Conservatism - Key thinkers

Question 1

Key Thinker 1) Thomas Hobbes

Answer 1

• Contrasts Locke - humans are ruthlessly selfish, calculating and competitive, and without the restraints of formal authority human relations would be
  about war, envy and hatred leading to a short, nasty and brutish life - they are feckless and need controlling
• Underpinning human nature is cold rationality and leads to warring individuals to create a contract and a formal state - we need authority to stop patterns
  of war, and the dread of conflict lead to formation of governments and authority
• His thinking is inseparable from the English Civil War - the conflict of the crown and parliament, and by nature he hated violence and favoured cautiousness
• Leviathan (1651) - his book illustrating why one should obey governments, even if they are not entirely suitable, to retain stability
• Also stated the social contract theory was dangerous for governments, as it would cause political instability - he discussed how governments arose from
  the state of nature which was not an ideal place where life in the state of nature is nasty, short and brutish without a DROK or rulers
• Inconvenience is from the people, and people should not complain against their governments as they are needed - what we have isn’t the best option, but it is
  a better solution than the alternative of nasty war
• Government by consent and social contract - mankind would eventually realise the state of nature was inimical to self interest
• Leviathan - sceptical view of human nature, considering it to be needy, vulnerable and destructive - prior to the emergence of the state there was no cooperation or voluntary arrangements between individuals and so no natural rights - instead the state of nature was a place of scarce resources where people are governed by self interest
• Natural chaos - absence of formal authority to enforce a moral code, and mankind is without it left in a state of one’s own morals, and this
  clash of perspective on what is unacceptable would lead to uncertainty and war
• Under the contract, a sovereign is given the right to make laws everyone is restrained by and allow order and security, which would take people
  from a state of nature to society where they can be secure and progress
• State has to be autocratic to achieve this - if power is dispersed, conflicts in the state of nature would simply replicate - principal for the creation of order and security is why the state was needed - no state = no civil society, and the state has to be autocratic, forbidding and intimidating

Question 2

Key Thinker 2) Edmund Burke

Answer 2

• Humans cannot create perfect societies and are not guided by reason; chasm between desire and achievement requires custom, habit and experience to guide behaviour
• Humans were fallible but not terrible - they are capable of kindness, altruism and wisdom as long as their actions were routed in Christianity, history and tradition
• Did not agree with Hobbes either on the idea that humans are ruthlessly individualistic - Burke argued human nature was communal and people gain comfort and support
  from ‘little platoons’
• Ally of Adam Smith, the curator of laissez-faire economics
• Opposition to the French Revolution (Reflections on the Revolution in France) - discussed human imperfection, empiricism, organicism, tradition, aristocracy and localism
• Human perfection - man is fallible and tends to fail more than it succeeds - denounced idealistic society the French Revolution represented, claiming it was based on a utopian and unrealistic view of nature
• Change is necessary to conserve but it should happen through fact and experience (empiricism and tradition) not theory and idealism - condemned the French for
  discarding what was known in favour of a society of philosophical abstractions
• Society and government are more like a plant than a machine - both have a dynamism beyond reason and planning- social and political change must therefore be
  cautious and organic - disliked how the French denounced history and tradition
• Scathing of the French Revolution’s stress on equality, asserting that with all organic societies a ruling class is inevitable and desirable; this class does however have a clear obligation to govern in the interests of all - the failure of the French aristocracy to do this lead to the Revolution
• Condemned the new French Republic for its highly centralised structures, praising instead little platoons that would acknowledge, nurture and prune the crooked timber of humanity

