Robert Nozick and the rise of libertarian justice

The policeman agreed, but also obliged to fine him. If he let him get away with impunity, in fact, he would have to do the same to all the others he caught in the same way. Morgenbesser retorted: "Who do you think you are, Kant?!?". On another occasion J.L. Austin had pointed out to him that while very often a double negation is equivalent to an affirmation, in no existing language is a double affirmation equivalent to a negation. Morgenbesser, slyly and almost bored replied: 'See, see'.

Enchanted by the possibilities of philosophical argumentation, Nozick, after graduating from Columbia, then moved to Princeton for his doctorate, which he was to obtain under the supervision of Carl Hempel, one of the last exponents of Viennese-style logical empiricism. After some wandering around in 1969 he landed at Harvard where he remained for the rest of his life, ending in 2002 after a long illness. Nozick and Rawls, therefore, were colleagues in the same philosophy department at Harvard. Between 1981 and 1984, Nozick was appointed director of the department, thus becoming Rawls' 'boss' in those years.
The young Nozick is politically formed in the ideas of socialism. He is involved in Norman Thomas' party and at Columbia founds a section of theStudent League for Industrial Democracy, which later changes its name toStudents for a Democratic Society. It was during his doctoral years at Princeton that he came into contact with libertarian ideas facilitated by his friend Bruce Goldberg who introduced him to Murray Rothbard with whom, in 1968, Nozick had a dialogue that was fundamental to his 'conversion' to the libertarian approach and anarchist perspective. Thanks to these influences over the years, not without hesitation, Nozick would become, as Ralph Bader writes, a "reluctant libertarian" (Nozick. Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers, Continuum, 2010). The reasons for this 'conversion' are set out in Anarchy, State and Utopia.

The starting point for the analysis of this work is the fact that Nozick had no intention of becoming a political philosopher. He was more interested in other issues. His doctoral thesis, for example, dealt with the theory of rational choice and he would have liked to devote his energies as a researcher to the subject of free will. For this reason, he described the publication of what was to be unanimously regarded as his most important book as 'an accident'. Anarchy, State and Utopia gained him enormous influence but at the same time provoked countless discussions and criticisms.

He never wanted to respond to any of these criticisms. With witty irony, he confides: 'I did not want to spend my life writing The Son of Anarchy, State and Utopia, The Return of the Son of, etc.. I had other philosophical questions to think about' (Puzzle socratici. Raffaello Cortina Editore, 1999). Questions to which he would in fact turn his thinking and most of his subsequent works: from Spiegazioni filosofiche (Il Saggiatore, 1987) to La vita pensata (Mondadori, 1990), from La natura della razionalità (Feltrinelli, 1995) to Puzzle socratici and his latest book Invarianze (Fazi, 2003).

It may seem strange, given the huge difference in the conclusions Rawls and Nozick arrived at, but their political reflection developed in response to the same need: a critique of the utilitarianism that had dominated the landscape of liberal political thought up to those years.

In the utilitarian approach - we have discussed this at length in the past weeks - the welfare of a society is given by the aggregation of the utilities of individuals. Every policy intervention must therefore be evaluated on the basis of the increases or decreases in social welfare that it will produce. This means, for example, that if in order to build a road that will increase the well-being of a great many citizens by a small amount, it will be necessary to considerably decrease the well-being of a few due to the expropriation of houses or land, such a policy will find support in the utilitarian principle since the sum of small but numerous increases will most likely exceed that of a few but considerable reductions in well-being.

With the same argument it is possible to justify redistributive income policies. Since, by the principle of diminishing marginal utility, the same amount of money produces more utility for those with low income than it does in those with high income, then reducing the income of the latter through redistribution towards the poorer will only increase social welfare understood as the sum of individual utilities.
It emerges, therefore, that one of the main characteristics of utilitarianism is the possibility of 'trading off' the well-being of individuals by focusing on collective well-being. If it is possible to make two people better off by making one person worse off, then so be it, argue utilitarians. An approach not unfamiliar to many contemporary political practices.
On this point the criticism of Rawls and Nozick is common.

The dissatisfaction with this position, as Rawls writes in A Theory of Justice, stems from the fact that utilitarianism "does not take the distinction between persons seriously" (Rawls: 1999a, p. 24). This means that although it is possible to imagine a single individual weighing the net effect of a loss and a gain of utility in making a decision that affects him personally, it is not conceivable for the same transaction to take place between different individuals. While it is reasonable to choose to go to the dentist, to use one of Nozick's examples, in order to avoid worse suffering that might manifest itself in the future, it seems less reasonable to restrict the freedom of a few even if this were to benefit many. Why would it not be right to do so?

"For (...) there is no social entity," Nozick writes in this regard, "with its own good, enduring sacrifices for its own sake. There are only individuals, different individuals, with different individual lives. By using one of these individuals for the benefit of others, one uses him and benefits others, nothing more: something is done to him for the benefit of others. To speak of an overall social good conceals this. (Intentionally?) Using a person in this way does not respect or take sufficient account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has to live. That person does not obtain from his own sacrifice any good that exceeds its value, and no one is entitled to force him to do so - least of all a state or government that demands his obedience (which other individuals do not do) and must therefore be scrupulously neutral towards all its citizens' (Anarchy, State and Utopia, Il Saggiatore, 2000, p. 54).

What then is the alternative? The alternative is to be found for both philosophers in Kantian ethics and its perspective that sees individuals essentially as ends and not as means. You cannot use anyone, against their will, even if this should produce a great benefit for many.
It will be interesting to see how two theories, which start from the same problem and propose to find a solution on the basis of the same approach, end up arriving at such diametrically opposed conclusions: Rawlsian social democratic liberalism, on the one hand, and Nozick's libertarian anarchism, on the other. We have only just begun the exploration of this bizarre affair.