Rawls vs Nozick - justice in society
Part 1: Comparing their theories of justice
Robert Nozick puts forward the argument in this extract of Anarchy, State and Utopia that a series of legitimate transactions between consenting parties, whereby monetary compensation is offered to a first party for something perceived by a second to be of equal value, from an originally just distribution of goods (D1), would necessarily result in an equally just state of affairs (D2).¹ Under his entitlement theory, as long as the principles of just acquisition and transfer are adhered to, the resultant state of affairs must itself be just.² John Rawls, however, supplements a first principle which affords equal rights and liberties to the greatest extent possible to all (and is compatible with the idea posited by Nozick) in his theory of justice with a second principle intended to preserve a standard of equality of wealth between individuals in his society, by stipulating that all inequality must in some manner benefit the most disadvantaged in a society.³ This essay will argue that the Nozickian argument for a standard of justice which involves minimal redistribution following patterned, arbitrary end-state requirements, is both more practical and less contrived than its Rawlsian counterpart.
Nozick’s argument elementarily proposes that the distribution of wealth and resources within a society must be done in accordance with the maxim (no doubt devised as a riposte against Marxism): ‘from each as they choose, to each as they are chosen’.⁴ More specifically, the distribution of wealth in his ideal society would be orchestrated to adhere to the entitlement theory of distributive justice in holdings. This theory is comprised of three main elements, or principles.
The first principle is that of justice in acquisition. This principle is concerned with the claiming to ownership of hitherto unowned and unclaimed resources. Nozick establishes his principle of just acquisition upon the foundation of the Lockean enough-and-as-good Proviso, which states that the appropriation of resources is just if this process does not harm or worsen the overall condition of others; Nozick argues that the acquisition of unclaimed resources must be done in such a manner that the good of others is not generally diminished, nor is the right of others to self-preservation infringed upon (non-worseness proviso). However, questioning the flaws of Locke’s assumption that merely mixing one’s labour with an unclaimed object would be enough to bestow upon the actor ownership of it, he rejects this theory.⁵ Although it is never explicitly delineated whether this right is fundamental or derivative, the assertion that the right to appropriate unclaimed resources as long as this causes no external harm is an inherent principle in Anarchy, State and Utopia is evident.
The second principle presented by Nozick is that of justice in transfer; the manner in which a transaction can be carried out justly. Such a transaction, firstly, must be based on personal choice rather than coercion. That is, the transaction must take place because two parties, being compos mentis, mutually recognise commensurate or superior value in one of each others’ possessions as in something they have themselves, and upon this basis wish to exchange their respective items.⁶
The third principle upon which Nozick’s theory is founded is the principle of the rectification of injustice. Nozick recognises that it is impossible to expect the totality of a state’s citizens to act in accordance with the first two principles, and therefore engineers a third to account for rectification for their violations. Although Nozick himself admits he does not know a ‘thorough or theoretically sophisticated treatment of such issues’, he circumvents this lack of precision with an approximate theoretical outline for a solution.⁷ This would involve assessing what the just flow of events since the puncturing of the timeline by an injustice would have been, and reallocating wealth such as to yield a similar state of value and holdings in a society.⁸ Presumably, this would be delegated to a judicial branch of some form within the society.
