 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato, an editor of libertarianism.org. I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at Cato in the Center for Constitutional Studies. We're joined today by our colleague Julian Sanchez, a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. Our topic for today is the political philosophy of Robert Nozick. His 1974 book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a classic of modern philosophy. In it, Nozick argues that the rights we all have as human beings dramatically limit what the state's allowed to do. So Julian, Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia was enormously influential at the time it was published. It won the National Book Award. It's considered by many the work of libertarian political philosophy. Can you tell us a bit about why it had the impact it did and also maybe is it still relevant today? Julian Sanchez I think it is, although let's brag at that. I think in part the influence of that book is in substantial part a kind of historical, I would say accident, but a product of happenstance in that it came right on the heels of another tremendously influential book, John Rawls Theory of Justice. And so just as a kind of a practical matter, this was one of the first strong responses to that book. And so as a matter of academic practice, it made a lot of sense in sort of intro political philosophy classes to pair them together. But it's not just that, of course. I think it's also an incredibly inventive book and one that is resilient, I think, and relevant today in a way because of Nozick's sort of broader approach to philosophy. He was notoriously an intellectual explorer. You could, if you wanted to be a pejorative, you could say dilettante. But he didn't, as many philosophers do, pick a tiny corner of the universe of philosophy and sort of churn away on it for an entire career. He moved from Anarchy State in Utopia to a book that ranged over metaphysics and epistemology and questions about personal identity and truth to the theory of rationality to questions about scientific objectivity and the origins of universes. So this is someone who ranged over an enormous domain philosophically. And this wasn't just, I think, a matter of personal disposition, but of a philosophy, a kind of philosophy about how to do philosophy, that he first sort of sketches in the introduction to Anarchy State in Utopia and then perhaps more elaborately in the introduction to his next book, Philosophical Explanations, which deals with what he calls non-coercive philosophy. And his idea there is that instead of trying to construct these very imposing systemic architectures of skyscrapers built on solid foundations and then building a kind of soup-to-nuts picture of the world from the ground up, philosophers should arrange and explore different areas and different ideas and not necessarily be too concerned on forcing you to accept the conclusion. He was interested in seeing what the possibilities were. What would it take for a certain proposition to be true? What would follow if it were true? And if you didn't agree that it was true, that wasn't necessarily the most interesting thing to Nozick. And one way I think it has allowed his work and in particular Anarchy State in Utopia to age well is that it is not a super systemic book in one sense. I mean, there are parts that are certainly extended and very elaborate arguments that do build to a conclusion over many pages of rigorous argument. But there are pieces that sort of stand alone as interesting thought experiments or arguments whether or not you agree with anything else he says. So one of his famous examples is the experience machine, which sort of shows up in a weird form in the movie The Matrix. This idea of a kind of perfect simulation that would give you precisely the experiences in life that you want. And he's using this in the book in a way as part of an argument about rights and utilitarianism and about what is fundamentally important to people. But you don't sort of have to even be interested in his questions about the state arising from Anarchy to find that an interesting and useful example to apply to other issues. And so I think one of the reasons it's relevant is it is not one of these structures where if you pull out one piece, the entire thing topples the interest and relevance of particular arguments Nozick makes don't depend on everything else that came before being completely unassailable. And he certainly I think would be the first to admit that in many cases he's sort of sketching an argument saying I'm not sure this is actually a rock solid. I've proven whatever conclusion I'm arguing to. But let's see what this sketch gets us and move on to other ideas. So do we think that the relevance, for example, of the experience machine compared to the foundations that he starts building for the state or the minimal state that he advocates, there's a connection between those two at all from the beginning of Anarchy State in Utopia and the foundation that he starts to build? So we should step back I think because we have to assume that not everyone who's listening here has actually read Anarchy State in Utopia. Right, so let's actually begin with one of those basic ideas that perhaps most of his argument would fall apart without but is also something that many have accused him of being a little bit sketchy on which is the notion of rights. He starts the book by saying that humans have rights and builds everything else upon this very strong conception. But what is his view of rights and where does he get it from? How does he argue that we have these things? So I actually think it's important to recognize that at least in the first part of that book, right, that the title is sort of a map to the book. You can basically just split in fact into three main sections, one basically dealing with Anarchy, the second with the state. This is sort of the response to John Rawls and dealing with questions of distributive justice. And then the final on Utopia, the idea of libertarianism as a framework for Utopias. And so most of the discussion of rights comes in that first section, Anarchy, and the mission sort of of this first third of the book is really to rebut the Anarchist. It is a response to sort of Rothbardian, libertarian Anarchists who believe that if you accept a strong view of individual rights, self-ownership, and property rights, that sort of obviously follows that a state is illegitimate. And I actually do think it's important that he starts here. Because I think in philosophy, starting points are tremendously important. I think you see a kind of pattern that if you start with the assumption that the world is full of states, that's what we have. And what should the state look like? You are likely or more disposed to end up, I think, with stronger statist conclusions than if you start from the question, how can it be that a state is justified at all? Which might not even rely on a super strong notion of individual rights. It might just rely on the idea that it seems weird that some subset of the population, even if sort of majority approved, would be able to make decisions that would force other people to do things. And that they would be sort of obliged to comply with and not resist if they can. So the development of the theory of rights there is, I think, as he would acknowledge, a little bit sketchy, is not a fully worked out theory of rights. In part because the point of that part of the book is to say, if you assume these very strong rights, could it be that a state is justified anyway? Despite these extremely strong rights, which you might think would make a state impossible if they were scrupulously respected, still a state could justly emerge. And so I think that explains to some extent why you don't have a very fully fleshed out theory there. To the extent you do, though, he points to the work of Emmanuel Kant, who was a great liberal philosopher, certainly not a libertarian. But the core idea there is one of Kant's three sort of famous formulations of his categorical imperative. Probably the best known formulation is the formulation of universal law, that you should not act except on a maxim that you could will as a universal law. And there's lots of famous problems with that formulation. If the maxim is, well, kill people when it would benefit you, then it's pretty easy why that gives you moral rules, everyone thinks you're right. But it's not clear exactly what the level of universalization should be. So become a doctor. Well, if not, if everyone were a doctor, we'd all starve because there'd be no farmers. That doesn't seem right. So there's questions about how to formulate that maxim. But one of three other famous formulations of the categorical imperative, which Kant claimed were all equivalent, there's a huge sort of secondary literature on how and whether that's really true, was the formulation against treating others as means. The Kingdom of Ends, well, it's a separate formulation that acts as a member of the Kingdom of Ends, but that you should treat humanity, that's right, it's the formula of humanity. Treat humanity always, never only as a means, but always also as an end in itself. And Kant thought this applied to you too, so you couldn't treat yourself in certain abusive ways. But the proposition here is that respecting other people as equal and autonomous beings means that you must always treat them as ends in themselves and not as a means to some end. And for Nozick, the way you cashed this out was with a strong theory of rights as what he called side constraints. And the contrast he's