Abstract
Robert Nozick initiated one of the most inspired and inspiring discussions in political philosophy with his 1974 response in Anarchy, State, and Utopia to John Rawls’s 1971 account of distributive justice in A Theory of Justice. These two works have informed an enormous amount of subsequent, especially liberal, discussions of economic justice, where Nozick’s work typically functions as a resource for those defending more rightwing (libertarian) positions, whereas Rawls’s has been used to defend leftwing stances. Common to these discussions, as found in politics generally (where similar kinds of arguments frequently are used to defend right and the leftwing policies and conclusions) is that they end in rather stubborn stalemates: the right defends minimal states while the left defends more extensive states. Interesting, too, is that both Nozick and Rawls take themselves to be consistent with, inspired by, and furthering Kant’s freedom project in the development of their own Kantian theories of justice. In this chapter, I start by outlining the structures of these debates with an emphasis on the original disagreements between Nozick and Rawls. I then show how neither theory actually employed Kant’s own theory of justice, but rather drew on or out (presumed) implications of his ethical theory. In the final sections, I argue that if Nozick and Rawls had instead used Kant’s theory of justice and not his ethics, not only would their individual theories have been stronger, but also they could have found ways of overcoming the unproductive stalemates that characterize their own as well as subsequent related discussions of economic justice as we currently find them in scholarly and contemporary political debates.
Thanks to Andrea Faggion and the audience at the Department of Philosophy at the State University of Londrina for useful feedback on an earlier version of this chapter. Thanks also to Kirstin Wilcox for invaluable help with the presentation of the ideas below.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Basic Books Inc., 1974.
- 2.
All references to this work in this chapter will be to the 1999, revised edition of A Theory of Justice, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
- 3.
Rawls’s difference principle states that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all” (TJ: 53). The relevant social and economic inequalities, in turn, are identified by utilizing a standard consisting of a set of “primary social goods,” that is, “rights, liberties, and opportunities, and income and wealth” that are useful “whatever a person’s rational plan of life” (TJ: 54, cf. 79–81). The difference principle is the second principle of justice as fairness; the first one states that “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others” (TJ: 53.). Rawls clarifies that the first principle concerns traditional liberties like “political liberty (the right to vote and to hold public office) and freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person… the right to hold personal property and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law” and that all citizens are to be equal in regard to this principle (ibid.). Nozick takes no issue with this principle, but only with the second principle, and especially how Rawls thinks that it can apply “… to the distribution of income and wealth and to the design of organizations that make use of differences in authority and responsibility” (TJ: 53).
- 4.
If this is true, then Rawls is also mistaken in his basic claim that the two principles of justice as fairness should, and so can “be arranged in a serial order with the first principle prior to the second… [so that] infringements of the basic equal liberties protected by the first principle cannot be justified, or compensated for, by greater social and economic advantages” (TJ: 54).
- 5.
For my purposes here, all that’s needed is this extremely brief outline of Nozick’s account. His argument is found in Ch. 7 “Distributive Justice,” Section 1 of ASU, pp. 149–182. I discuss this and other prominent, contemporary libertarian revisions of this principle of private property acquisition in my “The Lockean‘Enough-and-as-Good’ Proviso—an Internal Critique.”Journal of Moral Philosophy 9 (2012b), pp. 410–422.
- 6.
Again, given the aims in this chapter, I’m providing an abbreviated version of Nozick’s account of the establishment of the state, which can be found in Chapters 2 through 6 in ASU, pp. 10–146. I discuss Nozick’s account of the establishment of the state (including much relevant secondary literature) in “Nozick’s Reply to the Anarchist: What He Said and What He Should Have Said about Procedural Rights,” Law and Philosophy, Volume 28, Issue 6 (2009), pp. 585–616.
- 7.