Question 3

Key Thinker 3) Michael Oakeshott

Answer 3

• Conservatism is more ‘psychology than ideology’ - instinctive preference for what is known and fear of the uncertain; life without law would not be what Hobbes thought but rather noisy, foolish and flawed, and humans are both fallible & fragile as well as benign and benevolent, when framed by routine, familiarity and religion - humans need a state to be good
• Philosophy of imperfection is not one of pessimism - wished to qualify negative view of human nature, stating humans were fallible not terrible and imperfect but not immoral
• Humans are incapable of perfect societies but able to secure pleasure and improvement through everyday life
• Conservatism is more optimistic than liberalism and socialism as they produced impatience, intolerance and frustration because of their views of society - in contrast, conservatives who reconcile with human imperfection appreciate the pleasures that already exist in life more - prefer the familiar to the unknown, the actual to the possible the convenient to the perfect and the present laughter to utopian bliss
• Dismissed normative politics with simplistic visions that overlook reality - affirmed the merits of an empirical and pragmatic approach to politics and life - ‘art of the possible’, wisdom achieved through experience, trial and error rather than abstract philosophy
• State exists to prevent the bad rather than create the good - best things in life emerge from routine, apolitical activity
• Nautical metaphor - we all sail an endless sea with no destination, and the job of the government is to reflect this by keeping the boat afloat at all costs, using experience
  and stoicism to accept necessary changes of direction and not fixating on ‘ports’ that do not exist
• Criticised for being overly fatalistic and underestimates our own ability to change our circumstances - to the NR, this mentality was lazy and allowed socialism to advance unchallenged after 1945

Question 4

Key Thinker 4) Robert Nozick

Answer 4

• Humans yearn for individual freedom and its capacity for enterprise and innovation
• If the nation state is burdened by nationalised industries and welfare states, it is harder to focus on its true function of order and security
• Growth of government is the gravest threat to individual freedom, and welfare states in Western Europe generate a dependency culture - he is hostile to the state
• Individuals should be left alone in the economic, social and cultural sphere
• Minarchist state - public services outsourced to the private sector; many self-sufficient communities are free to practise their own moral codes and values (little platoons repeat ideas)
• ‘Tax, in the most part, is theft’ - individuals have self-ownership and should be left alone without government intervention
• Society predates the state - however, formal authority is needed to enforce laws, as the preservation of life, liberty and property ‘could not be taken for granted’
• Free market economy - promotes freedom to increase economic growth and a vibrant, prosperous society

Question 5

Key Thinker 5) Ayn Rand

Answer 5

• Humans yearn for individual freedom and its capacity for enterprise and innovation - New Right and traditional conservatives agreed even enterprising individuals were still freedom-loving pack animals who need restraints of authority and rooted communities
• If the nation state is burdened by nationalised industries and welfare states, it is harder to focus on its true function of order and security - when the state becomes flabby, it becomes feeble
• Objectivism - all guided by self-interest and rational self-fulfillment, and so individuals are atomistic; society is a loose collection of independent individuals
• Strongly linked to New Right support of a laissez-faire brand of capitalism and renewal of negative liberty and justified the ‘rolling back of the frontiers to the state’
  through tax cuts and privatisation programmes - a limited state is required for laissez-faire capitalism and free markers
• Liberty is impossible without order and security - only state can provide; ‘The small state is the strong state’

Question 6

Other thinker - von Hayek

Answer 6

• NR conservatives have a more sympathetic view of free market economies such as Reaganomics and Thatcher at the same time attempted to free the UK economy through privatisation
• NR argues that by disengaging completely from the economy the state could focus on its true Hobbesian purpose of order and security
• NR also argues a free market economy is a prosperous economy which will promote popular
  capitalism and destroy socialism, but also funds greater state spending on the police, armed forces and other agencies, order and security vital to the defence of a conservative society

Question 7

The strands of each thinker

Answer 7

Traditional conservatism (old):
- Hobbes and Burke

Traditional conservatism (post fascism):
- Oakeshott

New Right conservatism:
- Rand and Nozick

Question 8

3) Oakeshott - What is the difference between technical and practical/traditional knowledge?