drawing here is with a lot of consequentialist philosophy. The idea here is that you figure out what's important, very often utility or the satisfaction of people's preferences and there's lots of different variations of how that works out exactly, but that you figure out what's important in the world, what the good is, and you maximize it. So if what's important is pleasure or satisfaction, you maximize or the total amount of pleasure and that might mean that some people have to suffer a little bit if that means other people are even still better off. But your goal here is to maximize the sort of sum total or the average, depending on your particular version of what's good. And Nozick's idea is that this is not the only way to show respect for people that our moral obligations may not involve just sort of maximally promoting whatever is good without regard, and this is a common critique of utilitarianism for the boundaries between people as though harming one person if it benefits ten others is a kind of net benefit. Nozick says, look, you've just harmed one person and benefited ten others. There's not some quantity you've maximized. But Nozick argues that if you take the separateness of persons seriously, this is something also that characterizes and certainly rolls his views, that you end up with a theory of rights as side constraints that creates boundaries around them where the way you avoid treating people as tools or means is that you treat them only in ways that they themselves have agreed to and for this to be meaningful you need to assume that they are owners of themselves and then he goes from this to, and this is sort of the controversial step as far as a lot of people are concerned, rights over the external world, rights over things you've mixed your labor with and acquired. This is sort of a fusion of Kant with John Locke. I also think it's interesting that he, my question before about the experienced machine which we raised, it's interesting that he also thinks the important thing here is it allows you to live your own life. If you're treating people as ends, if you're treating them as means that you let someone do something, use them as a tool to promote someone else's life or someone else's ends. Giving them side constraints of rights means that you have the ability to live a flourishing life and that's what he says about the experienced machine in one of his lines. The most disturbing thing about experienced machines is they're living our lives for us and there's something that goes very ties into the rights conception there. Can I push back, put on like a status hat so to speak and push back a bit on that and just ask, so if we can't use people as ends for others but would this preclude, say, a paternalistic attitude where we're kind of, say, using people as ends for themselves? So we say, look, yes, you have a right to lead your life how you want to but a lot of people have mistaken views, say, about the best way to lead their lives or if they knew today what they're going to know tomorrow they would have made different choices. So someone could someone say, look, there are people out there who are wiser than most or have more knowledge or groups of people who have access to better decision-making procedures and so they're going to violate these Nozickian rights for you, Julian, because we know that you'll thank us for it later. So I think this in a way is maybe best answered by some of the discussion Nozick gets into in that third section, the utopia section, there's a famous sort of passage there where he rattles off a kind of list of different famous people some of whom I get probably in 2013 would not be familiar names anymore but he sort of runs the gammon so I guess if you wanted to do it now you could say, you know, Lady Gaga and Pat Robertson and Johnny Dapp and the Dalai Lama and rattle off as many people as you like. A lot of their Putin with Barack Obama. Right. And I think the argument you would make is that people are sufficiently diverse, first of all, that it's just unlikely to be the case that anyone is wise enough to know what constitutes the good of others but also, and this is getting back to I think the experience which we should probably explain because I don't think we actually have fully, which is the idea that there is one, because the good is so diverse, it's hard to put your finger on, you know, a concept of welfare that is somehow the same quantity that's being maximized across all these different people but also that what people care about is, in some sense, living their lives as opposed to merely having lives that are good. And so to kind of flesh that out, the experience machine is a thought experiment and he sort of starts with a cruder version of the pleasure machine. I suppose we think that what is important sort of morally is promoting pleasure and make sure that everyone has sort of hedonic satisfaction so you can imagine a machine that you should plug into your head that just gives you, you know, a life of just waves of orgasmic pleasure. It's just better than heroin plus sex plus winning the Super Bowl and going on Space Mountain at Disney World. You just feel pleasure your whole life and that's it. And he says, well, that doesn't actually seem very, I mean, that might be fun for an hour but that doesn't seem like a very attractive life even if you could have, you know, sort of an IV drip that would keep you fed for 50 years of this. And so he says, okay, the more sophisticated version is the experience machine where you plug yourself in and it's sort of like the matrix with the crucial difference that the other people in it aren't real. It scans your brain and it just sort of feeds you a lifetime's worth of whatever experience is the machine decides and it's just assuming that they've got very, very good AI or something and so it can actually tell what kind of life would make you happiest. And so it gives you the life of a great novelist or a rock star or a global adventurer or your Sherlock Holmes, whatever it is you think would be most satisfying for you. The machine gives you and it can even maybe make changes over time as it learns from your evolution. And Nozick's point is, you know, some people might plug into this. Certainly if you had a really miserable life and you were, you know, very sick or otherwise having a bad time, it might make sense for you to plug into this. It might be better than a very bad existence. But a lot of people wouldn't. And we think about why a lot of people wouldn't and they think, well, first of all, people don't just want to have pleasurable experiences. They want to do things. It's not just that I want to have the experience of feeling like I am a great writer and the experience of being invited on the talk show and people, you know, saying nice things about my books. I actually want to do it. And I want those reactions in some sense to be authentic. I want to have a satisfying romantic life and, you know, a spouse who loves me, let's say. But what I actually want is for that to be the case. I don't want there to be a kind of experience of a simulation saying the words I love you. I actually want to be engaged in a real relationship with another human being. And so the point of this in some sense is, well, as dual, one that, in general, what matters is not just how things feel to us. You know, from the inside on the experience machine, it might be subjectively indistinguishable, the difference between being a great writer and having the experience of being a great writer or a claimed as a great writer. But one, we actually want to live our lives and make choices and have things be the result of what we really have done in the world. And so as a result, in some sense, if that is something we care about, because one of the reasons utilitarianism and various consequentialist theories like that are tempting is, well, look, the satisfaction of our preferences or pleasure or whatever are things everyone really cares about. But if it turns out that lots of people, and we don't think this is irrational, would not choose the sort of ideal satisfaction of all their subjective experiential preferences, would avoid that in order to have a real existence, live their own lives, shape their own lives, then in some sense this is something that cannot be done for people. It's something you cannot give them. And so in a way it makes a system of boundaries that permit people to shape and steer their own lives in a way more important morally. So it just shifts the weight of that in the kind of hierarchy of moral values so that you have to factor that in as opposed to just, well, how satisfied do people subjectively feel? Couldn't say like a conservative who's opposed to drug use. Push back on that by saying, yeah, that sounds great in the abstract and it would be wonderful if everyone's lives were self-guided and they fulfilled them how they see fit. But we're talking about actual people here who have actual weaknesses of the will and all these other issues. And so say there's this really awful drug that people tend to get into when they're young and they're not making good decisions when they're at that age and you take it, you get a little bit of pleasure, but then it destroys your life. To say, well, but people should be self-directed, could that be placing this ideal world over the enormous destruction such things could do? So are there limits to these rights-aside constraints sorts of arguments based in self-directedness where we say, look, but this sort of behavior is so destructive and so few people when we pull them after they've done it say, yeah, I'm glad I did