The film follows two protagonists: One is a recent recruit to an elite antiterrorism unit (think 24), the other has just stumbled upon (and effectively, if grudgingly, joined) an underground resistance movement that is fighting against what they believe to be an alien invasion conspiracy (think V or They Live). The alternating scenes are shot in different styles, and genuinely hew to the different conventions of gritty-realistic-thriller and mindbender-scifi.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the terrorist group sought by protagonist A is the resistance group joined by protagonist B. While A is given to understand that the group is planning to release a lethal biological weapon that will kill millions, B believes that it will be harmless to humans, but render the environment toxic to the aliens, who are on the verge of implementing their genocidal takeover plan.

As the story moves back and forth between the two protagonists, evidence that seems to confirm one character’s view (spectacular alien technology, and even a real-live alien) is debunked in a later scene (cinema-grade special effects with a dose of psychedelics employed by a sinister cult to gull its members, the antiterror chief explains), and then de-debunked again (a clever hoax by the aliens to ensure none who discover their plan will be believed). By the time of the grand denouement, the audience should be thoroughly confused as to who is the dupe—though it should be clear that each believes himself to be the hero.

At the climax, protagonist B agrees to act as a decoy while he sends off another member of the resistance group/cult to activate the dispersal device that will release the biological agent. He is, of course, apprehended by protagonist A, who attempts to extract the location of the device by a series of increasingly desperate threats and physical assaults. (But couldn’t he lie? Well, fine: He needs to speak the code phrase to remotely deactivate the device, which makes confirmation instantaneous.) Though horrified at each step, A insists he will not let millions die because he was too squeamish. Protagonist B is, of course, in terrible agony at this point, but “knows” everyone on earth will face a still grimmer fate if the aliens aren’t stopped.

Realizing he can’t do much to step up the physical pain without causing B to lose consciousness (which makes it less likely the information will be obtained in time), A finally has B’s young children brought in and—though clearly nauseated by what he’s been forced to resort to—begins threatening them in B’s presence. Because they are too young to be persuaded to act convincingly, he ultimately has to begin harming them. Unfortunately, because B at this point knows A to be somewhat honorable, ruses will not be effective: B must see some kind of non-trivial harm really inflicted in order to believe that A is truly capable of it.

As it seems that A is on the verge of dealing a horrific, fatal injury to one of the children, a clearly broken B finally agrees to cough up the information. Fade to black.

In general, I tend to think it’s the other way around. People who imagine themselves to be utterly practical and non-ideological are usually just doing their philosophy tacitly, which usually also means badly. Most often, the philosophy in question is a potpourri of mutually incompatible forms of consequentialism seasoned with unexamined, inherited cultural prejudices (dignified by the label “common sense”). But for self-conscious libertarians, who often do make a point of stressing a distinctive theory of rights as the basis of their policy views, I think there’s probably something to this.

So, for instance, libertarians tend to think they are distinguished from others by adherence to some version of the Harm Principle—the idea that individual liberty should be coercively regulated only when it entails harm to unconsenting third parties (as opposed to for paternalistic reasons). But even if libertarians are unusual in regarding this as a necessary condition of regulation, almost everyone regards it as among the clearest and strongest justifications for intervention, and so quite a lot of policy disagreements are nevertheless driven, not by dispute over the (unique) validity of the Harm Principle, but about which types of harms count (which sounds philosophical, but usually has an empirical component) and which activities are, empirically, harmful enough to restrict.

Drug prohibition may be the classic example of a “paternalistic” policy that libertarians reject on the grounds that we all have a right to go to hell in our own way. And certainly, there’s a strong paternalistic strain in most prohibitionist arguments. But it’s also worth looking at how much Drug War propaganda—especially the stuff that circulated aroundm the time of the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act—involves exaggerated claims about how drugs almost invariably turn once-decent people into addiction-crazed thieves, rapists, and axe-murderers. Think Reefer Madness: It’s viewed strictly for laughs now, but around the time we were actually banning the stuff, many educated people’s beliefs about it were not much less ridiculous. And if it were really true that some drug reliably transformed almost everyone who used it into some berserk, violent beast, then (bracketing pragmatic concerns about black markets and so on) it’s not clear a libertarian could make a very strong moral case against prohibiting (or very strictly regulating) it. Less dramatically, there might be a range of views about which sorts of harms—such as being prevented by addiction from meeting the obligation to care for one’s children—would justify intervention if they did follow inevitably (or nearly inevitably) from drug use. Again, this isn’t to deny that there’s a powerful paternalistic component to prohibitionist arguments, but it’s a mistake to understimate how much work is done by (often confused) beliefs about the magnitude of third-party harms that would result from decriminalization or legalization.