Answer 8

• Denounced rationalism - ‘rationalist never doubts the power of his reason to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action’
• Favoured pragmatism, a flexible approach to reform that looks for practical solutions, intimated by tradition, over perfect ideological approaches
• All knowledge consists of technical knowledge and practical / traditional knowledge
• Technical - knowledge that can be formulated into rules, can be taught and learned e.g. the facts and rules in a recipe book; can be self-taught
• Practical / traditional - cannot be formulated into rules of facts and must be acquired through experience and then imparted onto others, such as the judgement, style and artistry learned by the apprentice; relationship of a teacher and learner - needs to be taught but is not simple black and white facts
• Whilst technical knowledge tells you about the objective nature of something, it cannot impart the experience and judgement that inspired those facts (a cookbook can teach you recipes but not the tradition involved in creating them, which we can only learn by participating in the tradition)
• There is no technical knowledge without practical knowledge - practical knowledge of experience, judgement and traditions produces technical knowledge facts, rules and instructions
• He believed that political activity and tradition was an act of negotiating practical terms that enable us to coexist peacefully, and so is a form of practical / traditional knowledge
  In contrast, ideologies are technical knowledge that has spawned from people conducting political activity - negotiation of existing peacefully requires abstract ideas and visions to be imposed on others, and so a tradition of coexisting leads to ideologies
• Ideologies are borne from the practice of political tradition - you cannot have ideologies without a tradition of negotiation and politics, and the ideologies are created by different perspectives on debates, and because ideologies are technical knowledge they must be preceded by traditional knowledge, not the other way round

Question 9

3) Oakeshott - The issue with rationalists ignoring practical knowledge

Answer 9

• He argues that liberalists, despite being portrayed as starting with a blank page shaking off the shackles of tradition and blind faith to become rational and develop abstract rights, their ideas are actually rooted in tradition
• E.g. the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789; the universal rights of liberty and property are abridged from the tradition of common law rights, and are not a gift of rationalism but rather evolved from centuries of arrangement and attending to historic society - rational ideas evolve from tradition
• He felt rationalists disregarded practical knowledge and its inability to be defined into rules - he stated that rationalism was the assertion of what he named practical knowledge, and there is no knowledge that is not technical, and so rationalists champion abstract reason over actual experience
• He criticised that rationalists see nothing as being valuable simply because it exists and not because it has existed for many generations, they see familiarity having no worth, and nothing is to be left standing for scrutiny, and this makes both destruction and creation easier to engage in over acceptance or reform
• Rationalists are therefore too quick to invent something new than repairing a current and well-tried experiment that requires knowledge of the material - disregarding tradition means things have to be created, not repaired
• This is a problem because - ideologies and abstract principles cannot be effectively used without or applied to practical issues when they are stripped of the political activity, context and tradition that they came from - notions of freedom are of limited use if remove the tradition of freedom and risks destroying institutions that give us our freedoms in the first place

Question 10

3) Oakeshott - Politics of faith and scepticism

Answer 10

• Tradition is a superior guide to making political reform - ideologies are the politics of faith; rationalists believed logic and reason was an infallible guide to a rational, perfect solution to modern problems; Oakeshott viewed this as extremely rigid as societies would have to conform to specific rules and does not allow the flexibility of tradition or no compromises on actual evolution of how we live
• Politics of scepticism - looked to solve emerging problems by looking towards intimations or hints that were apparent in political traditions and accepts policy outcomes cannot be known and reform will likely have risks as a result; policy reform should aim for cohesiveness and seek the best outcome in current circumstances and cause little disruption to tradition and that it is much more flexible to make gradual and pragmatic improvement
• Politics of scepticism with the enfranchisement of women - It was not abstract notions of equality or justice that had created right for women, but they had acquired new rights and duties that made it pragmatic for them to legally be enfranchised - the status of women had grown so much in society it made sense to make the law coherent with tradition - intimated by how we already lived
• Stated politics should be a conversation not an argument; there are no correct paths or ideologies or policies to achieve utopia, but instead it is a matter of judgement, and rather than arguing over flawed ideologies we should discuss and debate the pragmatic solutions intimated by tradition and practice not how we hope to live in theory

Question 11

3) Oakeshott - Civil Associations and Enterprise Associations

Answer 11

• Oakeshott’s rejection of politics of faith led him to favour a smaller state - civil association; state makes non-instrumental general rules that simply sets limits within the activities citizens freely choose to ensure that procedures stay peaceful - e.g. rules of the road avoid chaotic collisions but do not dictate destinations - laws are rules of the game, and are authoritative because of the body that made them, not because of ideology, and so it is authoritative regardless of whether or not it is just
• Citizens are related as fellow subjects of common law - the independence and freedom of the individual is prioritised; no one person or group can impose ideological visions on others
• Enterprise association - the state makes instrumental rules that follow an ideological vision, issuing substantive commands that limit how people do actions and the very activities they can do in the first place; the law commands and limits people’s choices
• Law must comply with abstract ideological principles and it is expected that citizens are united by the shared goal chosen by the government, with individuals being instruments for advancing a collective purpose