that. So, of course, Nozick doesn't really talk very much about children, libertarians who criticize for not thinking very much in their theory-building about children except perhaps as an afterthought and perhaps as a well-taken point. So to the extent that you're talking about people making choices literally as minors, I don't think, as most libertarians would say, well, you have sort of the full complement of adult rights. But adults make bad decisions, too. So we could drop the children part. Right. So, well, so then again, of course, the question is, is that actually a vision objection? So it may be the case that if people make their own decisions, sometimes those decisions will be bad and sometimes they'll even be worse than the kind of the wisdom of civilization would have guided them toward had someone had the authorities or prevent them. But again, I think probably what Nozick would say here is that to the extent that we respect people as autonomous beings, if the reason that what happens to people matters in a way that's more important or generates different moral rules than what happens to animals. And we tend to think for animals, you might be ethically obligated not to torture them or cause them to suffer needlessly, but basically whatever obligations we have toward animals are basically just about promoting their welfare and not about respecting their autonomy. I think for Nozick, what distinguishes people is that they are fundamentally choice-making beings and that includes accepting the possibility that their choices may go wrong, but that if all that were important were kind of maximizing how well people's lives go in retrospect, then we would not be importantly different from animals. That aspect of autonomy of deciding on your own good would be missing. There are other pragmatic arguments one might make as well, but from the perspective of rights, I think Nozick's counter would just be that that's not the centrally important thing. Not regretting your choices is actually not more important than shaping your life, even if you shape it badly. What's important is that it is your life to shape. Now, that said, of course, people can also choose to join communities where there are strong pressures to conform to whatever people think the best kind of life is. Again, we get to that third section of the book where one of the ideas is that people might choose to live in communities where drugs are not allowed. People in real life do, in fact, sometimes do this. You check into rehab if you have an alcohol problem or at any rate you choose to live in a community where those temptations aren't present. You join a church where there is strong pressure to avoid those temptations. We'll go forward from the theory of rights. I think it's interesting we have first straight paternalism. You can't put this in your body, which is something, as you said, a conservative would say, or even many liberals or leftists. If it's sugar. Yeah, if it's sugar or salt. But we can go forward to rights for private property acquisition, which Julian mentioned, sort of lock in in its sense, and maybe not a perfect philosophical move, but Nozick never really said he made perfect philosophical moves. But after you have property, and now we have a different type of maybe violation, possible violation that could make people's lives better, which would be distributive justice of some sort, the welfare state. What does Nozick say about what we go, how property rights exist, and then how maybe welfare state possible is possible or not, or worthwhile or not? So I think just an interesting thing to note at this point is that, again, from this kind of Kantian basis, Nozick does move through a variant on the kind of classic locking argument for property rights that if you start in the state of nature, people mix their labor with elements of the natural world and thereby come to acquire strong rights over those elements of the external world. A lot of thinkers, probably GA Cohen is the most famous here, have sort of agreed with Nozick up to that point and said, well, if you don't grant that part, you can assume all of the self-ownership stuff and still end up with a highly egalitarian set of rules. So for example, suppose it's not that you can unilaterally appropriate any pieces of the world, but that other people who might also want to make use of that property have a veto. And so in that case, he argues that to avoid the veto, you would get a very egalitarian distribution of that property. But assuming that much, you of course have the obvious problem for any kind of redistributive taxation, which is that for stuff to be redistributed, you need to take it from someone else and if they have strong rights over it, then that isn't going to work. But even actually bracketing that, I think the argument can work because, you know, the point Nozick makes is that most value is not just sort of inherent in natural resources but is kind of continuously created through people's labor and efforts. And so, you know, we probably don't want to say, I think, you know, taxation is theft. That's like a, I'm just going to get quite captures the sort of complexity of actual reallocation in a democratic society. But he does say I think it's, it can be seen sort of through the lens of theft or is morally, in a morally interesting way, tantamount to or related to theft because it involves essentially using people's labor for the benefit of others, forcing their labor to be devoted to ends that are not their own. So again, a way of using people as tools by requiring that their productive efforts go to benefit others chosen by the state. And so I think in some sense you can even bracket the external world, the external resources argument and still get a fair amount of the way by noting the way in which there's something sort of morally unattractive about the idea that the value people are creating through their labor is being, without them having to say in the matter or certainly about what proportion of it there is, is going to be redistributed, being used for ends that they haven't chosen. I think this gets at an issue that shows up in a lot of egalitarian socialist sorts of arguments, which is this lack of appreciation for how much of a connection we feel to the products of our own hands or the value that we create that egalitarians often seem to, they value certain sets of rights very, very highly. So our right to freedom of speech or freedom of conscience, belief, but, and they say because, you know, it's more damaging to us. It's extremely damaging to us to have those things limited, to have our conscience to be said, you have to hold a certain set of beliefs or you can't say these things. But they seem to discount how much of a connection we feel to... I actually think that's wrong. I think that might be a fair sort of argument against mainstream modernist progressive egalitarians. I think it's certainly not true of Marxists, right? I mean, the idea of the alienation of labor is, you know, in a lot of ways at the heart of the Marxist indictment of capitalism, the idea that people are compelled by the capital system to labor, you know, as part of some process that creates, you know, basically widgets for labor for someone else's use in a way that is disconnected from their own lives. So they're going and they're pulling a lever on a conveyor belt for 10 hours a day and then alienated from the products of it in a way that saps a lot of the meaning from work. But is that a distinction that the egalitarian critics of Nozick would recognize? Because, so in that Marxist conception, we are due to these economic structures that are kind of forced upon us by those more powerful than us. We're forced to labor and then we're forced to have the products of that labor taken from us, alienated from us. But if what we're talking about here is something more just like redistribution broadly speaking, then that redistribution would also exist in a economic system where we're each laboring in ways that we want, producing things that are meaningful to us that we don't feel alienated from it, but then a portion of that is taken from us forcibly in order to redistribute. Well, so Stepping Makes It, I think the argument Nozick makes that I think does work across the board here is similar to that, but that most discussions of redistribution take kind of the sum of social wealth as something that just exists to be parceled out. And so, you know, and from that point of view, if some people are, you know, far wealthier than others, that just may be arbitrary and crazy. But the point that of course Hayek also stresses is, you know, wealth isn't just there to be distributed. And then in fact, even the word distribution of wealth is somewhat misleading. It gives the idea, you know, presents wealth as something that kind of drops into the world and then you have a political system that parcels it out according to some formula when in fact wealth is produced, often produced in unpredictable ways, right? And people innovating and creating new things, new forms of wealth that didn't exist before and that to the extent that wealth comes into the world, you know, attached to particular minds and bodies and productive capabilities, you need to sort of pause before you even get to ideas like distribution and say, well, what entitles you to essentially determine how that wealth is going to be distributed? What, you know, what creates that right? And so, you know, I think the counter is of course, well, existing sets of property rights themselves are themselves a kind of distributive mechanism. They are the product of state coercion