Libertarians also tend to say that taxation to support a minimial government that enforces individual rights against violence, theft, and fraud is legitimate—but that taxation for redistributive purposes is not. But this doesn’t actually get you to a determinate set of policy positions without further empirical premises. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that some amount of subsidy for education, or for job training programs, did more at some margin to reduce crime, at lower cost, than additional tax-supported policing and incarceration (in part by turning potential inmates from a tax-drain into part of the productive tax-base). It’s true, of course, that such programs are typically defended on other grounds—such as the obligation to help people for their sake, and not as an indirect form of self defense—but if we assume those facts, it’s not clear what a philosophical libertarian would have to say against these policies as a mechanism for rights protection. “No, tax me more for less effective cops and jails!” doesn’t sound like much of a rallying cry, and while there’s an obvious incentives argument against a policy of directly bribing people not to commit crimes, it’s doubtful it applies to education.

Obviously, someone with a libertarian view about what types of justification for state action are valid will admit a case for tax-supported programs of this sort under far narrower sets of circumstances than someone who thinks they’re justified by all sorts of benefits beyond preventing rights violations. The libertarian may also have a variety of views about economics or the dynamics of bureaucracy that make him less likely to believe such programs will actually be effective. The point is just that the policy view doesn’t fall straightforwardly out of a set of premises established by rights theory or moral philosophy. Empirical beliefs are doing a lot of work, both for those who accept a libertarian position and those who reject it. Sometimes the philosophical differences would lead people to different policy views even if we agreed on all the facts. But there are many fact patterns where the plausible moral views all (or mostly) converge on a common normative result, even if for different reasons.

Supposing that’s right, what follows? The bad news (for those who find this sort of thing congenial) is that this reduces the number of questions that can be decisively answered from an armchair by contemplating the nature of rights. The good news is that many disagreements that appear to be grounded in divergent and incompatible values are at least partly concealed empirical disagreements, and therefore perhaps less intractable than they sometimes seem.

What exactly does it mean to say the state is justified, though? Of course he doesn’t mean that just any state anywhere is justified—at most some states are justified. When Nozick claims that state can be justified, that is consistent with holding that all extant states are unjustified. Does it mean we could just impose a minimal state on a well-functioning anarchic society, if we ever found one? Probably not. If X could or even is likely to arise out of Y through a series of blameless steps, and if Y is better than X, it doesn’t automatically follow that we can impose Y upon people who are in situation X. (E.g., suppose I could prove that nearly everyone who has a blue stripe Mesa Boogie Mark III will end up naturally wanting to buy a Mark V instead, and I could prove that the Mark V is superior to the Mark III. It wouldn’t follow that people with Mark IIIs are obligated to buy Mark Vs, nor would it follow that I could force them to buy Mark Vs right now.)

I have some views on what Nozick thinks it means to justify a state this way, but I’ll just leave it as a puzzle here.

Of course, if we did find a well-functioning anarchic society, that would tend to undermine Nozick’s argument: For he isn’t just claiming that a state might arise in the fashion he describes. Rather, he’s pretty clearly trying to make the case that it almost certainly would arise, even granting the anarchist the most favorable realistic conditions. This, I think, points the way to understanding what Nozick is up to here. Anarchists, after all, are not generally seeking to convince us that we ought not to set up governments and spoil our beatific anarchies. They’re trying to persuade us that we ought to abolish (or at least flee) the governments that are already all but ubiquitous in the modern world.

Now, it might be that no existing state is directly justified by having arisen from a state of nature without violating anyone’s rights. But if it were established that even under the most favorable realistic circumstances, we would in any case end up with a de facto (minimal) government, then the argument seems to lose a good deal of its practical force.

The anarchist can, of course, continue to stress that this actual state did not emerge from a series of a series of free contracts (plus compensation for the prohibition of risky enforcement) by an invisible hand process—and suggest that if a morally justified state would emerge in that way from anarchy, then we ought to let it do so, and consider that state justified (or less unjustified?). But if this is likely to entail (at best) a costly, and quite likely a messy and violent transition process, it gets hard to see the point once we allow that the outcome is still, ultimately, going to be a state. On Nozick’s view, it might be a much smaller state, but if the point is to arrive at that goal, then working to shrink existing states—however quixotic an endeavor it might sometimes seem—is at any rate unlikely to be more difficult than abolishing those same states, building new ones (perhaps by invisible hand mechanisms from competing protection agencies), and then endeavoring to keep these new states properly limited.

