What we perhaps get out of Nozick, then, is a kind of negative or inertial justification of existing states: Not an argument for thinking that they are legitimate in the sense that his morally pristine Dominant Protection Agencies might be, but an argument against the moral necessity of abolishing rather than reforming states that are admittedly historically unjustified, because that’s what we’d end up with anyhow after a great deal of trouble, even if nearly everyone were reasonably conscientious about trying to respect people’s libertarian rights.
This is, I think, in line with a view I've encountered via some libertarians of my acquaintance (e.g. Jacob Levy, though I wouldn't want to attribute this precise formulation to him): the state is morally neutral in the sense that its historical development is a combination of just and unjust acts which it is pointless to attempt to separate. It gets no credit as a morally necessary form of social organization, but neither is it to be held suspect because at particular moments it is unjust in its being or its functions. The state just is the form of organization we have now, for better or worse.
The recent hullabaloo over Nozick reminds me that he figures into one of the two big pedagogical experiments I'd like to conduct one day. They are:
1. Have students in an intro or modern political thought class read Machiavelli's Discourses before The Prince.
2. Have students in an intro or liberalism-oriented class start with Nozick and/or Hayek before Rawls.
...because I expect the reactions to the Discourses, and to Nozick, are conditioned by responses to The Prince and Rawls, respectively, and I'm interested to see how students would approach each if they had to be taken on their own terms, and not read through the lens of something else.
1 comment:
That formulation suits me fine.
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