Nozick’s conception of justice stems from a purely historical analysis of the state of events leading up to the present. He rejects an end-state, patterned, structural distribution of justice, citing concerns over the extent to which it involves the confiscation of others’ possessions for the purposes of redistribution through taxation, practical difficulties corollary to assessing moral worth of individuals prior to reallocation as well as the potential infringement of end-state principles upon the integrity of personal liberties.⁹
Hence, Nozick argues that in the case of Wilt Chamberlain, the value Chamberlain presents to supporters permits an unequal distribution of wealth (D2) to be just.¹⁰
John Rawls, however, counters the objection that an end-state requirement infringes upon personal liberties by creating a system of two principles, with the latter branching into a part (a) and a part (b). The relative importance of these principles, and therefore the order in which they take precedence over one another is arranged lexically by Rawls in the following order: 1, 2b, 2a.¹¹ To discern his principles of justice, Rawls poses a thought experiment whereby rational human agents are reduced to participation in an ‘original position’. In such a state, they are not aware of the various social, religious or monetary strata they are to be party to, nor any physical or mental endowments or talents.¹² He bases his principles upon that which people in such an experiment, where mutual disinterest and uncertainty of social position would remove much subjective bias, would agree upon. He believes, although such a proposition is liable to objection from reflective unacceptability (a counterfactual for his assumption of human behaviour is hard to prove), that people in such a situation would elect to participate in a system of extensive equal liberties, provided there exists a bulwark against extreme poverty, destitution and exploitation of those who are societally disadvantaged.¹³
The first of the principles is called the greatest equal liberty principle; this principle states that ‘each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all’.¹⁴ That is, the largest possible number of essential rights are afforded to people; such basic freedoms are listed by Rawls as including the freedoms of the person, speech, assembly, thought, liberty of conscience, freedoms from psychological oppression and physical coercion, as well as those which permit a person to hold property and protect them from unjust arrest and detention.¹⁵ This principle takes precedence over any artificial end-state requirements for wealth reallocation and redistribution. However, the freedom to own certain types of property (such as, in some cases, the means of mass production) and the freedom to form contracts without government interference under a system of laissez-faire are not considered basic and as such are not afforded protection under this principle.¹⁶
The second principle Rawls terms the ‘difference principle’. In itself it branches two separate requirements for a government practicing a system of ideal justice. The first requirement subsumed within the difference principle is that of equal opportunity for all to enter into positions where wealth is unequally distributed to their advantage. Equal opportunity here involves both the existence of offices to which positions of inequality are to be attached, their allocation on a purely meritocratic basis, and crucially, the reasonable ability of any individual to gain the skills necessary to attain such offices on the basis of merit.¹⁷
This principle supersedes the latter aspect of the difference principle, which is oriented more towards expressing a positive conception of justice. Rawls notes that in the original position, each individual has equal, legitimate claims to a common stock of resources. Morally arbitrary factors such as social standing at birth or inherent talents should not, Rawls asserts, determine the scope of one’s life opportunities. Therefore, upon this basis, one does not inherently hold a claim to a greater share of resources, unless this is attained by means of economic productivity and augmentation of these resources. There must be a route open to the augmentation of personal wealth that is open to all, in a manner consistent with principle 2a. Hence, to prevent a society serving to maintain a system of autocephalous privileged classes at the expense of the disadvantaged, and to afford the means and opportunities for prosper to all, a ‘difference principle’ is engineered, according to which all inequality must be to the benefit of the most disadvantaged members of a society.¹⁸ This may involve manual redistribution of resources and restructuring of the means of attaining an advantage of inequality in order to comply with this principle. Such maximin reasoning, which rejects Nozick’s historical interpretation of the just evolution of history, lends a heavy dose of support to the existence of a basic standard of wealth and the provision of all with basic resources and primary goods essential to their survival and chances of future prosperity.
Who is more convincing?
This article will argue that Nozick’s theory of justice is simpler, more aligned with popular opinion, and more protective of essential personal liberties than that of Rawls.