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.

Since writing about the Wilt Chamberlain example last week, I’ve been revisiting Anarchy, State, and Utopia and thinking about what legitimate criticisms can be leveled against this particular step in Nozick’s argument.  I still think Stephen Metcalf’s complaints are basically frivolous, and his recent response to his critics does little to change my view.  On the question of whether Nozick meaningfully “repudiated” libertarianism, he stresses that some of what Nozick says in the 1989 essay “The Zig Zag of Politics” seems more at odds with libertarianism than the positions he advanced both before and after—notwithstanding his later claim to have considered himself a libertarian “all along.”   I think my last post sketches a plausible fallibilist reading of “Zig Zag” on which the gap between that essay and his other writing is not as great as it might seem at first blush, but I’m not ultimately sure why this is supposed to matter all that much—or why you’d try to make so much of a change of heart that, if it was significant, was also apparently temporary.

As for the Chamberlain example itself, my objection was not that it is not sufficiently “representative” of Nozick’s views, but that it is not an argument to the conclusion Metcalf thinks it is, which means his attempted rebuttal is tantamount to establishing that the Pythagorean Theorem fails to prove Reimann’s Hypothesis. Metcalf halfway seems to acknowledge this, but insists the example is “rigged” in a way designed to “muddle” our intuitions:

Why, if Nozick did not want to game his example, did he choose Wilt? After all, if Sanchez is correct, isn’t the point made just as well with, say, a happy-go-lucky doofus who rides a wave of Internet exuberance and cashes out big, all while adding to the world precisely zero utility? Absent an injustice in each step (the prospectus is accurate, the bankers price the IPO fairly) the resulting gross inequality itself cannot be regarded as unjust. But I didn’t choose Wilt Chamberlain; Nozick chose Wilt Chamberlain. I.E., he wanted to harvest all of the sentimental associations from a historical reality while leaving behind all its real-world complications.

Well, I don’t know why Wilt Chamberlain. Why trolleys? Maybe Nozick was a basketball fan. Maybe it just seemed simpler than something involving stock options, IPOs, and fine points of securities law. Most likely, though, it’s because at the time Nozick was writing, Wilt Chamberlain would have been the most prominent pop cultural example of a celebrity many people thought outrageously overpaid. Even today, critics of inequality will routinely use professional athletes as an example of the absurd disparities market systems permit, as in “What kind of sane economic system lets a grown man make a million dollars playing a game most people consider recreation, while teachers are underpaid?” In the early 1970s, Chamberlain would have been the poster boy for this kind of argument. He was one of the most famous athletes in the country, and had just made news by signing to the Lakers for a controversial and, at the time, unprecedented $250,000 salary, making him the highest paid pro in any sport. That happens to be the exact sum Nozick imagines him earning in his thought experiment, so this is pretty clearly an example “ripped from the headlines” about that controversy. I imagine the choice was motivated in part by the idea of flipping that common complaint around: “You see, I’ll defend even this canonical example of ridiculous inequality.” It’s pretty doubtful, in other words, that many people around Harvard at the time would’ve thought that using Chamberlain to illustrate the point was stacking the deck somehow.

In any event, since the upshot of the thought experiment is to make a point about certain features of patterned (as opposed to historical) theories of distributive justice, rather than to validate in one fell swoop the pattern of holdings in actual capitalist societies, this just doesn’t seem particularly important to me.  The example is, by design “rigged” to be as unobjectionable as possible in terms of the validity of the specific set of transactions described, and given the limited purpose of the thought experiment, this is no dig against it. If you think the result is fair in a case like this, then you think that historical factors can be relevant to assessing the justice of a distribution, and that a patterned view fails to capture the whole truth.

That said—and perhaps in the spirit of the “Ideological Turing Test“—I want to point out some of the ways I think the Wilt Chamberlain Argument does fall short—not, again, as a supposed proof of the morality of real market institutions, but as a theoretical argument against patterned principles of justice. Here’s what a fairer critic might be able to say.