Question 12

3) Oakeshott - Reason, not authority, destroys individuality

Answer 12

• He argued Hobbes had argued for civil association, due to an absolute monarch who had made rules to keep order and maintain conditions that kept people free, but the law was absolute because the King had made it - whilst the monarch has absolute power, their aim is to settle disputes and keep the peace, not impose a grand vision, leaving people largely free
• In contrast, ideological dictators create enterprise associations and issue commands to pursue and ideological plan for the country, and even though their power is not absolute, their ideological vision will still encourage them to interfere in far more aspects of people’s lives
• It is therefore reasons such as having an ideological plan to impose, that makes a ruler far more dangerous than one that has absolute power but no ideological plan
• He did note that not all modern states were purely enterprise or civil, as all combine instrumental and non-instrumental rules designed to achieve substantive purpose - even a civil association state would need to provide some relief for the poor to maintain order, but ideally in making any interventions, substantive goals would be targeted pragmatically, pursuing intimations from society and tradition, not ideology

Question 13

3) Oakeshott and the strands of conservatism

Answer 13

• He feared all ideologies had become rationalist - his essays arguing against it were influenced by Labour’s Post-war reforms and the One-Nation Conservatism focus on keeping unemployment low and finding a middle way - Oakeshott however argued that obsession with a single problem is detrimental to politics, as a no society has a simple life that one element can be made the centre of political activity
• New Right agreed with the idea of Oakeshott’s civil association - however, Oakeshott argued that their rush to counter the left wing ideologies had created a right wing version with their own rigid and inflexible values and aims
• Against Von Hayek - Argued that the ‘Road to Serfdom’ simply stated that resistance to ideology had been converted into an ideology - a plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics
• Conservatism is a disposition not an ideology - Oakeshott argued that conservatism was not a subscription to a specific packet of beliefs, but rather committing to the familiar rather than the unfamiliar, tried to the untried, fact to mystery, actual to impossible, limited to the unbounded, near to the distant, sufficient, convenient and the present rather than the utopia
• This is a sceptic and pessimistic approach, but Oakeshott argued this allowed people to be positive - rationalists are never happy with what they have; the disposition in taking delight in what is available is best

Question 14

4) Ayn Rand on Altruism

Answer 14

• Significant influence on the New Right
• Everyone has a moral code, or a guide to right or wrong that directs our decision making, and everyone acquires this in a different way - Rand disliked the idea of people acquiring their morals unthinkingly, without rational thought of their own and disliked how most moralists that ethics were subjective, and that it was not possible to objectively prove a particular moral code to be correct - she agreed that you could argue for a superior moral code
• She also disliked how, despite their differences, moral codes were overwhelmingly altruistic and based on the idea that being a moral and good person meant taking actions that benefit others, even at a personal cost and taking actions to benefit yourself is wrong and selfish
• She sought to correct this idea of selfishness and the lack of questioning as to why we have moral codes
• She began with nature, and arguing that the maintenance of the organisms life is the motivation for our actions, and that life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action; plants cannot choose to not be ‘selfish’, an animal has no choice in the standards of their values, but humans in contrast have no automatic code of survival and have to consciously use rational thought to discover what is needed
• Since man has to support his own life through is own conscious efforts, the doctrine of concern of one’s own interests is evil means that man’s desire to live is evil, and so life itself is evil
• As a result, death is altruistic, as it conflicts with man’s desire to live as altruism states that no one has the right to exist for their own sake, and that service to others is the only justification of his existence and self-sacrifice is the highest moral duty, virtue and value
• Altruism teaches people that they only stand to lose from ‘moral’ actions, fostering resentment towards others, and we hope others may sacrifice themselves for our benefit as we do for them
• Ethical egoism - believed it was morally right to ct in your own self-interest and she opposed collectivism and statism; believed that laissez-faire capitalism was both productive and the most morally just - moral defence thinker - moral to act in your own interest
• The standard of value of objectivist ethics - the standard by which one judges whether they are good or evil is man’s life, or that which is required for man’s survival
• Any action that allows man to thrive is good, and any that negate are bad