themselves and so there isn't all that much difference between a kind of explicit distribution and one that arises through the operation of a set of state-enforced property rights and, you know, that's an argument that you can go back and forth on for quite a bit. But I think you've at least progressed somewhere if you're moving the argument to that point and thinking of it in terms of the incentives and productive capabilities that people have as opposed to treating the social distribution of wealth as this kind of arbitrary assignment of manna that exists out there somewhere. Well, that's probably a good segue into probably the most famous example in Anarchy State in Utopia about property and justly acquired or not and possibility of redistribution. The Wilt Chamberlain example, Wilt Chamberlain was a 60s and 70s basketball player for those who don't know, so we could update it to the LeBron James example possibly. It's important because at the time, and this has actually been weirdly misunderstood in a terrible piece that showed up in Slate a couple of years ago, but the reason he chooses Wilt Chamberlain is that at the time, Wilt Chamberlain had just signed a contract for what was at the time the highest salary that has ever been paid to certainly a professional basketball player, maybe a professional athlete, period, and so there was a lot of discussion in the press about whether this was reasonable or fair for basically one person to make so much money just playing basketball, and so his choice of Wilt Chamberlain there was to say, okay, let's take this example that people think is a sort of egregious unfairness or inequality, but the example works as follows, and I should say in advance this is an example whose point I think is often misunderstood, whether or not what I think the correct sort of reading of it is nosy, I'm not totally sure, but I think the interesting point of it is slightly different from what it's often taken to be, but the example works as follows. Let's start assuming your favorite theory of a just distribution of resources. So this is actually not turning on any particular theory of just acquisition of property through mixing labor or anything like that. He's saying whatever you think is fair, people have whatever they mixed their labor with, great. People have whatever distribution makes the worst off people in society best off, great. Totally equal distribution of resources, great. Whatever it is, whatever you think is the correct pattern of distribution of resources, that's what obtains. Everyone has what the best just theory requires. And then he says, now suppose Will Chamberlain and a few other people are agreeing to put on basketball games and everyone volunteer, not everyone, but large numbers of people voluntarily go to see those games and say there's even a bucket where the amount... Well, I think he foregoes his salary, right? He just says, I think in the example, he says I'm going to have a bucket that says money for Wilt. That's all the money I get. Every single thing that goes in there is someone, it's like when Radiohead sold their album for zero. So when you go to see the game, there's a box with Wilt's name on it and you put in a share of the ticket price that's his share. Maybe a few years of games through everyone making, you know, a small portion of their ticket price deposited into the Wilt Chamberlain box, it turns out that Wilt now has more money than anyone. He has vastly more money than anybody else does. And so then the question is, is this unjust? And Nozick's argument is no, because we have at the start a by stipulation, just distribution, whatever you think that means, and we have arrived from there to a just distribution through only people disposing of their just shares according to their own uncoerced choices. You can argue how well this represents all the workings of a modern capitalist economy, but the point there is that if you want to say justice and distribution is fundamentally about the pattern of distribution, what you have to kind of buy for that to work, and as an example tries to illustrate is, well then you have to believe that it is possible to get from a by stipulation totally just distribution of resources to an unjust one purely through people voluntarily disposing of what their just resource shares were, and you sort of have to ask, well if the point of having resources, if the point of having something that is your just share of resources isn't that you then get to use it in the way that you think is best, then it's not clear why you care about what people's share of resources is, and so he says, look there's got to be something wrong with the theory of justice if it says that through this process people just voluntarily disposing of what is by stipulation their just share, then there's got to be something wrong with that. The problem then with pattern theories of justice is that the pattern is upset as soon as people make free choices. Again, there are lots of arguments about why in various ways seemingly free exchanges in the capitalist side may not be as free as they seem. Those are sort of extrinsic to that as a principled matter where within the confines of this thought experiment a pattern theory tells you you have somehow injected injustice from a just starting point purely through voluntary, unforced, just, one assumes, transactions. Do you think that Nozick would have an opinion about whether or not a patterned system of justice if you just freeze the world at time zero and you see that A has five and B has two and C has one and you say, well, that's just unjust. I can just tell by looking at the pattern would he say that you could ever do that by just looking at a pattern or would you have to look at the history? When you say that you look at the history of A having five, B having two and C having one, you saw that C used to have five, but A beat him up and took four from him and now he has five, which would make it unjust. Or you saw that C had five and A transferred something to him or he gave A for the four, so that's how this arose. So could you look at a time slice of a distribution and determine whether or not it's just or unjust? Do you think Nozick would have an opinion about that? I think he would know, in a sense, a progressive friend of mine made the point that in some sense it's well taken. I think this is actually a fair enough point, which is that it is actually the libertarian who needs a patterned theory of justice and this is something I have not perhaps thought as much about as I could. But the point is, look, on Nozick's theory, justice is not a matter of patterns. It's a matter of justice in acquisition. So do people initially acquire property from the state of nature or from an unknown state in a way that is self-just? And then justice in transfer, that is to say, what makes the transfer of resources from one person or group to another fair? You know, it wasn't fraudulent or coerced or meets whatever other conditions you want. And then a principle of justice in rectification, meaning, you know, if someone is stolen or your negligence harmed another, how do you restore the balance when violations of rights occur? And, you know, the point my friend made was, well, look, obviously, history up to date has not observed anything Nozick, even remotely, kind of fits Nozick's idea of these principles. So lots of property is either owned by the state or, you know, directed to people through state redistribution or been stolen. And that this is, right, this has sort of gone on for so long that it's probably kind of incoherent to say, well, how do you remedy it and get, you know, get everything back to, you know, the people who justly would have it in the counterfactual? And so the argument is, well, so actually, it's libertarians, and this is how you think things ought to work, then don't we actually need some theory for how to kind of reset, not just from individual rights violations, but from kind of systemic centuries of illegitimate ways of allocating property. And Nozick himself actually, at one point in the book, sort of acknowledges this. I mean, it's like, I think a footnote or at least a very brief passage where he says, well, of course, right, you know, history doesn't look like the thought experiment I've constructed, so maybe you would actually need some kind of one-time reallocation to get back to a sort of fair starting point. And then from there, you can just have a historical theory. But he doesn't really get very far into what that would look like. Well, I think it's interesting, too, because libertarians, I think this is a very good point that we have to deal with head on. And a lot of the left libertarian sort of group, if you want to call them that, talk about this more than other types of libertarians. I think it was Benjamin Tucker. It was an older philosopher who's featured on the side, I think, talked about, you know, we can't have the railroads, the corporate form, like everything about this has been skewing the world unjustly. We're not at time zero. We're at a pit of injustice, and we have to figure that out from here. There's the term that left libertarians to use is they distinguish free markets from freed markets. And so they prefer to use the term freed markets because what that implies is we still have somewhere to go, that the existing structure of the markets is based upon all of this past injustice and just transfers and aggregation of wealth through course of means and whatever else. Yeah, and I think this is important points. I mean, I often find myself throwing my hands up and saying, what can you do? That's