First, Nozick’s claim that patterned principles will require “continuous” intervention with people’s choices to be “continuously” realized does not have much force independently of the argument for thinking that a distribution will be just if it arises from free transactions consistent with a valid Principle of Justice in Transfer (PJX) from a just (according to your favorite patterned theory) starting point. Rawls’ Justice as Fairness is a patterned theory, but Rawls is quite clear that it—and specifically the Difference Principle—applies to the rules and institutions of the basic structure of society, including (inter alia) whatever PJX is enforced. It is not supposed to be an independent criterion for evaluating the justice of a time-slice distribution, except insofar as this may reveal whether the PJX and other institutions have been suitably well crafted in accordance with that principle. 

Moreover, insofar as Nozick supports both rectification of unjust (e.g. fraudulent) transfers, police enforcement of property rights, and taxation (e.g. sales taxes) to support the minimal state, he must also be prepared to countenance “continuous” interference with various kinds of chosen activities. There may be pragmatic issues with the scale or form of intervention proposed, but they’re distinct from the question of whether the intervention is just.

Second, the force of Nozick’s argument relies in large part on being able to grant the patterned theorist a favored starting point, D1, and show how it could be transformed into a distribution highly inconsistent with that pattern by a series of morally unobjectionable steps. For some versions of a patterned theory, this will not quite work. If, for instance, the patterned theorist argues that people are entitled to a share of the stream of social output over time, then no static allocation at a time slice (such as D1) would actually count as satisfying the requirement. More generally, the patterned theorist can object to Nozick’s move from the justice of a distribution to the claim that people therefore have a right to the specific bundle of assets they’re afforded under that distribution. For someone who thinks the just pattern involves rights to shares of social wealth rather than specific concrete holdings, each new child born will be entitled to a share—requiring a transfer from others even though we presumably don’t want to say reproduction involves intrinsic injustice. The advocate of a patterned view can say that transfers to ensure each child a fair starting endowment does not really interfere with anyone’s entitlement to their (previously) just holdings, because what people were entitled to all along was not the specific stuff constituting their previous holdings, but only an equal (or fill in your favorite allocation algorithm) percentage of the total, which they continue to have. Nozick still has the objection that it seems absurd to claim it’s unjust for people to freely do anything with “their” shares that disrupts this delicate equilibrium. But if we’re clear that share rights remain share rights, and don’t translate into rights over the specific assets constituting one’s share at a time slice, the example loses a lot of intuitive force. If I’m entitled to an “equal share” of the floor space at the yoga studio, there’s no mystery why my share might vary over time as more people arrive or the building is enlarged, on top of any gains I might realize from svelte friends offering me portions of their shares until I slim up a bit.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the intuitive appeal of the argument rests on the tacit premise that if D1 is just, and the microtransfers that lead from D1 to D2 are individually morally permissible, then the macrodistribution D2 effectively inherits the justice of the microsteps. As Nozick himself observes, of course, one could “shoehorn” a patterned view into the PJX, such that individual steps contributing to the disruption of the macropattern are ruled out (or corrective transfers mandatory), even though the microtransfers would be unobjectionable absent consideration of their contribution to altering the macropattern. No correct PJX, Nozick thinks, will have this form. This seems to beg the question against the patterned theorist in a way that is hard to justify. This is especially so given that, on a plausible libertarian theory, it will be the case that independently permissible actions may be rendered wrongful by virtue of their contribution to an aggregate effect.

Consider, in the spirit of Derek Parfit’s (itself highly unrealistic!) “harmless torturers” thought experiment, certain kinds of pollution. Suppose it is the case that many producers emit, as a byproduct of industrial activity, a variety of chemicals into the atmosphere. Further suppose that for each factory, its individual emissions make no perceptible difference in the surrounding air quality, but the combined effect of all these gasses emitted by thousands of producers mixing produces some catastrophic ecological effect. 

Each producer can claim that his emissions inflict no harm when considered in isolation, and perhaps they even inflict no marginal harm, holding constant the actions of others. (By analogy with voting: Each voter, at least in a national election, can reasonably point out that her vote makes no difference to the outcome of the election. Yet the outcome is, nevertheless, the joint product of all those individual votes.) In conventional libertarian terms, the ecological catastrophe (should it occur) nevertheless clearly constitutes a serious harm to the health and property of others, in a way that may plausibly be said to violate their rights, whether or not that violation can be ascribed to any individual actor. (To avoid complications involving potential “homesteading” of emissions rights, suppose the producers all act simultaneously and without coordination.) 