See, for example, Mary Gregor: Laws of Freedom, Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1963, pp. 36f; Otfried Höffe: Immanuel Kant, transl. by M. Farrier, SUNY Press: Albany, pp. 184ff); Jeffrie G. Murphy: Kant. The Philosophy of Right, Mercer University Press: Macon, pp. 144ff; Onora O’Neill: Bounds of Justice, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England, p. 65; John Rawls: “Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy”, in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, ed. E. Förster, Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1989, pp. 81–95, Ch. 40 “The Kantian Interpretation of Justice as Fairness,” in A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999, pp. 221–227, and Lectures in the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. B. Herman, 2000, pp. 217–234; Allen D. Rosen: Kant’s Theory of Justice, Cornell University Press: New York, p. 197, Howard L. Williams: Kant’s Political Philosophy, St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1983, pp. 196 ff. For a recent defense of this interpretation of Kant on economic justice, see Pauline Kleingeld’s Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship, Oxford University Press: Cambridge, 2013.
- 8.
All references to Kant’s works in this article are given by means of the Prussian Academy Pagination (PAP) as well as an abbreviation. This particular reference is to “Notes on the Lectures of Mr. Kant on the Metaphysics of Morals,” PAP 27: 479–732, in Lectures on Ethics, ed. P. Heath and J. B. Schneewind, Cambridge University Press: New York, 2001, pp. 249–452. In addition, I have used Mary Gregor’s translations of The Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1996, and of his other texts in moral philosophy printed in Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press: New York, 2006.The other abbreviations are: MM for The Metaphysics of Morals, CPrR for Critique of Practical Reason, TP for “On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice.”
- 9.
See especially Ch. 7 “Distributive Justice” in ASU, pp. 149–232. Similar arguments are found in Locke’s writings as well as in contemporary, so-called rightwing libertarian economic writings such as those of F. A. Hayek, Jan Narveson, Erick Mack, and Fernando R. Tesón—entailing that this argument, if successful, should be of interest also to them since there is nothing in the argument that their basic commitment to understanding justice in terms of freedom rules out.
- 10.
See, for example, pp. 153 and 164n7 in Wolfgang Kersting’s “Kant’s Concept of the State,” in Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. H. L. Williams, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1992, pp. 143–166.
- 11.
See, for example, Rosen 1996: 173–208 and O’Neill: 1989, ch. 10 and 12; 1998: ch. 5–7; and 2000.
- 12.
- 13.
Paul Guyer: Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness, Cambridge University Press: New York, 2000.
- 14.
Hannah Arendt: Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. by R. Beiner, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1992.
- 15.
Alexander Kaufman: Welfare in the Kantian State, Oxford University Press: New York, 1999.
- 16.
See, again, especially ch. 7: “Distributive Justice,” in ASU.
- 17.
The earliest interpretation of Kant’s poverty arguments that is closer to the one I defend here is probably the one proposed by Sarah Williams Holtman in “Kantian Justice and Poverty Relief,” in Kant-Studien, 95: 86–106. The interpretation of Kant on economic justice that is the closest to the one I’m sketching here is the one defended by Arthur Ripstein in his Freedom and Force—Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009. I defend this type of position in more detail (including against alternative readings) in my papers “Kant and Dependency Relations: Kant on the State’s Right to Redistribute Resources to Protect the Rights of Dependents” (Dialogue, XLV, 2006: 257–284) and “Kant’s Non-Absolutist Conception of Political Legitimacy: How Public Right ‘Concludes’ Private Right in ‘The Doctrine of Right’” (Kant-Studien, Heft 3/2010, pp. 331–351) and I defend it against recent objections raised by Pauline Kleingeld in her Kant and Cosmopolitanism in “Patriotism, Poverty, and Global Justice—A Kantian Engagement with Pauline Kleingeld’s Kant and Cosmopolitanism,” Kantian Review, Vol. 10: 2, pp. 251–266, 2014.
- 18.
Hence, public reason so understood refers, as Rawls suggests, both to how “government officials and candidates for public office” must reason in order to specify the “political relation” between citizens properly as well as to how citizens engage each other in public debates of legal-political issues. See John Rawls: “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in The Law of Peoples, Harvard University Press: Cambridge (2003), pp. 132f.
