of Nozick’s anti-egalitarian arguments? Or, taking those arguments seriously, so as to legitimize them as a philosophical position?

B Wilder
That Nozick could make a good living as a bad philosopher examining the justice of winning the lottery of life, because his philosophy suited the interests of a few immensely rich and greedy folks

Did Nozick become substantially better off financially than his peers in philosophy whose books espousing different positions sold roughly as well? GA Cohen implicitly or explicitly criticized his own relative affluence in If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re So Rich? Has anyone ever claimed that Cohen made a good living as a philosopher b/c his philosophy “suited the interests of a few immensely rich” people?

Bruce, I’m afraid your “so as to legitimize” remark reveals that you think we engage in philosophical argument only with the purpose of defeating political opponents we already know to be wrong.

Have you actually *read* either Nozick or the voluminous commentary on him? Did you even bother to read Cohen’s refutation? If you had, you’d quickly realize that Nozick’s critique of distributive justice, socialist or otherwise, is not principally grounded in self-ownership. It is a species of immanent critique, arguing that *whatever* the mechanism of egalitarianism is established, it will inevitably result in, or at least authorize, a sequence of interactions that will result in an unequal distribution, compelling an intervention to “set things right” that *violates the grounding principle of justice*. Even Cohen gets this right, before completely failing to offer a satisfying refutation. (Tellingly, he refuses to offer any substantive definition of socialism in response to Nozick. When he does so elsewhere, the result is laughably inadequate).

So the notion that Nozick adds nothing to Locke is decidedly false. As generations of philosophers and social critics have learned, the best way to refute Nozick is not by appeal to the abolition of property but by an immanent critique of the market economy, coupled with substantive proposals for democratic forms of redistribution that avoid the contradiction he has identified. Heck, even Rawls himself took Nozick’s argument onboard. But then he was not so arrogant as to dismiss a serious counterargument out of hand.

@stevenjohnson #18
Good point about Libertarians and speculative fiction. I suppose you could say the same about Libertarian economists or political philosophers. They have to create an imaginary scenario in which their preferences would function. But, then that critique might apply to most economists. ;-)

Chris Bertram@ 21:
It is important to appraise others of the origins and political settings of ideas so that they can be alert to biases as they read them. US libertarianism has a very well documented origin through pro-capitalist propaganda organizations who have been massively funded by the wealthy for at least 3 generations. Critical appraisal of texts doesn’t just happen: the reader needs to be prepared to recognize how motives of the author may be shaping his argument. That’s how JQ has been analyzing Locke, for example.

Why shouldn’t that be part of the conversation as well?

Chris Bertram @ 5: 3. You say rights are social structures. (Well yes, but so are beehives and wasps nests.) I find your focus on property as created by the laws of particular societies problematic in part because it suggests that particular societies and their legal systems are the locus of justice, which rather naturally (though not inevitably) leads to an anti-cosmopolitan view of global justice. The whole social democratic/egalitarian liberal project, with its stock response to natural rights libertarians on property rights, rather easily slips into a nationally limited view of things.

I’m curious: What would be a more comfortably cosmopolitan basis for a view of justice? Ideal theory? Peter Singer’s kind of utilitarianism? Or just more traditional kind of “philosophical” thinking generally? Or are you only making a specific criticism of society or legal institutions as a basis for morality?

I think that it would be perfectly fitting for the blog to get a thorough comment philosophy, sociology, and enforcement redesign just as its medium dies out altogether. Twitter will do the same thing in 2030.

@bianca steele thanks. My point is just that the leading social democratic response to Nozick and some other libertarians, that favoured by people like Thomas Nagel, carries with it some baggage that some of us find problematic, so we might just want to hesitate a bit before grabbing onto it. My own view, only really worked out for one question (immigration) is that particular state actions and structures, to be just, have to be constrained by principles acceptable to everyone, including those beyond their borders, and that implies a conception of rights that isn’t merely what particular societies decide on.

CB @ 17

Thank you for reading my mind. Speaking from my position of epistemic privilege, I had been unaccountably unaware that I thought that at all. But what a conversation starter!

