Rawls & Nozick PDF

# John Rawls (1921-2002) John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He went to Princeton in 1939, taking his degree in 1943, after military service during World War II, he taught at Cornell University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and finally, at Harvard, where he was a Professor of P...

# John Rawls (1921-2002) John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He went to Princeton in 1939, taking his degree in 1943, after military service during World War II, he taught at Cornell University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and finally, at Harvard, where he was a Professor of Philosophy for almost forty years. He became John Cowles University Professor at Harvard in 1976. He published numerous articles and reviews. His articles tended to be preliminary exercises leading to two large and influential books: *A Theory of Justice* (1971) and *Political Liberalism* (1993). He died on 27 November 2002. ## *A Theory of Justice* *A Theory of Justice* is Rawls’s major contribution to political theory. The notion of justice that he develops in it is often referred to as *justice as fairness*. *Justice as Fairness* was the title given to a preliminary article published in the Philosophical Review in 1958 and reprinted in several anthologies since. In a certain sense, Rawls’s argument is a rehabilitation of the old explanatory device of the social contract. Unlike the social contractarians of the seventeenth century, however, Rawls does not make the device part of a theory of obligation. Rather, he employs it in an attempt to establish what he thinks are rationally necessary principles of social justice. His chief purpose in doing so is to avoid what he regards as the major drawback of utilitarian or consequentialist thinking, namely, that such thinking can sanction the sacrifice or neglect of individual interests for the sake of a ‘greater good’. This, he believes, is contrary to our intuitive beliefs about right and wrong. The system of social justice that he envisages will, as a matter of principle, exclude no one from its benefits. Rawls’s underlying conviction is that a just or fair political order is one that provides similar opportunities for everyone to live a happy and fulfilled life. Rawls’s procedure is to invite us to engage in a thought-experiment. We are to imagine a group of individuals placed in what he calls an *original position* - that is, in the Rawlsian equivalent of the seventeenth-century ‘state of nature’. Their project is to devise the kind of society into which, on leaving this original position, they might wish to move. But the ‘original position’ is located behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ - it is characterised by the lack of knowledge possessed by the people in it. They know that it will be useful to them to have what he calls *primary goods* - rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect; and it is assumed that everyone is self-interested enough to want as much of these goods as possible. They do not, however, know anything about their own talents or abilities; nor do they know what position they will occupy in the society that they are to create. In such circumstances - in circumstances, that is, such that self-interested people are required to make decisions without knowing how those decisions will affect them - what principles of ‘justice’ will they devise for the society into which they are to move? They will, Rawls suggests, arrive at general principles that would leave the least advantaged member of the future society no worse off than any one of them would wish to be if they were to turn out actually to be the least-advantaged member. There will be two such principles: 1. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. 2. Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. Rawls's two principles are, he thinks, rationally necessary and universal in the sense that any human being capable of thinking at all will arrive at them as a matter of natural reason. We can, he suggests, test them and, if necessary, modify them by a method called *reflective equilibrium* - that is, we can act on them, see if they satisfy our basic requirements of a system of social justice and, to the extent that they do not satisfy our basic requirements, alter them. They are, in other words, capable of fine-tuning. But anyone who knows what it is to behave fairly will assent to them in a general way. They are to that extent reminiscent of the *laws of nature* that the older social contractarians invoked. The liberty of which the first principle speaks is ‘negative’ liberty in the familiar liberal sense - that is, freedom from restriction or coercion. This liberty will encompass a range of basic rights, such as freedom of conscience and movement, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and so on. The second principle Rawls calls it the ‘difference’ principle - is intended to overcome the drawback that arises when negative freedom is interpreted in a strictly libertarian way: that is, the possibility that one might be destitute, homeless, starving and so on, yet still be technically free in the sense of unconstrained or uncompelled by anyone. The ‘difference’ principle is a principle of distributive justice. Under the system that Rawls proposes, even the worst-off members of society will have at least sufficient resources to enable their freedom not to be totally without value in practice. What Rawls’s system implies is a welfare state in which the poor are provided with a minimum acceptable standard of