- 19.
For Kant, the reason why there are only three such categories of things is that they are made possible by the three relational categories of the understanding, namely substance (private property), causality (contract) and community (status relations) (6: 247).
- 20.
I provide my interpretation of Kant’s account of private right in “Kant’s Non-Voluntarist Conception of Political Obligations: Why Justice is Impossible in the State of Nature,” in Kantian Review, vol. 13–2, 2008, pp.1–45. Other interpretations that are similar (in that they also defend ideal reasons for the establishment of the state), though not identical (since various steps in the arguments are described in different ways) in their way of approaching Kant’s Doctrine or Right include Julius Ebbinghaus: “The Law of Humanity and the Limits of State Power.” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 10: 14–22, 1953; Katrin Flikshuh: “Reason, Right, and Revolution: Kant and Locke,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 36:1, s. 375–404, 2008; Wolfgang Kersting: WohlgeordneteFreiheit. Immanuel KantsRechts- und Staatsphilosophie, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984 /Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2nd ed. 1993; Arthur Ripstein: Force and Freedom; Thomas Pogge: “Kant’s Theory of Justice.” Kant-Studien 79, 1988, s. 407–433; Jeremy Waldron: “Kant’s Theory of the State,” in Kleingeld, P. Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, New York: Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 179–200; Ernest Weinrib: The Idea of Private Law, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995.
- 21.
The German word used here is “rechtliebend” and Mary Gregor has translated this as “law abiding,” which I find misleading since Kant does not think that it’s possible to be law abiding in the state of nature (it’s only possible to love, or be committed to right in this condition). Hence, I use the word “right-loving” instead of “law-abiding” here.
- 22.
Although Kant considers justice impossible in the state of nature, this does not mean that there is always injustice in this condition. After all, if no coercion is used—if everyone discusses everything peacefully and no one is enforcing their rights against others as they happen never to disagree about anything)—then there is no injustice (no wrongful use of coercion). Yet this is still a condition devoid of justice, since rightful interaction remains impossible in it (6: 312). I engage this issue in “Kant’s Non-Voluntarist Conception of Political Obligations.”
- 23.
This is why Kant argues that only a will “that is united a priori (i.e., only through the union of the choice of all who can come into practical relations with one another) and that commands absolutely” can justify external acquisitions because “a unilateral will (and a bilateral but still particular will is also unilateral) cannot put everyone under an obligation that is in itself contingent; this requires a will that is omnilateral, that is united not contingently but a priori and therefore necessarily, and because of this is the only will that is lawgiving. For only in accordance with this principle of the will is it possible for the free choice of each to accord with the freedom of all, and therefore possible for there to be any right, and so too possible for any external object to be mine or yours.” (MM 6: 263)
- 24.
Some liberal accounts also seem to assume that what the state enforces is individuals’ moral rights against one another, such as Kant’s perfect, ethical duties (duties of virtue). As we have seen above, this is not Kant’s position. For reasons of space, I cannot elaborate further on this issue here. For an overview of some of these issues, see my “Immanuel Kant–Justice as Freedom.”
- 25.
Rawls also seems to share this basic assumption with Kant; this especially prominent in Rawls’ later writings (Political Liberalism onwards) where he increasingly emphasizes how the theory is based on the citizens’ two moral capacities and the public character of the state.
- 26.