It is useful to look at the context where Nozick introduces the Chamberlain case.

From ASU 1974 p160-163:

“It is not clear how those holding alternative conceptions of distributive justice can reject the entitlement conception of justice in holdings. For suppose a distribution favored by one of these nonentitlement conceptions is realized. Let us suppose it is your favorite one and let us call this distribution D 1; perhaps everyone has an equal share ”
… “Now suppose that Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams” [here follows the Chamberlain story]
… [Nozick next attempts to make a point based on the case] “If D 1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with?), isn’t D2 also just?” … “The general point illustrated by the Wilt Chamberlain example … is that no end-state principle or distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives.”

One problem here is that Nozick starts by misrepresenting competing theories as single time only redistribution views (D1). But those theories in fact have *ongoing* distribution sensitivity. They aim for a social structure where the value of equality between people (combined with other values) is *ongoingly* realized. As technology progresses the aggregated choices in a complex social system will indeed recurringly upset distributive patterns. Therefore egalitarians call for enduring but adaptive institutions like taxation, limits on power and wealth concentration and provision of welfare state services instutitions that together function to adjust patterns.

“Aha!”, some nozickian may say, “but then you admit that your theory leads to continuous interference in peoples lives.” Answer: of course the theory leads to continuous interference, but that is in itself no objection because so does *every* political philosophical theory. Nozick’s too. For example the minimal nozickian state would continuously interfere in peoples lives to enforce its favored constructed set of near absolute negative property rights. For example some people who at no fault of their own are born with abilities not valued by the specific marketplace constructed by the nozickian rules may in that state face starvation. People who starve in the midst of plenty are unlikely to acquiesce in death. So the nozickian state will in practice violently coerce (perhaps even execute) such starving people to prevent them from e.g. taking fruit from lands some rich person claims ownership over.

Typos
“This is obviously that this is not the case and, if it were, Nozick would be writing a very different book (something more like Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. ” => “Obviously, this is not the case…”
“He tehn asserts (p 182)..” => “He then…”

I’d suggest a parenthetical definition of “indefeasible” to make it more readable to lay people. Also, a parenthetical definition of consequentialism would do the same.

I am thinking of the “hill of bones” upon which property rights rest. As they say in the Marines, “Sorry pal, you shoulda fought harder.” To a biologist, this is even more obvious.

No territorial rights exist for animals except those that are taken and enforced. Kitty-cats stake out their territories in neighborhoods and those territories are in a constant state of flux. (Similar in their dynamics to the time-lapse bondaries of nations in Europe.) From birdsong claiming land (hat-tip to Aussie birds who don’t sing, but rather croak, garble and gabble to do the same) and the aerial dogfights of hummingbirds, to the territorial grab a sub-adult cougar kicked out of mom’s territory by its mother or father, and on to the territorial stakes claimed by street gangs of teenage boys (who sometimes go on to be adult gangsters) — no property rights exist except those that can be enforced. Inevitably, some of those fights over property are battles to the death.

Thus, the hill of bones is the ground of property rights. There is no justice except that which we agree on after the battles are over. And we go to battle again sooner or later.

John Bates Clark. John Maurice Clark, his son, was an institutionist, exploring what his father might have called dynamics.

Academics often explore mistaken ideas. Nozick knowing no better in the 1970s is a black mark against him. He could have taken local experts to dinner and drinks to find out better.

Chr

Thanks. I was assuming John Quiggin was making an argument like Robert Reich’s that the structures of the market are up to us (the political “us”), rather than being dictates of nature. So it should be up to the electorate, in a democracy, what rights people have and what kinds of economic activities would be considered legitimate. But if I understand Chris Bertram’s point about cosmopolitanism correctly, arguments about rights that are addressed only to one community aren’t likely to be acceptable to those outside the community; so arguments acceptable from a broader view are preferred. (I hadn’t known Thomas Nagel supported that view, and given what I (thought I) knew about his “view from nowhere” it surprises me.)

how the economy should work, what should be produced, and how people should benefit from growth–or alternately how much those things should be left to choice outside political processes (presumably within broad bounds set by some number of real economic principles).

mbrave @19 is right to remind us that Nozick’s argument is “a species of immanent critique, arguing that *whatever* the mechanism of egalitarianism is established, it will inevitably result in, or at least authorize, a sequence of interactions that will result in an unequal distribution.”