Insofar as the ecological harm is foreseeable on the basis of solid science, producers who continue to emit willy-nilly, without coordinating to set limits on their individual emissions, can plausibly be said to act wrongly. If this is so, the injustice of the individual producer’s excessive emission will not be a function of its intrinsic effects considered in isolation, but rather of its role in realizing an aggregate “pattern.” The libertarian can, of course, object that unequal macrolevel distributions do not constitute an analogous “harm,” and that the macropattern at D2 does inherit the fairness of the transfers that give rise to it. But he cannot appeal to a general principle to the effect that rules of justice governing individual action may never factor in the role they play in generating an aggregate outcome.

In the unlikely event that’s not more than enough Nozick for you, Matt Yglesias and I had some things to say about Nozick and political philosophy more generally in a recent Blogging Heads dialogue.

The different levels of ethics have a different status. The ethics of respect, largely specified by what I have called the core principle, is the part, the one part (I think), that is (that should be) mandatory across all societies. In saying this, I am putting forward a particular normative position: that the further ethical levels are matters of personal choice or personal ideal. Even if these further levels are not mandatory for all societies, some particular society may attempt to make one or another of these further levels [requiring affirmative assistance to others, caring and love, and embodiment of various spiritual ideas] mandatory within it, punishing those members of the society who deviate or fall short. I also believe—this is an additional component of my own position, presented in Anarchy, State, and Utopia—that no society should take this further step. All that any society should (coercively) demand is adherence ot the ethics of respect. The further levels should be matters for a person’s own individual choice and development.

Yglesias actually thinks this view is arguably more extreme than the original A,S,&U position, though since Nozick’s primary concerns in that chapter are metaethical, I’d be chary of inferring too much from his passing remarks here. Still, it’s clear enough that he regards this aspect of the position laid out in A,S,&U as “his position.” In what sense, then, do we think he became “less hardcore,” and in what sense did he regard his earlier views as “seriously inadequate”? While it’s probably a mistake to try to shoehorn too much of what a thinker as notoriously mercurial as Nozick wrote into a single coherent view, given the span of time involved, I think it’s useful to consider the position laid out in Invariances in light of what Nozick says in “The Zig-Zag of Politics,” which is the essay that gave rise to the popular impression that Nozick had wholly shed his libertarian ideas. I’ll return to that momentarily.

First, an observation about Invariances. Here, Nozick spells out a view of morality as an evolved adaptation with a specific function: Enabling ever broader mutual social cooperation. He divides this cleanly into “levels,” but it’s not obvious that the boundaries are so sharp and clean as all that. On his “core principle of ethics,” for instance, Nozick writes:

It is desirable to extend the realm of people who benefit from coordination and cooperation. A group G1 should extend social cooperation to G2, if this can be done in some way that benefits those in G2 and improves (or does not worsen) the situation of the poeple in G1. [....] However, a group is not required to extend cooperative relations to another group with whom it has no interactions, at the cost of lessening the benefits to itself.

Now, pace Nozick, it seems at least possible to me that this principle is compatible with some forms of affirmative assistance. It might, for instance, be the case that the (or a) Pareto optimal scenario for interaction between a Better Off and Worse Off group, on the whole and over the long term involves some level of subsidy from Better Off to Worse Off, in the form of provision for education or insurance against extreme hardship, because the social surplus from the productive cooperation thereby enabled—and in particular the share of the surplus accruing to Better Off—is greater than the amount of the subsidy. (It may also be less expensive than enforcing libertarian rights against members of Badly Off who may feel compelled to turn to crime in the absence of viable opportunities for productive cooperation.) Where this is the case, that sort of limited aid might fall within Nozick’s “core principle” even when it is not motivated by an independent principle requiring aid to others for its own sake, at least if that principle is interpreted broadly. If familiar collective action problems make it difficult to supply an adequate subsidy without compulsory transfer, the initial interaction will not be to the “mutual benefit” of those compelled to provide it, but the system of interactions it enables may be. I don’t say this is the case with respect to any particular system of transfers—that’s an empirical question—but insofar as this scenario is not wildly implausible, it is at any rate subject to reasonable disagreement. What falls within the “level” specified by the “core principle” of interaction to mutual benefit is, in other words, not quite so sharply defined as the system of side-constraint rights spelled out in A,S,&U—and my loose interpretation of it may well be in direct conflict with what he says in response to Rawls in Chapter 7 of that book—even though there are enough obvious affinities between these ideas that Nozick himself is prepared to link his “core principle” with the position of the earlier book.