living out of taxes paid by the rich. Rawls does not object in principle to there being a difference between rich and poor. He assumes a competitive market economy in which economic inequalities will function as incentives to the wealth creation that makes redistributive or progressive taxation possible. The practical limit to redistributive taxation is the point at which such taxation becomes a disincentive to wealth creation. *A Theory of Justice* has been subjected to a great deal of analysis and criticism. Perhaps the major objection to which it is vulnerable is that its main argument is a question-begging one. The people in the ‘original position’ are the usual stereotypes of liberal political theory: *rational, risk-averse, utility-maximising individualists*. They are assumed to have exactly the characteristics - *acquisitiveness, competitiveness, self-interest* - that will lead them to formulate the principles of justice at which Rawls wishes to arrive. If one were to imagine an original position full of gamblers or altruists, the kind of society that might be inferred from the anticipated behaviour of such people would be quite different. His theory of justice is to that extent a liberal democratic theory disguised as an abstract and universal one. This is a point that Rawls came to accept in his later writing. In his second book, *Political Liberalism*, he presents a somewhat modified version of justice as fairness. His purpose now is not to formulate a theory that purports to be universal and abstract, but to show how his theory is amenable specifically to the needs and aspirations of modern liberal democracies. A liberal democracy - a political society such that citizens are free to live their own lives in their own way under the protection of the law - is, Rawls assumes, the kind of society in which any reasonable person would want to lie. But modern liberal democracies are strikingly pluralistic in nature. Pluralism or heterogeneity is inevitable precisely because the liberties that liberal democracies exist to protect find expression in a wide range of different moral, religious and philosophical beliefs. How, then, can the life of such a society be ordered in such a way as to minimise conflict between different views without prejudice to freedom? Rawls's contention is that the institutions and procedures of government should rest upon his conception of justice - as *fairness*: justice, that is, as described by slightly modified versions of the two principles stated in *A Theory of Justice*. Justice as fairness minimizes the possibility of conflict because it secures the interests of all, while remaining neutral with respect to any one conception of the good life. As such, it is capable of acceptance by all human beings who are rational in any normally recognisable sense of the term, no matter how divergent their other beliefs may be. Justice as fairness is, as Rawls expresses it, capable of being the object of an *overlapping consensus*. It is therefore capable of forming the basis of a reasonable, humane, well-ordered society in which all citizens can participate at the level of ‘public reason’, while pursuing their own private versions of the good life in conditions of economic security and personal freedom: a society in which, moreover, tolerance and understanding of others can grow. *Political Liberalism* has not, it must be added, achieved the same degree of critical acclaim accorded to *A Theory of Justice*. Rawls is a major figure - perhaps the major figure - in the Anglo-American political theory of the twentieth century. His courage and intellectual ambition are not in doubt, even to his severest critics - and he has been widely criticised, by those on both the left and right wings of the political spectrum. At a time when philosophy in the English-speaking world was still almost entirely committed to the analysis of language, Rawls persisted in trying to do old-fashioned, prescriptive, deductive system-building. It may be felt that he failed, especially by those who still believe that such an enterprise must fail of necessity, but his work is to be valued not so much for its substantive achievement as for the debate that his attempt at a theory of justice stimulated. # Robert Nozick (1938–2002) Robert Nozick was educated at Columbia University and Princeton, taking his Ph.D. at the latter university in 1963. He taught at Princeton, Harvard and Rockefeller Universities, before becoming Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard in 1969. In 1998 he became Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard. Nozick’s political ideas are set forth in the book that made his name as a philosopher: *Anarchy, State and Utopia* (1974). Political theory was only one of Nozick's interests and, as it turned out, a transient one. In his later work, as expressed in *Philosophical Explanations* (1981), *The Examined Life* (1990) and *The Nature of Rationality* (1993) he concentrated on the nature of the self, free will, ethics and epistemology. *Socratic Puzzles* (1997) is an eclectic volume of articles, reviews and fiction. His last book, *Invariancies in the Structure of the Objective World*, came out in 2001. *Anarchy, State and Utopia* is one of several attempts made in the second half of the twentieth century to reaffirm the values and beliefs of ‘classical’ liberalism. As such, it quickly became one of the key texts of the so-called ‘New Right’. Its central premise is, in effect, a traditional Lockean doctrine of inalienable ‘natural’ rights. Nozick is impatient of the kind of metaphysics that depicts societies