Question 15

4) Rand on objectivism

Answer 15

• This does not mean that individuals should be guided by pleasure or pain, or be hedonistic, and that objectivism is not the right to do as one pleases, but simply allows the rational man to be guided by reason and that allow people to think carefully and identify rational values that, if stuck to, benefit their long-term interests
• Objectivism values reason (must value the only proper tool we have to discover true knowledge), purpose (we must decide for ourselves the life-promoting goals we want to work towards) and self-esteem (we must live up to our values and maintain the conviction that we deserve to be happy)
• These fundamental values imply important virtues, or things we need to do to live - think rationally, be productive and be proud of what we accomplish and not feel guilt when others achieve less, we must have integrity (be loyal to our values and not just abandon them when under pressure), be honest (recognise that you cannot fake an existence and accept it for what it is) and pursue justice (judge the character of others and treat them accordingly
• Rand argued any other values were too altruistic and therefore prove harmful to the life of the individual
• This does not mean an objectivist would never be kind or charitable, but they would consciously choose to do so only when it would fit their rationally chosen hierarchy of values - love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values and concern for the welfare of those loved ones is a rational part of one’s selfish interests
• Rand approves of incidents such as saving people from drowning due to the value they may represent to society, but it would be immoral to put your own life at risk as you cannot decide whose life holds more value
• How this links to collectivism - Led to a more atomistic view of society, and society allows us to expand our store knowledge from generation to generation and every man gains incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others, and the division of labour enables man to devote his efforts to a particular field of work and to trade with other specialists - obvious benefits to society
• A basic social principle is individualism, which is the idea that individuals should be left as free as possible to pursue their own self-interest and free from any coercion, not a collectivist society in which people’s rights are sacrificed for others

Question 16

4) Rand - Why did Rand believe that society had to prioritise the negative rights of ‘independent thinkers’ & ‘producers’ over the positive rights of ‘second-handers’ & ‘takers’? Why did she consider property rights to be so fundamental?

Answer 16

• Negative rights e.g. freedom from any interference with property, speech etc
• There is no such thing as positive rights, as the property rights of others would have to be sacrificed in order to realise them; they are not natural, and rights such as jobs are man made values, or goods and services produced by men, and any alleged right of one man that necessitates the violation of the rights of another is not and cannot be a right
• In contrast, rights arrive from the fundamental right to life, and so individual rights are derived from this as we are able to best decide how to sustain our life - Rand pointed to the US Founding Fathers, who stated all people have the right to pursue happiness, not the right to happiness itself
• The right to life implies a right to property, and a right to the product of man’s effort necessary to sustain life
• Racism is an evil, irrational and morally contemptible, but doctrines cannot be forbidden or prescribed by law, and so the protection of freedom of speech, despite having evil doctrines, is protected as a racist’s right to the use and disposal of his own property, and so private racism is a moral issue, and can only be fought as an economic boycott or social ostracism, not by law
• Negative rights are more important to human nature; it is in the interest of everyone to prioritise the rights of the inventors over the dependents - independent thinkers over second handers, not the rich over the poor, and producers over takers (competing correctly in the free market, not those dependent on welfare)

Question 17

4) Rand - The purpose of the state

Answer 17

• Protect individuals from violence and coercion and the moral purpose is to protect the right to life, property and the pursuit of his own happiness - Rand was less concerned by the size of the government than the question of what citizens allow the government to do - does the state respect individual property rights or not
• Tax and redistribution is theft, and she instead preferred the idea that citizens should be willing to pay for services such as the police, rather than being forced, and paying the state in turn for its services e.g. access to public courts if it is needed
• Public interest and common good - The idea that the state should intervene in the public interest, with the tribal notion of the common good has served as moral justification of most social systems and of all tyrannies in history, is immoral
• Rand feared when you strayed from the black and white of negative rights to the grey of positive rights you cause issues with the ‘public interest’, and people should accept that some people’s rights supercede others - all men and all private groups have to fight to the death for privilege of being regarded as ‘the public’