which is one of your first reactions. You know, okay, my ancestors were in northern English attacked by Vikings. I'm going to go to Sweden and ask for a check. What you can do is the difficult problem. There are more direct things. You know, we can give money to the people who are interned at Japanese camps, like as they were actually there, but maybe distant ones, not so much, or at least learn from history better so we don't have so many unjust transfers. I don't know if it syncs libertarianism, but it's something we definitely should be concerned with. So the Will Chamberlain problem, I wanted you to clarify, Julian, what did you think that people, how it's misread? You think there's something that people think it stands for, the Will Chamberlain example, that is not exactly what it stands for? Well, so what some people object is, look, Nozick is just assuming the sort of strong property rights that he thinks he's approving. He assumes that there is nothing unjust when people voluntarily transfer their money to Will Chamberlain and he ends up with a vastly unequal share. He's just assuming that the right to your share means a kind of unlimited right to dispose of it in perpetuity in some way. And I think that sort of misses the point because I think the point of the example is almost in the form of a reductio, which is to say if your theory entails that from a perfectly just by stipulation starting point, you can generate injustice purely by voluntarily disposing of your shares in some way. Then there's something at least intuitively that's very suspect about your theory. If your theory requires that, injustice can be generated through purely consensual use of what people are presumed to have rights over or stipulated to have rights over, there's something odd about that theory. And I think that's a fairly compelling argument. I will stop for a second and say there are probably ways in which we can counter that because I've tried to think about what is actually a better kind of counter-argument to the Will Chamberlain example. And one of them is this, is that there are effects that are emergent. So you might imagine a lot of people who own factories that are emitting pollutants of some kind, but which if you take in the individual factory, there's basically no harm. If it was just that factory, it wouldn't harm anyone. And so you could say, well, each factory kind of taken individually is not doing anything wrong. They're using their own property in a way that doesn't actually harm anyone or violate anyone else's rights. But it might be, I mean, again, let's just forget what you think about current environmental debates. Let's just stipulate for the purposes of thought experiment that if there are a whole lot of factories emitting different chemicals that sort of combine in the air, there are sort of aggregate effects of that that do in fact harm a lot of people. And you could say, well, so this is a harm that eventuates so everyone is doing something that is individually not harmful to others, but is on aggregate harmful to others. And so someone might say, well, the fact that someone ends up with a wildly disproportionate share, you know, has all sorts of other consequences in terms of the disparate power it gives them, and so that is by analogy to the sort of pollution example a way that, yes, sort of people doing things that they're individually entitled to take in an isolation, you can have aggregate results that are not in fact just or that are unjust in some way. But then, so I think that would be an interesting counter and then you'd have to kind of get into the question of whether something like that is plausibly true of inequalities in wealth, but I think that would be a better response. Which would be very of the times because it's sort of the 1% in the aggregate of the problem, right, or the 0.01, the super, super rich in the aggregate are more the problem than any specific rich person. I think it's sort of one of the, you know, emerging critiques of wealth inequality. Well, I've always thought that this was the argument against inequality that libertarians have to take most seriously. It's a better argument against inequality whether or not you on that think it is persuasive, which is you can't totally separate inequality of resources from political inequality that if you allow wealth to be so concentrated that there's a small, you know, some small number of people who have, you know, more than the entire bottom half of the population combined, those people will necessarily sort of dominate politics and exercise that power in ways that harm other people or, you know, subject them or make them subject to their will in various undesirable ways. And that's, you know, I think, you know, an argument that we can respond to in a whole lot of ways. I mean, one argument to make is just that the question then is, you know, where do you concentrate power in a way that will have the ability to undo, you know, right, the concentration of resources and when does it kick in? But in a way, I think that's a better kind of argument because it's at least sort of getting at the right kind of concern, which is the exercise of control and the exercise of power over other people as opposed to inequality in itself, in itself, just, you know, the raw fact of a particular distribution being problematic. And so I think that, in a way, is advancing the ball to a more useful place. That sounds like an episode in of itself. So a lot of these concerns that we've raised or counter-arguments that we've raised are about there's a given problem that people think is there and we're going to rectify it somehow and the way we're going to rectify it typically is state action. So let's use that as an opportunity to move into a discussion explicitly of this state. But first, let me see. So let me just kind of summarize where we've gone and where we are now before we talk about the state. We've had Nozick say individuals have these rights, which function as side constraints. So there are things that you cannot violate. No matter how good the consequences might be, no matter what other reasons you might have, there are always limits on whatever action you might take. And he derives those from, or to some level bases those in this Kantian notion of treating people as ends in themselves, the need for people to be self-guided in their lives. He then moves into one of the offshoots of that is these strong property rights, that we have a right to the product of our own labor and that it's not permissible to take from us that he has these principles of justice in holding acquisition, transfer, and rectification. And so the question then is, these are all very strong limits on permissible actions, yet Nozick is not an anarchist. Much of the book takes the form of an argument against the anarchists, who he seems to be saying, like, look, in the beginning, I'm going to accept your views of rights, but it's not going to take us where you think it's going to take us. So given how strong these rights are and these property rights are, how do we get to a state and what sort of state can we get to from that very strict foundation? So we get to what Nozick calls a night watchman minimal state. And the argument here is actually fairly sophisticated, somewhat technical, involves some sort of game theory at some points. And so it's hard to summarize accurately, but I'll give it a shot, though really you should probably just read the book if you want the fully developed version. So he starts with, I think, an idea that will be familiar to libertarian anarcho-capitalists, which is, in a stateless society, because it's not very efficient for everyone to just sort of enforce their own rights, you would tend to get what he calls protective associations. And by enforce your own rights, what he means is defend yourself. So someone's coming to steal my stuff. I'm going to be the one who... Or your stuff has been stolen or you have been defrauded and you don't want to just go and punish the person who you think has done it. So this is massively inconvenient for those of us who are not Chuck Norris. I think it's interesting. I mean, he does start with the idea, too, that the anarchy is not going to be total chaos. I mean, he basically says, yeah, a lot of things, you know, people will have moral constraints on them. It's not going to be complete chaos. But then you're going to have a problem that, you know, Thar Gore, 7-foot-5 Thar Gore takes your stuff and you're 5-foot-4, you're not going to be able to get it back. So let's have some protective associations. So his idea is that there will be these protective associations which will specialize in enforcing people's rights and that certainly at least for conflicts between their own clients, they will want to have some kind of clear procedures for determining guilt and innocence, determining liability and enforcing appropriately. Everyone will also, one of the things they'll want from their association, he suggests, is to be protected from the unreliable enforcement of other people. So the idea here is, someone says, you defrauded me. You harmed me through negligence. I'm going to, you know, extract compensation for you. You're going to want your association to step in and essentially say, okay, well, wait, you can only, you can only extract retribution from our client if a certain reliable procedure to determine guilt or responsibility is used. And so we will protect our clients until we are satisfied that procedure has been met and that this person does, in fact, oh, such and such. Just to clarify these protective associations, just because this