Turning back to “The Zig-Zag of Politics,” I note that one of its primary concerns has to do with the attitude one ought to have in the context of a liberal democratic society in which many different moral views coexist. Where A,S,&U is concerned with ideal theory and the sort of government that could justly arise from a state of nature, “Zig-Zag” is more concerned with how to deal with the range of divergent positions members of a pluralistic society holds. Here, he effectively takes a fallibilist stance that leads him to embrace the titular Zig-Zag of democratic politics over intransigent insistence on one’s own view as uniquely avoiding injustice, at least within a certain range. In some ways, it prefigures the Rawls of Political Liberalism, who focuses on how to deal with the conflict of diverse reasonable moral conceptions.

We hear echoes of this in Nozick’s language in Invariances. In contrast with the stark boundaries of rights-respecting and rights-violating states found in A,S,&U, we find a discussion of multiple levels of ethics, all of which are equally part of morality, even as Nozick argues that only one level is legitimately enforceable. There is, in other words, a stronger sense of tension between competing values: A state which coercively transfers resources to the poor may be enforcing a real ethical obligation even if that enforcement violates the claim to non-interference embedded in the “ethics of respect,” and even if we think those claims should take priority. That seems to mark an important distinction from simple theft, even if we think the transfer is on net morally bad.

Note also the (perhaps canny) ambiguity in the claim that “some particular society may attempt to make one or another of these further levels mandatory,” though he believes no society “should” do so. Does that “may” express a mere possibility, or a permission, as in “it is not the morally optimal policy, but it is in the set of morally permissible options”? (Would that make libertarianism supererogatory?) One way to construe this, again borrowing Rawlsian jargon, is as suggesting that (some modified version of) the view from A,S,&U is one among many “reasonable conceptions of justice” that might order a liberal society, and in Nozick’s view the most defensible one of that set. This is something analogous to the way Rawls recasts the theory of Justice as Fairness articulated in A Theory of Justice as one of several possible “modules” that may be plugged into the superstructure of Political Liberalism.

Since something close to this is roughly my own view, I’m wary of too-confidently projecting it on a thinker who is, sadly, no longer around to correct the liberties I take with his ideas. Still, it is one (I think appealing) way to square Nozick’s claim that he had become “less hardcore” with the textual evidence that his substantive commitments to a moral (and not merely pragmatic) claim against coercive state redistribution remained intact. (There are also, as David Boaz notes, reports that Nozick had modified his views on the inalienability of certain rights.) On this interpretation, Nozick’s substantive view of libertarian rights remained largely the same, but less “hardcore” insofar as that view is situated within a family of reasonable views that give different weights to competing ethical values, rather than simply in contrast to varying degrees of theft, slavery, and predation.

The more important question, of course, is whether Nozick’s arguments hold up, and Metcalf chooses to focus on just one very brief passage from Anarchy, State, and Utopia as representative of Nozick’s thought: A famous thought experiment that’s come to be known as the “Wilt Chamberlain Argument.”As Reihan Salam observes, there are many provocative and insightful responses to Nozick out there in the philosophical literature.  Metcalf’s is, to put it as kindly as possible, not among their number.  The first sign that we’re in for a painful read comes with a grossly unfair and factually challenged attempt to dismiss F.A. Hayek as some kind of paid corporate shill.  The second is his claim that “Nozick is arguing that economic rights are the only rights,” a claim so wildly disconnected from anything Nozick says that I’m left to wonder whether Metcalf actually read the book, or just skimmed the Wilt Chamberlain bit on the advice of a friend.

A little bit of context is needed to understand the point of the Wilt Chamberlain Argument. Nozick is taking issue with what he calls “patterned” conceptions of justice, which is to say, views on which the justice or injustice of a society’s economic arrangements can be discerned simply by looking at the distribution at a given moment. On the simplest such view, it might just be that everyone must have roughly equal shares—and so if you want to know whether the holdings in a particular society meet the standard of economic justice, you just have to look at what everyone has, and see whether it fits your criteria—which, of course, are on many theories substantially more complex than “equal shares for all.” Here Nozick sets up a dilemma for the advocate of a strongly patterned view. Suppose, he suggests, that whatever distribution you think just (whether it’s equal shares or something more convoluted) is realized in a miniature society. Enter Wilt Chamberlain:

Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams, being a great gate attraction. (Also suppose contracts run only for a year, with players being free agents.) He signs the following sort of contract with a team: In each home game twenty-five cents from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him. (We ignore the question of whether he is “gouging” the owners, letting them look out for themselves.) … Let us suppose that in one season one million persons attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain ends up with $250,000, a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone else has. Is he entitled to his income? Is this new distribution D2 unjust?