But this just reinforces what an embarrassingly bad, because absurdly question-begging, argument it is. An imminent critique succeeds by critiquing a view from its own premises. Nozick’s mindboggingly bad argument starts from two transcendent normative positions not shared and directed challenged by egalitarianism: 1) that liberty is a primary and inviolable political value and 2) that liberty is defined negatively and simplistically as non-interference.

It is a comically failed, almost absurdist parody, of immanent critique. Like an immanent utilitarian critique of Kant that proves a perfect Kantian world will harm the greatest net happiness. No shit, shitlock.

compelling an intervention to “set things right” that *violates the grounding principle of justice*. Even Cohen gets this right, before completely failing to offer a satisfying refutation. (Tellingly, he refuses to offer any substantive definition of socialism in response to Nozick. When he does so elsewhere, the result is laughably inadequate).

So the notion that Nozick adds nothing to Locke is decidedly false. As generations of philosophers and social critics have learned, the best way to refute Nozick is not by appeal to the abolition of property but by an immanent critique of the market economy, coupled with substantive proposals for democratic forms of redistribution that avoid the contradiction he has identified. Heck, even Rawls himself took Nozick’s argument onboard. But then he was not so arrogant as to dismiss a serious counterargument out of hand.

Mike Huben@33

“But even if he was a dupe and not being paid money, he was laboring for the common purpose of the conspiracy which was created to serve the wealthy. Readers ought to know about these origins so that they can spot the systematic biases for the wealthy.”

I have no idea what this means. In what sense is he “laboring for the common purpose of the conspiracy”? What systematic biases of your own do you think readers need to be warned about?

If nothing else, this thread illustrates the capacity for self-delusion. People, do you have any idea how hard it is to get a professorship at Harvard? Even in Robert Nozick’s time there were a lot of unemployed philosophers, and somehow he wound up with tenure at the world’s richest and most eminent university, in a department dominated by people with views quite different from his. Apparently his fellow philosophers, who had their pick of just about anybody in the world as a colleague, saw something special in him. It is fine to argue with Nozick and give your reasons, as John Quggin does, but the anonymous commentators whose most sustained public writing is a paragraph or two in an obscure blog should think about whether the condescension runs the way they think it runs.

Kurt Schuler @48

somehow he wound up with tenure at the world’s richest and most eminent university

Richest yes, “most eminent” I don’t think so, since that designation is pretty meaningless. [*]

in a department dominated by people with views quite different from his.

As I recall (cd be wrong), he got tenure for some fairly technical papers of not much interest to anyone outside a narrow circle of professional philosophers. He already had tenure when he wrote ASU; however, my guess is that he would also have gotten tenure if the chronology had been reversed, bec. ASU won the nat’l book award, became famous (for certain values of “famous”), etc.

——

[*] In my experience (undergrad, late 1970s), all one had to do to be disabused of the notion that Harvard was the world’s “most eminent” university was to take one mediocre Harvard course (while there were plenty of good ones, there were also some mediocre ones). [By the way, Nozick has a passage in ASU where he imagines Harvard undergrads bolstering their self-esteem (assuming it needed bolstering, e.g. if they weren’t doing all that well academically or whatever) by thinking of their age-mates who are at (supposedly) “lesser” institutions. Nozick doubtless thought the passage was psychologically insightful, but it comes across more as snarky, and frankly somewhat nasty, than anything else.]

Deleted I specifically asked for a stop to this kind of thing

@JohnQ agree with your #45. Just to clarify, Nagel (and Rawls for that matter) don’t deny that we have obligations to outsiders such as to respect their general human rights, they deny that we have obligations of distributive justice towards them such that inequality between them and us calls for redress (for example). They’d accept there’s an obligation to see to it that nobody starves (or, at least, they’d accept that there’s a duty for wealthy states to assist states so poor that it is inevitable that some people starve).