isn't a pretty abstract idea, we're talking something that looks kind of like a combination of a HOA and a... Insurance company. Insurance company and a private security force. Basically, yeah. A kind of private mini-state that's just there to arbitrate disputes and enforce rights. But one that you go and sign up for, like you sign up for cable-layered services. Oh, Aaron, who is your protective agency? Oh, I'm on... And you cut them in one chair, and they give you these services. And so the argument NOSIC develops is, look, what will happen over time is that, because actual conflict between agencies would be extremely costly, right? This isn't just sort of market competition of the kind where, you know, you go out of business if your product is not competed, but if it comes down to it physical combat competition that over time there will be sort of an advantage towards converging on one agency, which is the strongest, the most able to enforce its requirement that its clients will only be punished subject to procedures that the agency itself believes are appropriate. And so one kind of key premise here is that once you outsource rights enforcement to a third party, and even if you don't, frankly, because people have often different judgments in complicated cases about contracts or fraud or, you know, negligence about who exactly is responsible and for how much, even when they know sort of all the facts about their own actions. But certainly when you are outsourcing this to a third party who may not know whether or not you're guilty of assault or theft or whatever it is, that there's a sort of epistemic problem, what procedure is going to be used to determine when it's appropriate for rights to be enforced. Am I within my rights in protecting you against someone else's assault, or am I violating your rights because you do have a right to kind of forcibly extract compensation? You can sort of be reasonably ignorant about that, and so you can be justified in preventing someone from extracting retribution or compensation given that you in good faith have a contract to protect that person and you don't know that they really are guilty. And then also just sort of the fact that there will be a tendency to converge over time because the basically the biggest and strongest agency will reliably be able to prevent enforcement against its clients, according to the procedures that they approve of, and this is a huge marketing point, right? If you're a client to the strongest agency, you will only be subject to that agency's approved procedures for determining guilt or liability. A member of a smaller agency that can't stand up to the bigger agency won't be able to promise that. The bigger agency can say, well, no, we're going to impose the procedure we think is reasonable for determining whether your client owes our client compensation. Well, I think that there's also sort of the nature of the firm that if you're in the same protective agency as the person you're ever going to dispute with, it should be easier to solve within the firm, possibly. And so if there's a networking effect, it's kind of like Facebook, better than Google+, the more people who are on it, the better it gets. So then what do we get after that? We have a conglomeration of them. And so notice this argument is that what will emerge over time is either a kind of geographic monopoly within a given area. The strongest agency will then be the one that basically gets all the customers because you don't want to be the customer of the weaker agency that can't effectively enforce your rights or promise that it will do so. Or you'll get a kind of macro federation that will be you know, tantamount to that, which is to say there will be some kind of umbrella alliance among agencies that are roughly equal in strength to agree on procedures or some kind of super arbitrator that will arbitrate conflicts between them. But this will be basically equivalent to a geographical monopoly on the use of force that is the classic kind of Sinequanon of a state. And... Let me ask about how realistic this is. I mean, granted this is a hypothetical story meant to tell not how states actually emerge, because of course it's not how any state, any existing state actually emerge, but how a state might emerge without violating the rights that you set out in the first part of the book. But if the argument is so we've got me defending my own rights and enforcing my own rights is not realistic or efficient for a whole bunch of reasons from I'm not very big and lots of people could beat me up to I simply don't want to put the time into it to whatever else. So I hire some company that's going to do it for me. Lots of these little companies that are competing but at some point because these companies it's much more efficient to work things out based on a set of procedures than to go to war with each other and so they'll set up overarching organizations that will set the procedures for multiple companies or because if we're talking about having my life defended being with the biggest and best guys is obviously better and so we're going to actually gravitate toward the bigger protection agencies are going to get bigger and so we'll get to this one. Why doesn't this I mean wouldn't those sorts of same arguments about efficiency and all of that apply to states? Like why states go to war with each other real states go to war with each other all the time and obviously war is very inefficient and it would be much more efficient to work things out through all these procedures but they don't do it. So to the extent that this is supposed to have any kind of justificatory force part of what Nozick is trying to do here is give the best realistic background assumptions so I mean sometimes you can't just assume that everyone always perfectly respects everyone's rights and there are no you know there are no real conflicts or that's so unrealistic as to be not very useful Plus we wouldn't need any of this story about protection agencies in the first place but but it also has to be a pretty good sort of scenario in essence to have justificatory force right you can get all sorts of outcomes if you sort of just assume you know I guess people are rapacious and terrible but that wouldn't be a justification it would just sort of be like well if everyone acts atrociously you would get this bad result this is only sort of an interesting justification if we're kind of assuming the best realistic preconditions so people basically accept this theory of rights of strong self-ownership and strong property rights most people most of the time make a good faith effort to abide by them although some people don't and other people sometimes you know as often happens harm others by accident or not realizing it or you know sell them a shoddy product and there's a question of who's liable and so you know you do note though that you know the wars between states tend to happen at boundaries you know between states that is to say that and that you do find actually a in the real world geographic kind of monopolies of force as a practical matter and the question is just well but you know often those are achieved through manifestly unjust means the point of this is to sort of say look even under the best realistic conditions you would get a state and a lot of people sort of in response to this argument say well that's all well and good but of course we know real states didn't arise this way so why would this justify any real states and there's sometimes a little fuzzy on exactly how he thinks that step works but I think the to reconstruct it sort of charitably the way it works is if you know the anarchist argument is well we should abolish states and return to anarchy if you can make a pretty compelling argument the best case scenario from anarchy is that after a lot of conflict you end up back in a state even under these sort of if not ideal optimal realistic conditions then that's a pretty good argument for sort of accepting the state as such and then just trying to make sure that it is no more expansive than the state you would have if people were in good conscious trying to obey the sort of libertarian rules and sets of rights. Okay, but so knows it so far we haven't gotten to a state yet right we've gotten to we've started anarchy and then these protection agencies a whole bunch of competing protection agencies started up and then through this system of just competition and consumer choice incentives lead us to if not only one protection agency left there's at least one really dominant one and a handful of smaller ones on the periphery but this isn't a state in the sense yet that so far everything is still voluntary and what sets the state apart is that the state can compel us to follow its rules and that it can tax us to pay for its services and we're not we're not quite there yet so how do we get from this still voluntary system to something that actually looks like a state right and so that the final move there is the idea that the dominant protection agency will sort of reasonably want to prohibit even independence people who are trying to enforce their own rights from doing so so that if you're not a client of the state or the dominant protection agency or any other protection agency and you just want to sort of take your own initiative to extract compensation from people you believe have wronged you that the DPA dominant protection agency will sort of stop you from doing so and say no no no only our procedures can be used to determine the guilt of our clients you can't self-help enforce against them and there's this argument here is so there's again that epistemic