Notes on Rawls and Nozick

Tom's Notes on Rawls and Nozick on Justice

Rawls argues that:

The basic idea of the social contract tradition is a good one. This idea is that we can determine what the basic social rules ought to be by asking the following question: What rules would it be reasonable for people to accept, if they were trying to negotiate a ‘social contract’ in order to escape the ‘state of nature’ (a state in which there is no government at all) and thereby gain the benefits that flow from social cooperation? (Note: it's a purely hypothetical contract, not a historical one.)
The choice of basic rules will be fair only if it is made in the right conditions. We would not think that a contract is fair if it is made under coercion, for example. (If one person shows up with a gun and says, "Make me king or I'll shoot you", people might agree. But that wouldn't make monarchy a just form of government.) Very roughly, a fair bargain is one that is struck under conditions of equality (here: equal bargaining power).
Rawls also thinks that the choice should be made from behind "a veil of ignorance." That is, we should imagine that the people who are trying to agree on a contract (a set of rules) are ignorant of what their specific place or role in society will be. We should imagine that they don't know what race or gender or class they will belong to, what talents or disabilities they will have, or even what their personal tastes and preferences will be. If they were ignorant of all these things, then they would not be tempted to try to skew the social rules to benefit themselves, and they could agree on rules that were fair to everyone. (Note: this is a purely hypothetical situation. Rawls does not think that it is possible for real people to be ignorant of these things or to be unbiased in the way that fairness requires. His claim is that the true principles of justice are the ones that would be chosen in this very artificial situation.)
If people were choosing fundamental principles 'behind a veil of ignorance,' it would be rational for them to use the very conservative (risk-avoiding) 'maximin' rule of choice. This rule says that you should choose the option that has the best ‘worst case outcome’. That is, for each option on your menu, consider what is the worst possible outcome that might result if you choose that option. Then choose the option where that worst possible outcome is as good as it can be. In other words we "maximize the minimum" and thereby play it safe. Rawls thinks that this choice situation -- where we are choosing the rules that will govern our whole lives and the lives of our children and descendents -- is not a situation where a rational person would want to take any unnecessary risks.
If they followed this rule, they would choose Rawls' two principles of justice. That is they would choose principles that called for:
1. Protection of civil and political liberties (because these are of fundamental importance to one's ability to pursue one's own plan of life, whatever it is)
2. Minimization of inequalities of wealth, power, authority, and so on, except when these inequalities are:
  1. To everyone's benefit -- as when the possibility of earning greater rewards motivates individuals to work harder and contribute more to a socially useful enterprise. (Rawls calls this “the difference principle” – presumably because it is about when differences in income, wealth, and power are justified. Note that this principle may require taxing and spending to prevent anyone from falling into poverty and to make sure that the increases in productivity, etc., really do benefit everyone.)
  2. Open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. This seems to require:
Taxes to support programs that expand opportunities (like public education) and provide what Rawls calls a 'social minimum' (what others sometimes call a 'social safety net') are not unfair to those who are better off, because their ability to earn high incomes is only partly a result of their own effort. It is very significantly a result of the fact that we have a cooperative social order going. (The same effort would have yielded much less if it had been expended by a solitary individual or an individual in a less advanced society.) It is also largely a result of good fortune: either inherited social advantages like wealth, connections, or access to better-than-average education or inherited natural advantages like intelligence, creativity, or athletic ability. (According to Rawls, even your ability to develop your natural talents by working hard, practicing, studying, etc. is dependent on a kind of luck. You will have acquired the character traits necessary to do these things, he says, only if you were lucky enough to be born into "happy family or social circumstances.")

Nozick argues that:

1. Nozick advocates what he calls "the entitlement theory of justice." This theory is an historical theory in the sense that it says that any distribution is just as long as it has the right kind of history -- as long as it came about or was created in the right way. It does not specify any particular pattern or principle of distribution. (A patterned theory would say something like: "Everyone should have an equal share." Or: "People's shares should be proportional to their effort [or merit or contribution or virtue or...].") The entitlement theory says that people are entitled to their holdings (roughly: their property) as long as they 1) acquired them through a voluntary transaction from 2) someone who was, in turn, entitled to that holding.

2. Obviously, this chain of transactions has to start somewhere. It starts with what Nozick calls "initial acquisition." He doesn't say exactly what makes an initial acquisition just, but the idea seems to be roughly the same as Locke's: People have a right to previously unowned natural resources after they 'mix their labor' with them. He also agrees with Locke's 'proviso': this kind of acquisition is fair only when it leaves "enough and as good" for others, so that they are not worse off because I have appropriated something. It's not fair for the first person on the scene to monopolize the only water hole in the desert. But he does not expect this sort of issue to come up very often.

3. "Liberty upsets patterns": People who are free to bargain and trade will use that freedom in ways that, over time, will make some people better off than others. (The example of Wilt Chamberlain's basketball wealth is supposed to illustrate the kind of thing that would 'naturally' happen.) So any effort to maintain any particular pattern of distribution will require constant or periodic interference with people's free choices. Nozick thinks that liberty is such a fundamental right that such interference is wrong.

4. Taxation and regulation that forces some to benefit others is a form of slavery: Forcibly taking a portion of a person's earnings and spending the money to provide benefits to others is tantamount to forcing that person to work without compensation (forced labor). (Note: Nozick thinks that taxation to support what he calls a 'minimal state' is O.K. A minimal state is a government that provides nothing more than courts and law enforcement to protect citizens against violence, theft and fraud. Such a state is needed to protect our fundamental rights not to be killed, robbed, assaulted, etc. But we have no rights to be provided with food, shelter, education, or anything else besides protection from violence and fraud.)

5. One consequence of this view is that equality of opportunity is not a legitimate principle. To make opportunities equal we would need to provide resources to those who lack them (education, at least, perhaps other things) and we would have to prevent employers and educators from discriminating. But the resources (e.g., money to pay for schools) would have to be taken from people who are entitled to keep them. And private businesses have a right to hire (and fire) for any reasons that seem good to them, including the reasons ruled out by anti-discrimination laws.