Nozick has deliberately set this up to be as unobjectionable a historical transition between distributions as can be imagined: The primary resource Chamberlain employs is his own body and talents, and the service he provides is by any reasonable standard a sort of luxury good, such that we’re inclined to see each individual decision to transfer a relatively small amount of money to Chamberlain as genuinely voluntary and free. Metcalf—because he utterly fails to comprehend what Nozick is doing, or how this argument fits into the larger structure of Anarchy State and Utopia—imagines that this is some kind of tricky rhetorical ploy, further loaded by making the hero African-American, and raising the spectre of the plantation for anyone who would deny him the fruits of his labor.  Actually, the failure is broader than that: Metcalf seems not to really get how thought experiments typically work in philosophy, or what their function is. Because after some snarky (and stunningly obtuse) remarks about the uselessness of thought experiments that don’t sufficiently resemble reality, he goes to great pains to point out that this ginned up example involving the natural talents of a basketball superstar isn’t exactly representative of most transactions in a market economy. He then goes to still greater lengths exploring how it might be that a thinker widely regarded as a dazzling intellect even within the rarefied air of Harvard could have imagined otherwise, and left out of his thought experiment all the complicating factors that are involved in real-world economies.

The answer, of course, is that he didn’t—that wasn’t the point. In the real world, we also don’t generally find ourselves confronted with elaborate assortments of runaway trolleys that can only be stopped by pushing fat men from footbridges. In the real world, you probably couldn’t actually keep it secret if you chopped up a healthy vagrant for organs to save five ailing patients, which would raise all sorts of complicating factors. Thought experiments are not supposed to be realistic, and as such they almost never suffice on their own to yield a determinate practical conclusion on questions of ethics, let alone political philosophy. Their purpose is to strip away complicating factors by stipulation in order to get down to bare principles, usually to resolve one narrow type of abstract question by artificially isolating it, as variables are isolated in a laboratory experiment. Nozick is here setting up a dilemma: Under these idealized circumstances, from what is stipulated to be a perfectly just starting distribution by your preferred theory, a series of free choices yield a very different, and much more unequal pattern. On what we might call a strictly or strongly patterned theory, then, Nozick observes that a highly counterintuitive conclusion follows: That from a perfectly just starting point, we quickly progress to an unjust state by a series of moves themselves involving no apparent injustice, but only people’s voluntary deployment of the holdings to which your favorite pattern theory entitles them. Alternatively, one’s preferred pattern might be loose enough to permit this transfer without dubbing it unjust—in which case one acknowledges that a pattern is not all there is to it, and one must know something about the history of holdings and transfers, not merely the overall distribution, to know whether it meets standards of justice.

Metcalf seems to imagine that this four-page argument—which occurs about a third of the way through a long, dense, and in places somewhat technical book—is in itself supposed to establish the injustice of taxation and redistribution, or the justice of real-world holdings arising from existing markets. Would that political philosophy were so easy! It’s not supposed to do that at all, of course: It is meant to develop an abstract point about the inadequacy of a certain (purely patterned) way of conceiving the criteria for evaluating the justice of property holdings. Maybe the Internet has so attenuated our attention spans that Metcalf can’t quite grok the idea that a single thought experiment might not be meant to fully justify an entire sociopolitical system in the span of four pages, but serve to establish a single lemma in a much longer sustained argument—albeit one riddled with gaps by Nozick’s own admission. In his defense, I should add that I think some of Nozick’s admirers sometimes take the Chamberlain argument to prove rather more than it does. Still, next time Slate decides it wants to try to take down one of the giants of 20th century philosophy, they might consider recruiting someone else and let Metcalf stick to his beat analyzing Lady Gaga and Teen Wolf, which seems likely to be more entertaining and a lot closer to his speed.

Here’s the difference, very roughly, in case this sounds like semantic hairsplitting. To say someone deserves X is to say that X is in some sense an appropriate or fair reward in light of that person’s morally virtuous qualities or conduct. To say that someone is entitled to X is just to say that the person has a just claim to X, without any implied commitment to some deeper claim about their moral merit. One could fill a book trying to spell the difference out in a rigorous way, but I’ll assume it makes intuitive sense to most people at the conceptual level, whether or not we agree on the proper application of each term. But to pick examples I think folks would generally agree with: someone who makes a heroic effort to stop a purse snatcher might deserve a reward without being entitled to any particular amount (unless the law has created some kind of “Samaritan bounty” to incentivize this sort of thing), while someone who wins a raffle or lottery doesn’t deserve the prize money (they didn’t do anything special relative to everyone whose number didn’t come up) but is nevertheless entitledto it, insofar as the organizers promised that amount to a ticket purchaser chosen by some specified procedure. If we wanted to be cute about it, we could say desert is about your due, and entitlement is about what you’re due.