problem which is to say if in fact your client is guilty and the person seeking to enforce their rights you know really is entitled to the compensation they're demanding then it is sort of wrong to prevent them from taking their compensation and so you should you know you shouldn't do so on the other hand kind of from a subjective perspective given the limits of your knowledge you are doing sort of what given what you know you are entitled and obligated to do and so the move to the state is in a sense a way of compensating the independence for preventing their self-help as to say the state is sort of saying okay we're going to only allow the enforcement of rights under the procedures we've approved acknowledging that this will prevent some people from enforcing their own rights even in cases where they're absolutely entitled to because we need to be sure we don't know who those people are in advance and so the idea here is well that's given the sort of uncertainty about whose rights have been violated who is guilty or liable who is owed compensation they're acting reasonably in doing this and indeed everyone will want their protective agency to do just that just to say ensure that only its procedures can be used to enforce rights but on the other hand this does mean that some people's rights will be violated and so they need to be compensated for what they've lost they've lost the ability to self-help enforce their rights even when you know they would be totally justified in doing so and so the compensation is the state sort of protects everyone within its geographical boundaries or within the dumb protection agency protects everyone over whom it is sort of asserting this authority to approve the procedures used for rights enforcement and so you end up with an organization that is without any really invalid steps protecting everyone within its domain it's sort of the invisible hand of the state it's like the spontaneous order of the state it's not consent I mean everything is consensual there but it's not a social contract area viewpoint or anything of that sort sure but spoiler alert most anarchists don't buy this argument and I think there are problems with it and I confess like there are parts of it that feel deeply dissatisfying to me and I think the crux of it is that compensation issue so let's say that we all own houses and we all have lawns and we like mowing we all mow our lawns right and then I start a service to mow lawns and Julian and I sign up for it it's great and we're the dominant mowing service but Trevor still likes mowing his lawn and he's not his own lawn and he's not harming anyone by doing it and I our lawn mowing service shows up and we say look we're going to charge you we'll charge you $10 to mow your lawn for you and Trevor says I don't want to do that I want to mow my own lawn or I want to start my own service over here to mow the lawn and we say no no no we're going to compel you we're going to use force necessary to take your $10 and Trevor says well now I've been hurt I'm out $10 how are you going to compensate me and we say well we're going to compensate you by mowing your lawn like that lawn mowing was worth 10 bucks and so your compensation is you've gotten your lawn mowed which is precisely the thing Trevor didn't want in the first place yeah well I think that's an interesting point for justification of like political authority and whether or not this compensation is justifies the force or compensates for the force but I think it doesn't really apply totally to Nozick example because it has the possibility the very important element of the independence in this the possibility that they may run up against and accidentally do violence to one of the clients which is I might not accidentally mow someone else's lawn I don't think but like in a world where there's only a few independence left after the Dominant Protection Agency exists they're still living in this world and you know may hit someone with their car who's a client of the Dominant Protection Agency drop something out a window it's that sort of integratedness that I think makes them over. But that would only seem to get us to if the independent has this sort of negative interaction at some point with a member of this Dominant Protection Agency then the Protection Agency can exercise authority over that person but that's not how states work you're not like the state doesn't totally leave you alone unless you do something you're not supposed to do the state in this case the Protection Agency can take your money upfront in order to pay for your rights protection Yeah, it's funny because we're actually talking about something abstract but a lot of these issues have not been abstract like the idea of self-help in the history of this actual states not in Nozick's thought experiment the banning self-help from the state like in the Anglo-American system the state doesn't like you to enforce your own rights and it's not because it's not because you may not have a good claim to the only one left is self-defense which is I think funny for Julian's point about the epistemic sureness of it self-defense is the last place where you have to be you have a reasonable fear of imminent bodily harm so you know immediately like that guy isn't a hurt me I have that's the last self-help right you have so the state has taken away self-help rights in order in order even for people who don't agree with the state so it's just a matter of course even before taxation right that happened you know in the 1300s before taxation was really a thing on the level we have it today and I think another another problem I see with this argument is especially as an argument against anarchism as opposed to just an argument for what a good state would do and look like is is that a state demands an exclusivity on authority so within a given area no one else is allowed to compete but the whole I mean that one of the base arguments that the anarchists make is that the benefit of one of the benefits of anarchism is that this competition say between any sort of firms but between protection agencies in this case will lead to better services that if a given protection agency starts behaving unjustly or privileging certain people or charging huge rates they can up and go to a different protection agency and so it's a check but once we've got a dominant protection agency what's to stop it from behaving in all these bad ways jacking up its rates to an enormous amount and using force to compel them or deciding that if you know certain people it likes it's going to just not ever punish them for whatever they do and everyone else is prohibited from starting up competing agencies so I will say that the my recollection is that knows it does assume that sort of the holdout independence have to be compensated for being kind of prohibited from self-enforcing but and get kind of the basic minimum protection package but are not necessarily taxed if I'm remembering correctly the the point I'd make specifically about that though is I mean I think this is sort of implicit in a lot of news arguments which is the arguments for the efficiency of competition in general assume the restrictions of normal market rules on competition and you can't really generalize that to competition for the coercive enforcement of those rules itself that in essence competition is not necessarily efficient when it takes the form of people with truncheons and guns fighting each other I think that the point about taxation you said is really interesting because I come from the law side here so all these things we talked about when you have jurisdiction over them and if the people who are non-compliant are actually exempt from taxation in Nozick's book then you have something interesting like a tariff system that's how the United States was largely funded before income tax that's a tax on you being in a place we have authority over you to take because you're here tariff you had to actually do something to get taxed you could avoid it but the government was supported almost entirely by tariffs and so there was no exaction for general if you weren't trading goods there was no general exaction to the state doesn't it also raise a free rider problem if they can't compel taxation because presumably defending people's rights and then having some sort of system for arbitrary disputes and all of that costs money or uses resources and if I know I'm going to get rights protection simply by saying I'm an independent and I don't have to pay for it now because I'm going to be compensated by having it forced upon me by having it given to me then why wouldn't everyone just declare themselves as independents and now there's no more resources to work with that's the obvious problem my recollection is that certainly NOSIC does make an argument against that being a justification for taxation and he says basically I mean actually he also uses lawn mowing as the as the example if I'm recalling correctly he says you know look at the fact that you've gone around and provided everyone with a service like lawn mowing they haven't asked for doesn't that entitle you to you know insist that they chip in their their share after the fact does he actually address that problem if we write a problem I don't think he actually hits that he's sort of assuming that he's sort of moving kind of from I guess part of the problem here is he's moving from a kind of fully voluntary competitive protective association scenario where you are not going to get protection if you're not chipping in to a scenario where indeed you have a very strong incentive as rights enforcement comes to be