Rawls’ theory of justice, in essence, is born from a vacuum. It is, therefore, at its core both a product of speculation, as well as one involving an arbitrary conception of an end-state greater good in which a justice-as-fairness criterion determines the social and economic landscape. Rawls’ theory is both more complex, subjective and indeterminate than that which is posited by Nozick. Nozick simply aspires to afford to individuals the greatest possible ability for legitimate consensual economic interactions, whereas that of Rawls’, being ignorant of the historical context of an economic state of affairs and preferring an end-state patterned idea of justice, opens the door to the curtailing of individual freedoms relating to consensual economic interactions because of the onus it places upon their serving the interests of the entirety of a society. That is, Rawls refuses to grant certain freedoms of property ownership and mutual contracts because the economic actions of individuals must be in service of his two ideals (of the difference principle and equal opportunity principle) rather than the mutual betterment of involved consenting parties (Rawls 1974: p.54). There are two issues with such a system; firstly, it seems that these two principles serve not as a means but as an ideological imposition that all human interactions are to work towards. Furthermore, little attention is given to the fact that individual capabilities or lack thereof also determine to what degree one is able to attain a position of comparative power in a meritocratic system. Therefore the practicality of this criterion is put under doubt. Economic and social interactions between free agents in the service of an end-state criterion of ubiquitous equality of opportunity and universal ownership of essential commodities, whose mere possibility itself is not made clearly evident by Rawls open the door to the curtailing of uses of wealth and consequently ownership thereof. Whereas one in the Nozickian system has a responsibility over themselves, Rawls broadens this and lays upon each individual the responsibility for serving the interests of all in a society. The conception and interpretation of the ‘common good’ is broad and therefore difficult to apply; out of fear of infringement and the burden of responsibility, economic freedoms are curtailed in the service of arbitrary and likely impractical ideological criteria.
In addition to this, as aforementioned, Rawls’ conception of justice involves an assumption, likely overly oriented towards economic risk aversion, of the result of human decisions from the standpoint of the original position. Whereas Nozick necessarily historically traces a thread of interactions buttressed by mutual consent to arrive at his conception of a just social state, Rawls makes clear that his theory is based upon a hypothetical and fundamentally ahistorical conception of human decision making from behind a veil of ignorance. Hence, it is hard to prove or posit any counterfactual to something that can in reality only be divined empirically.
The practical application of Nozick’s theory is not difficult as it requires minimal positive justice; that is, it does not preoccupy itself with, by means of reallocation of resources and restriction of the scope of economic interaction, engineering a society in which any end-state patterned ideological criteria are chased. In Rawls’ theory, not only is such a ubiquitous, arbitrary criterion, for which there is no proof of possibility of practical application presented, but a large amount of positive involvement and redistribution of government is necessary. This raises the problem of practicality in both the meeting of the nebulous end-state criterion by governmental distributors justice as well as the incentivisation of all individuals to act in their self-interests, which often results in value creation, when their ability to serve the interests of themselves and their family are restricted by a collective duty to the service of the disadvantaged. Rawls’ ideal justice involves complicated state and individual transfers of wealth, which would likely involve excessive, disincentivising taxation, in the service of an arbitrary (not based in popular consent), unproven and impractical patterned end-state criterion. Certainly, in engineering such a society, large redistributions of wealth would have to take place. Nozick, however, advocates that the societal wealth distribution evolves in line with the voluntary interactions of all consenting individuals whose ownership rights are protected, without the need for extensive government requirements and redistribution, except in the interest of reallocation of resources when personal liberties have been violated and wealth illegally transferred.
Rawls’ theory is simply too nebulous and speculative, and too leveraged upon the extensive necessity of government intervention, to be practical in a real society. However, this is not what Rawls intends; Rawls seeks to present a speculative conclusion based on an experimental theory of human will from behind a theoretical veil of ignorance. Nozick seeks to develop the practical basis for a state based on historical analysis. His presentation of distributive justice is more obviously practical, less idealistic and far less arbitrary fundamentally because his aspirations in this regard are disparate to those of his counterpart. Nevertheless, an element of Rawls’ welfare state may still find its way into a synthesis with Nozick’s model, which involves a radical view of taxation as being tantamount to ‘forced labour’ because of its confiscation of the value created through one’s labour.
Footnotes:
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 151–152.
Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 152.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 70.
Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 160.
Robert Nozick, ‘A Minimalist Theory of Appropriation’, p. 7.
Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 152.
Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 152.
Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 153.
Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 154, 157, 164.
Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 160–162.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 266.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 11.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 11.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 266.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 53.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 54.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 266.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (revised ed., 1974), p. 68.