Question 18

4) Rand on the free market

Answer 18

• Individuals should take responsibility and cast their vote in the free market, rather than delegating moral judgements to their elected representatives, as they should vote for what they actually want and support causes they actually agree with - the free market represents the social application of an objective theory of values
• As values are meant to be discovered by the individual, they should not be discovered via taxation in which the product is not chosen by the individual
• Criticises the defence of capitalism on economic grounds, and despite agreeing that capitalism is the most prosperous system and that capitalism’s problems of boom and bust, corruption and monopolies and entrenched inequality are caused by state intervention - pure laissez faire capitalism has not yet existed due to constant state or business intervention, and so contrasts with the argument of many Conservatives that the role of the state is to maintain capitalism - capitalism should not be economically defended
• Instead, Conservatives should defend capitalism on moral grounds, as it is the only system compatible with human nature, by leaving individuals free to rationally pursue their own self-interest, and saw it as the only just system, as its ruling principle is too ensure that people get what they deserve
• Capitalism allows laws of supply and demand, trading by mutual consent and uncoerced judgement and a man can grow rich if he is able to offer better values, products or services at a lower price

Question 19

5) Nozick on a society in which ends justify the means

Answer 19

• Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them without violating their rights - so strong and far reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do
• Main division in ethics - determining morality by either actions or consequences; can the ends justify the means and utilitarianism states that the action that produces the most utility is the moral choice - sees infringing on rights as permissible such as removing property to redistribute wealth
• Rights are not absolute limits on our actions and it balances competing positive and negative rights to achieve the best outcome
  Nozick criticism utilitarianism as he feared that focusing on ends rather than means encouraged worrying violations of human rights
• He instead promoted the separateness of persons and self-ownership, stating that we are all distinct individuals with our own aspirations and lives to lead, and so we should not be treated as a unit in a mathematical equation, and sacrificing someone’s inviolable rights for the ‘common good’ fails to show proper respect for the moral worth of every single individual who owns their own bodies, talents, abilities and labour
• However, we do individually choose to sometimes undergo some pain or sacrifice for a greater benefit or to avoid greater harm, such as going to dentist appointments or saving money
• Therefore, it makes sense that others should bear some costs that benefit others more, for the sake of social good - Nozick argues that there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good, there are only individual people with individual lives; asking people to sacrifice for society uses them to benefit others, not themselves
• Kant - always act in a way that you always treat humanity not just as a means, but always at the same time as an end

Question 20

5) Nozick on rights as side constraints

Answer 20

• The only way to respect the individual and separateness of persons and individual ownership is through treating rights as side restraints
• These reflect the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not just means, and so they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent, and so individuals are inviolable
• Rights should not push you into certain goals that may be good for society, but rather once you have freely chosen your goal, rights do constrain you from the side, such as rights to property, life, liberty and self-defence by stopping you violating the absolute rights of others on your path to achieving this goal
• Treating individuals as ends n regards to paternalism - It violates side constraints to force someone to take actions even if you know the action is in the believe best interests of the individual
• It also violates redistribution, as seizing someone’s earnings effectively seizes hours of their life from them and if everyone has the positive right to a share of society’s resources, they have a claim on the products and labour of others, amounting to partial ownership of other people, undermining self ownership and the separateness of persons