dominated by protective associations you know the vast majority of people he's assuming will indeed want to pay one of these decisions because you'll be in a much worse off position if you are not protected by an association and better still you want to be protected by the largest and strongest association and so then he moves from there from the single dominant association to the argument for compensating independence and I don't recall that he actually then says you know has something to say but well once that's in place why would everyone keep paying in if you can still get the same services without it he may but I don't remember that certainly he doesn't he doesn't do it at any length because I would remember that well let's move on then to the last part of the book which is the utopia section so the state that we've developed let's accept for now that his argument works and we've justified this minimal state but the minimal state is limited pretty dramatically over what most states do right now it exists only for rights protection it can stop people from using violence against you or destroying your property or stealing your property and it can get you compensation if they do but that's about it it doesn't get to do much more and a lot of people see that as a a lot of people on the left are progressives or communitarians see that as a really kind of impoverished view of the state it's not a satisfying view of the state because first it doesn't allow for transfers and welfare programs it doesn't allow for the sorts of regulations that many feel are necessary beneficial paternalism right and and it also in this sense that a lot of especially communitarians have that the state is simply the community kind of working together by radically limiting the reach of the state it's limiting this community which is very important for people so Nozick's last section is kind of a pushback against that general attitude that he wants to say look this minimal state yes it's extraordinarily minimal by standards of typical states today but he says it's a it's actually a really inspiring vision and he does this through this argument that it's a it's a framework for utopia and the argument there of course is that people have very different ideal worlds or at least the best best possible worlds or best possible communities and so we shouldn't think of the sort of libertarian political solution as being the sort of end of our efforts to craft a good society but as establishing a kind of framework within which different communities can form and and establish rules or that go beyond what a libertarian state does of course both in terms of the rules they impose on people and you think of various sort of associations of homeowner associations where you can only paint your house certain colors or mutual aid communities or hippie communes or utopian communes or you know certainly the kind of mutual aid society as we saw in the late 19th and early 20th centuries you might become a member of an organization that agrees to you know help you if you become employed or injured in some way or you might do that either kind of at an arms length kind of purely commercial insurance transaction you might do it through a community organization that is you know thicker in some sense and more participatory but that you would allow a kind of thousand flowers to bloom you would allow many different kinds of local rules local aid programs to flourish and let people decide in a sense which of these communities they found most attractive so that you would have in many ways or at least in many places all the things communitarians and others think are important and necessary for the state to do you just wouldn't have them done through the state you would have them done through people voluntarily coming together to do them it's sort of interesting it's a very big philosophical description of a lot of stuff that people hear Kato talk about like whether it's discussing free market education and saying let a thousand flowers bloom let's see the possibilities of schools or possibilities of free market healthcare it's still the possibilities of freedom for a well-lived life or a more fulfilling life or one more interact with your community without an oppressive one-size-fits-all structure coming down it's something that I think we don't talk about enough in libertarianism the hopefulness and the human empowering element of it right I find it to be a really humane vision for the world and I do find it as he said I think it's extremely inspiring because it gets us back to where we started which was these rights being based in self-directedness and respecting people as people as individuals that there's a sense libertarians are often criticized for that sort of argument because it's taken as kind of a cold and atomistic individualist you know every man for himself that what it means to say that all of us have these rights and we can't those can't be violated is that all of us should kind of only look out for number one and not worry about the needs of others and not participate in community relationships but in fact this what this does is this gives us this kind of baseline protection that all of us need in order to define our lives live the lives that are deeply meaningful to us to live them with other people who agree with us because recognize how important that is but also to recognize how wildly diverse humanity is how vast the number of interests we have and the kinds of lives we want to live and to really respect that and allow us to all live the kinds of lives we want in peace with each other diversity is bred by certain minimal constraints I would say you know if we all voted on a national radio station there's a lot of people I wouldn't want to live next to but thankfully we have you know minimal minimal of that so I can totally live in concert and go to concerts with many different types of music fans who aren't trying to impose their preferences on you so I think the last question that we need to address before we finish up is whether or not Nozick rejected libertarianism this is something that gets often repeated by many people when a libertarian hit piece is written or maybe specifically Nozick hit piece is written one of my friends was told this recently in his philosophy class so his philosophy professor said well you know Nozick rejected libertarianism which I think is first A funny because it doesn't actually matter because it's not an argument it's the arguments he makes in anarchy state in utopia but Julian you're probably the best person to ask on this what did he reject libertarianism? So I actually interviewed Nozick shortly before his death in 2001 or I interviewed him in 2001 shortly before his death I think he may have actually died in 2002 but right after the publication of his book in variances his final book as it turned out and he had there a section on ethics what he called the core principle of ethics that seemed to me to be very libertarian and spirit and so he affirmed to me that that he in fact still thought of himself as a libertarian and really always had there was an essay I think published in his book the examined life called the zigzag of politics which was widely read and I think actually reasonably read I mean if you read this essay sort of standing alone it does sort of sound like a repudiation of his former libertarian views which he describes as seriously inadequate and what he said to me at the time was well no I thought I was just sort of saying I was less hardcore of a libertarian he was arguing that it might be legitimate in various ways to have compulsory public support for different kinds of programs to achieve various good things these are seem to say well maybe these don't work very well but still if the community sort of has decided that it's going to express its its values in this way you kind of are obliged to go along and the zigzag of politics will decide which things work and which don't over time so it sounds not like a rejection of libertarian ideas I think the kind of way to interpret it consistent with what Nozick is saying is maybe in a sort of a principle of of humility and this is perhaps a kind of a subtle distinction to make but that if you know you live in a polity with people with different ideas about what the state is justified in doing that the appropriate approach is let's say not the external one which just says well this is just theft and slavery and coercion and you know totally indistinguishable from just a marauding gang taking things from you and the whole thing should be regarded as totally legitimate a move to sort of an internal perspective where you can say well look I still think that the libertarian ruleset or policies are the best ones but that this means that you have one of many conceptions of how the state ought to operate that are in competition that will bag back and forth and that you should the correct approach is to sort of treat this as a problem from the inside of convincing other people of your of your views and you know while they hold theirs as opposed to viewing the whole thing as a kind of criminal charade and I you know I think that's actually probably you know at some sense whether you think it's philosophically correct or not probably not bad advice I'd like to thank Julian for joining us on free thoughts we welcome your questions and comments you can find me on twitter at arosp and you can find me on twitter at tcburris b-u-r-r-u-s and I am normative n-o-r-m-a-t-i-v-e and to learn more about Robert Nozick and other libertarian topics you can find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org