Kurt Schuler @48
Yes but how do you explain Naill Ferguson. It seems to me that a professorship at Harvard is a sign of some sort of unique quality, but that quality doesn’t have to be academic merit.

Not sure if this is relevant for the thread, but:

The idea that this or that political choice can “maximize freedom” is a nonsense, because freedom is a zero-sum game. For example, in a dictatorship, people are unfree, but if you free them you limit the freedom of the dictator, who was very free earlier.

In my opinion, the modern idea of freedom was born when “liberals” started questioning aristocratic values (Locke too is part of this movement). In the aristocratic (feudal) world, some people (the aristocrats) had more rights than the others (the commoners), or in other words the aristocrats were more free than the commoners. Liberals were opposed to this state of things, and proposed a state of equality of rights, that they called freedom:
– the “subject” of the monarchy becomes a citizien;
– the government is not up to the monarch (or the aristocrats) “chosen by God”, but is democratically elected so that everyone has the same political rights;
– various forms of rights are supposed to be “human” general rights, so that also the right to property is supposed to come from labor;
– etc.

Thus “freedom” in reality means “equality of rights”.

But, this equality of rights did lead to a society where there was (more or less, generally less) an equality of right but there was also a big inequality of income, so that the socialist movement came up with the idea that the equality of rights thingie was just an empty shell without an equality of income to complete it (I totally share this perspective).

In my opinion, the difference between Locke and Nozick (I didn’t read either) is this:
– different time period, Locke was debating with aristocrats, Nozick with socialists, so Locke’s glass is half full whereas Nozick’s one is half empty;
– Nozick totally doesn’t understand what “freedom” means, because he doesn’t get that freedom is a form of equality (specifically equality of rights), whereas Locke does understand this, since he is polemising with aristocrats (who are against equality of rights by definition).

What kind of thing?

Actually on reflection the reason they have the same word is we used to think of them both as ‘natural’ rights, but no one on the left professes to believe in natural rights anymore so things got muddled.

@52

Seriously, are you referring to Chris Bertram@21? Did my post in any way resemble this? As opposed to, say, MisterMr@58, which pretty much epitomizes it?

To be clear I’m not saying that education is unimportant. I’m saying that it doesn’t fit in well with the rubric of ‘rights’ in the same way as a right to not be murdered so treating them as if they are similar doesn’t help analyze how we can vinidicate them very usefully.

@Howard Frant
I believe JQ was referring to his comment @46 re N’s ‘motivations’.

“What, other than politics, motivates the sharp distinction you want to draw?”

Does that phrase change meaningfully change your sentence at all?

The distinction is between things that people can avoid violating all on their own, and things that require affirmative action to get done. If everyone chooses not to murder anyone else, no further action is required by society to vindicate that right. The same is not true of education. If everyone chooses not to educate anyone else, education doesn’t happen. So in order to fulfill a ‘right to education’ society needs to take steps to make sure that happens.

The flip side of that is what does society need to do in order to vindicate the right. In order to vindicate the right not to be murdered, society only has to stop other people from murdering you. (I say ‘only’ but as it turns out that isn’t as easy as we would wish). To vindicate a *whatever we want to call it* to education, society can’t merely prevent other people from interfering with your ‘thing’ to education. Society has to actively provide it.

So far as society has to get involved, ‘negative’ rights are those that society merely has to stop other people from interfering in while ‘positive’ rights are those that society has to take affirmative steps to provide. From that perspective, property rights are in one of the in between areas. On a close personal level property rights are vindicated by not letting people take your stuff. But as things get further and further from you, (not the thing you personally made, or the house you inhabit, but the house 4 states away that you want to rent or the tone pattern you want to copyright) the more it looks like property rights are in the ‘positive’ rights area where society has to provide them.

Which may be why property rights are so contentious, they occupy both areas but we try to define them in only one of those areas.