Question 21

5) Nozick on the state of nature and inspiration of anarchism

Answer 21

• Anarchists argue that minimal states are intrinsically immoral because they encroach on individual rights - if the individual has the right to govern themselves, all states are tyranny
• Nozick rejects the idea of individuals explicitly or tacitly agreeing to give up some key rights to a higher power that can enforce them more effectively - people have never truly given unspoken consent simply by remaining in the country
• Nozick offers the invisible hand justification of the state - in the state of nature, if we take Locke’s optimistic view, people generally respected rights, but some would lack the power to enforce them and would want impartial judges - because of this, people would likely join together to make mutual protection agencies where a group promises to uphold each others rights when violated by others
• However, this would become tiresome and so people would form professional protection agencies and members would begin to pay fees so that people could be hired to investigate and impartially settle disputes to protect their members and bring people to justice - these protection agencies would compete within the free market
• Eventually, a dominant protection agency would emerge, and as this becomes the largest agency smaller rival agencies would not be able to protect rights as ably and so would join
• The dominant protection agency is very similar to the minimal state, by enforcing the rights of the bulk of the population via fees- however some would refuse to buy into this and the minimal state would have complete monopoly on the use of force unlike a dominant protection agency
• Anarchists therefore question how a state can form with violating side constraints and the rights of non-members
• Nozick - risk and compensation; it does not violate rights to prevent people from taking dangerous, high-risk actions provided they are compensated for any disadvantage they face as a result e.g. an epileptic could be banned from driving provided they are reimbursed from taxi or public transport costs
• Allowing independents to take justice into their own hands carries very high risk as they are unlikely to meet the same procedural standards of professional agencies; they may act on gossip or emotion, act on bias or attempt to impose unfair punishments, and the dominant agency has the right to defend members against such methods
• As a result, the dominant agency can effectively ban independents from using their own risky methods provided that it compensates the independents for any disadvantages or violations on their rights such as offering free services
• At this point, the dominant agency has effectively become the minimal state in a natural way with no morally impermissible steps, as the rights of independents have not been violated due to their compensation; while members will have to pay more to cover this compensation, Nozick says that this is not redistribution, but simply the unavoidable cost of effective, moral protection

Question 22

5) Nozick on distributive justice

Answer 22

• Debates about the nature of justice tend to ask what the fairest way to distribute wealth is - these debates on distributive justice are misleading as they create the idea that resources exist in a single pot, ready to be handed out once the fairest, most just method has been found - however, there is no such central distribution, with no person or group entitled to control all the resources, jointly deciding how they are to be doled out
• Distribution instead arises out of each person making a voluntary exchange with another, or received as a gift - in a free society, diverse persons control different resources and new holdings arise out of the voluntary exchanges and action of persons

Question 23

5) Nozick on end-result justice and historical justice

Answer 23

• End-result theories of justice - justice depends only on how goods are distributed - the distribution must conform to a particular structure
• Basing justice solely on ends opens the door for immoral means - reducing it to numeracy tells us nothing about society’s history; do people get what they deserve, is everyone free
• Historical theories state justice depends on how the distribution of goods came about, conforming to a particular pattern e.g. based on effort, contribution, moral merit or need - however, Nozick argues that liberty upsets patterns, and maintaining any pattern or end-state would require impermissible limits on freedom
• Distribution 1 is a structure or pattern based on equality, merit, need etc - Wilt Chamberlain signs a basketball contract that requires 25 cents from each ticket to go to him; 1 million come to watch Chamberlain play, giving him $250,000
• This leads to Distribution 2, in which one person is far more wealthy than any others - if D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1, isn’t D2 also just?
• Nozick argues that individuals will never be able to preserve an end state on their own as maintaining the pattern would need constant state interference to stop people from transferring resources as they wish to, or continually / periodically interfere to take some persons resources that for some reason was transferred to them

Question 24

5) Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice

Answer 24

• Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just
• Entitlement theory of justice is historical but unpatterned, and stated a just distribution requires only 3 things - justice in acquisition (did individuals acquire unowned property in legitimate ways), justice in transfer (were foods then transferred voluntarily, free from coercion) and justice in rectification (have all violations of these two standards been rectified?)
• Justice is a question of whether we have what we are morally entitled to, not what we believe ourselves to deserve

Question 25

5) Nozick on why the minimal state is utopia

Answer 25

• While Nozick argues that it violated side constraints to seize money from the rich to help the poor, his opposition is to coercion, not charity - it would be wrong for a socialist government to forcefully create a more equal society, but absolutely fine for willing individuals to establish their own socialist community to voluntarily redistribute wealth equally to live more equal lives - it has to be the individual’s choice
• Nozick argues other thinkers have it wrong when assessing what makes a utopian society, as not one solution would be perfect for all - instead, a perfect society is a utopia that is a framework for utopias, or a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realise their own visions of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision on others