Kant argues: “In terms of rights, the attributes of a citizen, inseparable from his essence (as a citizen), are: lawful freedom, the attribute of obeying no other law than that to which he has given his consent; civil equality, that of not recognizing among the people any superior with the moral capacity to bind him as a matter of right in a way that he could not in turn bind the other; and third, the attribute of civil independence, of owing his existence and preservation to his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth, not to the choice of another among the people” (6: 314). Naturally, given his emphasis on consent, it might be tempting to believe that here Kant is defending democracy or strong voluntarism (actual consent viewed as a precondition for political obligations). This, however, is not the case. As we saw above, Kant defends an enforceable duty to enter civil society (and so not a strong voluntarist conception of political obligations), and later in the “Doctrine of Right,” Kant explicitly denies that democracy is a necessary condition for state legitimacy (6: 338–341). In fact, Kant maintains that there are three legitimate forms of actual states, namely autocracy, aristocracy and democracy (6: 338). I deal with some of the related interpretive issues in “Kant’s Non-Absolutist Conception of Political Legitimacy: How Public Right ‘Concludes’ Private Right in “The Doctrine of Right” as well as in “Self-Governance in Kant’s Republicanism” (work-in-progress).
- 27.
I’m naturally not engaging this issue of what Kant calls international and cosmopolitan spheres of justice here.
- 28.
Most of these arguments are found in the section called “General Remark. On the Effects with Regard to Rights That Follow from the Nature of the Civil Union,” or the sections marked A through E in the “Doctrine of Right.” (MM 6: 319–338). In addition, I expand on Kant’s comments about how passive citizens must be facing a set of coercive restrictions that permit them to work themselves into active citizenship (MM 6: 314f).
- 29.
I illustrate one way of doing this in “The Lockean ‘Enough-and-as-Good’ Proviso—an Internal Critique.”
- 30.
Ripstein’s chapter “Roads to Freedom” in Force and Freedom explicates this point particularly well.
- 31.
One interpretive complication concerns the fact that what I call public reason here is by Kant divided into “private” and “public” reason in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Here Kant emphasizes that an enlightened public, namely one that governs itself through public reason, is a precondition for right in its full realization. Yet being an enlightened public includes two aspects: One the one hand, it involves everyone being capable of what Kant here calls “private” reasoning, which is the kind of reasoning ability necessary for one to execute the duties of a functioning public office as governed by public rules (8: 37f). On the other hand, it requires the people to govern themselves through public reason as “scholars,” meaning as people capable of engaging in public critique of the actual operations of the fundamental public institutional structure. See Jonathan Peterson’s interpretation of Kant’s “private” and “public” reason distinction in his “Enlightenment and Freedom” by Jonathan Peterson (The Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2008, 46: 223–244)
- 32.
I develop this argument in more detail in my “Self-Governance in Kant’s Republicanism,” (work-in-progress).
- 33.
This concern is mentioned prior to the “General Remarks,” on (6: 314f), in the “Doctrine of Right.”
- 34.
The category of passive citizens therefore corresponds to Kant’s the weaker party in his discussion of “status relations” in private right (6: 276–284).
- 35.
The original German is gender neutral here.
- 36.
I go into more detail in my “Kant and Women” (work-in-progress).
- 37.
It is common to maintain that Kant’s statements about women reveal that he considers women incapable of civil independence in perpetuity. I discuss these issues in my papers “Kant and Dependency Relations” as well as in “Kant and Women” (work-in-progress).
- 38.
A major difference between these two arguments is, I believe, that only the former (that the state does not make it impossible for passive citizens to work themselves into active citizenship) can plausibly be presented as a minimal requirement on the legitimacy of the state. I discuss this issue in “Self-Governance in Kant’s Republicanism.”
- 39.
Kant considers there to be three forms of state, namely autocracy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by nobility) and democracy (rule by the many) (6: 340). I address this issue in Kant interpretation in much more detail in my “Self-Governance in Kant’s Republicanism” (work-in-progress).
- 40.
I deal with this point in more detail in “A Kantian Critique of the Care Tradition: Family Law and Systemic Justice.” Kantian Review (2012a), Vol. 17:2, pp. 327–356.
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Varden, H. (2016). Rawls Vs. Nozick Vs. Kant on Domestic Economic Justice. In: Faggion, A., Pinzani, A., Sanchez Madrid, N. (eds) Kant and Social Policies . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42658-7_5
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