Nozick on Distributive Justice
Where We Are: Unit #5
Recall van den Haag's claim that so long as someone really deserves the death penalty for their crime, there is no injustice to executing them, even if only people of their race are executed, and there is a legal policy of never executing people who belong to some other race, no matter how well-deserving. On van den Haag's view, all that matters for what we should do in a particular case depends on the merits of that very case, and never on the system that it is part of, or how it relates to other cases. In contrast, as we saw, Cholbi argued that racial patterns in the enforcement of the death penalty all by themselves constitute a wrong against African-Americans who do not commit crimes.
Our goal for the last unit of the course is to turn to other topics that exhibit a conflict between the conclusions that we draw when we think only of particular actions on a case-by-case basis, and those that we draw when we think of their role as part of broader social patterns.
In order to be clearer about the ways in which these two perspectives conflict, we turn first to Robert Nozick, who has given probably the most illuminating illustration of how they come into conflict, focusing on the case of the distribution of wealth.
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick was a brilliant and wide-ranging philosopher who taught at Harvard for many years. He wrote on many different philosophical topics throughout his career, but is most famous for his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which is a philosophical defense of libertarian thought, and for his 1981 book Philosophical Explorations, whose most famous contribution is to the field of epistemology, which is the study of knowledge and rational belief. Despite the fact that Anarchy, State, and Utopia became one of the most important works of political philosophy of the twentieth century and generated many responses, Nozick wrote in the preface to Philosophical Explorations that he had never read any of these responses. He simply thought that he had said his piece and wanted to think about other things.
You may also find him easier to remember as the philosopher who returns pictures of George Clooney in response to a Google image search for his name (try it!).
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a philosophical elaboration and defense of a libertarian political philosophy, and along with Ayn Rand and Friedrick Hayek, is one of the most prominent twentieth-century voices in the development of libertarian thought. In Nozick's view, which he briefly mentions at the beginning of chapter 7, our selected reading for this class, the purpose of the state is to enforce basic laws and provide for national self-defense, and anything else that a government does is an immoral imposition on the liberty of its citizens.
The selection that we are reading, which comes from the first half of chapter 7 of the book, contains some of Nozick's most forceful arguments that are relevant to his defense of libertarianism. Since Nozick has given the most forceful arguments in defense of libertarianism, they are among the most important arguments to understand, in thinking about the merits of limited government, graduated income taxes, and the inheritance tax, all issues that we continue to confront in virtually every contested election in the contemporary United States.
I've provided links above both to the full book, in case you are interested in context, and to the first half of chapter 7, which is our reading for class.
Sample Papers
You may find sample papers here, here, here, and here. All four of these sample papers are actual papers written by students in this class in a previous semester. None of them is perfect; they could all be improved in some way. But they are all examples of reasonably strong performances, so they should give you some sense of the range of what a good paper in the class could look like.