or communities as something greater than the sum of their parts. Societies consist simply of individuals, each of whom is assumed to be endowed by nature with rights that no government may infringe or abrogate without their bearer’s consent. One consequence of the inviolability and moral supremacy of the individual is that for Nozick, as for Rawls, utilitarian arguments, inasmuch as such arguments can justify the infringement of some person’s rights for the sake of a supposedly greater good, are inadmissible in any process of political decision-making. Another consequence is that the only kind of state that is rationally justifiable is a ‘minimal’ state, equipped with just enough power to perforin the functions of protection and defence: a state, that is, that will impinge upon the rights of its subjects as-little as possible. Nozick’s semi-anarchist theory of government is intended as a response to the welfare-state position of John Rawls’s *A Theory of Justice*. Nozick illustrates his position by what is, in effect, a modernised version of Locke’s social-contract argument. Individuals living in a state of nature would inevitably encounter what Locke had called the ‘inconveniences’ of that state. They would find themselves in need of protection against crime, invasion and breach of contract. They would, Nozick suggests, meet this need by co-operating with one another to form mutual protection agencies - ‘mutual’ in the sense that each individual would secure protection for himself by making some of his own time and effort available for the protection of all. Sooner or later, it would occur to the participants in this arrangement that paying specialists to protect them would be easier and safer than doing it themselves. At this point, the mutual protection agencies would become commercial protection agencies, paid for by the contributions of those in whose interests they functioned. They would be impeccably liberal creations of self-interest and private enterprise. But not all such agencies would be equally efficient. By the operation of what may fairly be described as market forces, weaker agencies would be taken over by stronger ones until a ‘dominant’ protection agency would emerge. Eventually, virtually everyone would opt to join this dominant protection-agency, and so it would acquire a legitimate monopoly on the use of coercive force within given territorial boundaries: it would, in other words, come to answer to the traditional definition of a state. The point of this chain of reasoning is to show that a state might emerge as a result of a ‘hidden hand’ process involving nothing more than the free consent of rational individuals acting in their own interests, but that such a state would be entitled to do no more than perform the protective functions for which it was originally set up. It would have no right, for example, to make_welfare or social-security provision available to some of its citizens by taxing others. Nozick believes himself to be writing in defence of liberty, but, in practice, he makes no appreciable distinction between the individual’s right to liberty and the individual’s right to property. This move - the creation of an effective synonymy between liberty and unrestricted property rights - is a frequent feature of classical and neo-classical liberalism. Nozick's minimal-state argument is linked with, and reinforced by, an uncompromisingly libertarian stand on the question of justice. Justice, he thinks, is in its essence procedural rather than distributive. Property rights arise in two ways. Initially, they arise when property is acquired by a legitimate act of its first proprietor, that is, when someone peacefully appropriates something not already owned by someone else. Subsequent rights arise when property is transferred from one proprietor to another by some such established legitimate process as sale or bequest. These two conditions, legitimate acquisition or legitimate transfer, are what create property rights, and any distribution of property that does not infringe them is ipso facto just. It follows - especially since no utilitarian consideration can trump individual rights that no one can have any other kind of claim against the property of another, no matter how great actual inequalities of distribution may become. If the poor are to be assisted by the rich, this must come about through acts of private benevolence. It cannot rightly come about through social-welfare mechanisms provided by the state and paid for out of taxation. *Redistributive taxation*, Nozick asserts, is in effect forced labour exacted upon those of whom it is required; as, indeed, is any taxation levied for purposes other than protection and defence. Nozick, like Rawls, came upon the scene at a time when English-speaking philosophers had long been convinced that political philosophy has nothing substantive to contribute to our understanding of practical life: that it can do no more than analyse and clarify the language in which political arguments are conducted. To many in the 1970s, this view had, rightly or wrongly, come to seem arid and played out. To that extent, Nozick and Rawls were in some quarters welcomed as a breath of fresh air. Whether Nozick is actually saying anything remarkable or novel is a moot point. At heart, he is an old-fashioned laissez-faire liberal who really does no more than state the tenets of the old faith in new and often quirky forms. But, again as in the case of Rawls, his contribution lies more in the debate that his arguments have fuelled than in the originality or success of the arguments themselves.