Society has to provide you with the positive right to own property before it can stop someone from taking it.

“The example also makes use of a seemingly plausible principle, namely, that any distribution that arises from a just initial distributive pattern by just steps, is itself just.”

Isn’t that the problem with the Wilt example, though? Nozick’s example is a pretty fact specific trade – it involves a minor amount of funds for something ephemeral, and more importantly non-exclusive. No one is starving either way, and everyone can buy and Wilt can sell as much of his basketball as needed. Of course that won’t upset an initially just system. It doesn’t have much effect at all. It’s set up to avoid having any hypothetical consequences except making Wilt rich.

But that’s not representative of all trades. This is literally a first-world problem, something that only matters to very wealthy people who can blow money on basketball games without much harm. If instead Wilt has the only method of curing cancer, and is demanding that you become his slave to get it, well, not so sure that’s just no matter how just the initial distribution was.

That’s how he can ignore the initial distribution. If you make the trades so meaningless that you are basically at the initial distribution anyway, of course it’s fine. We’re never really leaving the initial distribution.

Nope.

Locke + Nozick < Locke

This is the way my Stanford’s prof refuted Nozick:

Wilt only gets rich if fans have limited information and/or make poor choices (which happens, or course). If they knew that paying Wilt $1 would contribute to (inequality) Wilt’s gaining power over them and the planet and probably causing loss of liberty and harm, they ought to refrain.

There is also this other point: that libertarians generally assume that the government doesn’t have property rights; but if we see how things developed in the middle ages:
1) Someone (the King) owned all the land;
2) He “gave” the land to some subject (nobles), in exchange of some tribute, but the land still was part of his kingdom;
3) Finally the noble “gave” the land to some serf, again in exchange of some tribute;
4) There was some land that was “completely owned”, known as “allodal land”, on wich the owner had no tribute to pay.

We can see “tributes” as a form of taxes, and the king and the aristocrats as the “government”; but we can also see the tributes as rent, and the king and the aristocrats as big landlords with weird forms of subrenting; the concept of allodal land only makes sense if there is no distinction between “sovereignity” (government) and “ownership” (landlords).

Only later the concept of ownership and sovereignity became distinguished, and his is the modern concept of the “state”; libertarian theories only make sense in this more modern legal conception (where the president of the USA is not the owner of the USA, whereas Charlemagne basically was the owner of the empire).

“Charlemagne basically was the owner of the empire”

and JQ’s post linked to @84.

Sigh. No – medieval society did not work like this. The government – of which the king was head – had over-riding public rights, and could resume property either on conviction for certain crimes or after payment. Conditional rights tended to become absolute over time (so counts started as public offices supported by revenue from public lands, fines and so on but morphed into owners in France. In Germany they negotiated ownership from the imperial crown in return for political support. In England, government was stronger, and periodically returned to conditional holding through writs of quo warranto). Gifting and other forms of personal exchange played a much larger part than we are used to, rights were more complex insofar as they usually involved families rather than individuals and they were bundled differently, but that’s all.

Really, the image of medieval government commonly held is outdated by several decades at least.

“there wasn’t a distinction between “public” and “private””.

There was is the short answer. The public tended to become private over time (as it still does), but the king held some land directly, as “private” owner, some as the royal domain, some under various conditions (eg land held in trust for minors or unmarried female heirs). The Merovingians and early Carolingians seem to have treated the realm as a whole as a collective family possession, but divisions still affected royal and private domains differently – Chlodovic might get, say, a third of the realm as his share, but would retain any personal holdings in the other two-thirds. And some rights would be reserved to the head of the family as holder of the overall public sphere.

Feudal government was very personal, largely a matter of custom and spoken agreement, and incredibly diverse in practice. Neat chains of tenure and obligation are a matter of later (mostly post-feudal) legal tidying-up. But there was always a clear concept of public and private – the arguments were about what belonged where, not about the categories themselves.

It’s not philosophically relevant, but Bill Russell was actually paid a higher salary than Chamberlain. Nozick was in Boston metro. Come on.