Again, without trying to make a very rigorous case in the span of a blog post, I think political and policy discussions should concentrate on what people are entitled to, rather than on necessarily muddy attempts to determine (and embed in law) what people morally deserve. For one, the latter question is likely to implicate contested and metaphysically fraught ideals of virtue and (to use the Rawlsian jargon) “conceptions of the good” between which a liberal state ought to be neutral. How morally meritorious is a particular occupation? In what sense do people “deserve” their natural capacities, or the dispositions and habits inculcated into them as children? And of course, absent a sort of happy Liebnizian coincidence, desert will often tend to be in conflict with other sources of entitlement—such as what people have freely agreed to, or what would incentivize more wealth creation—which means making desert a criterion will often involve sacrificing other (I’d say less dubious) values. In case my suspicious progressive readers are inclined to read this as some kind of sneaky attempt to rig the debate in favor of libertarian principles of economic justice, I should note that I’m not seeking to rule out any particular view about what people might be entitled to—maybe including very generous government benefits. I always find it strange and slightly grating, actually, when people say that people “deserve” healthcare or a good education or some minimal standard of living: Usually, the claim being advanced is that these are things we morally ought to have just because we are persons (or at least members of a particular society that can afford these benefits), which seems like the ultimate case of something that is not “deserved.” Language gets tricky here: We sometimes talk as though the only options are that people “deserve” X, or alternatively they are “undeserving of” X, implying that they ought to be denied it. As I hope is clear, though, I assume people will often be entitled to things they don’t deserve—like the two working eyes I was just fortunate enough to be born with.

My impression, incidentally, is that the facially similar economic views of libertarians and conservatives are often distinguished by the extent to which they rely on appeals to desert. Libertarians generally have two broad types of reasons for favoring a free-market system, which countenances potentially quite large inequalities, without a great deal of redistribution: First, they think the incentives and decentralized coordination this system produces generate much more wealth for the society as a whole over the long run. Second, they think it’s an important way of respecting people’s free choices and agreements (given, of course, a bunch of controversial assumptions about the conditions under which a choice counts as “free” and the scope of our rights over physical stuff, as opposed to the added value human effort imbues that stuff with).

Conservatives will say those things too, but it seems to me they’re far more likely to rely heavily (primarily?) on the idea that wealth is a deserved reward for hard work, ingenuity, prudence, and whatever other virtues they ascribe to the rich—while the poor must similarly deserve their lot by dint of being lazy, dissolute, and so on. (I occasionally get the impression that certain progressives hold a kind of antimatter version of this rather Calvinist view, with wealth a symptom of intrinsic vice and poverty a sign of the elect—which seems at least as implausible as the conservative version.) To the extent this view is wrong, it has the morally ugly effect of salting with blame a wound acquired through misfortune or injustice—but also of introducing incendiary judgments of personal virtue into a discussion where they’d best be left aside. It’s easy for arguments about incentives to blur into moralized rhetoric about “rewarding” virtue or vice, but we might have a slightly less debased political discourse if we could talk about economic policy without having to commit to a view about the personal virtue or moral worthiness of different groups of people.

Addendum: The justly ridiculed Tasini v. HuffPo suit might be a good case study in the pitfalls of blurring the distinction. Do the folks who contributed free content to the site–presumably because they wanted a high-profile platform to promote themselves and/or their ideas–”deserve” a share of the profit the site earned? Geez, I don’t know. Tasini’s own filing shows that the vast majority of his posts didn’t attract many comments or retweets, and he was an otherwise pretty obscure political candidate and author, so the odds are decent that he got more out of the arrangement than HuffPo did. But we could argue about who deserves what forever. The question of what everyone is entitled to, by contrast, is pretty dispositively settled by the fact that he agreed to write blog posts without pay, and then freely chose to produce a couple hundred of them anyway.

Addendum II: Since John Holbo clearly didn’t believe me when I said this wasn’t some kind of Trojan Horse libertarian argument, let me be a little more explicit: Aside from not being dependent on our assessment of the moral merit of particular individuals or groups, “entitlement” as I’m using it here is really meant to be neutral between a pretty wide variety of positions about distributive justice. What people are entitled to could be determined by (a set of more specific rules conditioned by) John Rawls’ difference principle. Or Ronald Dworkin’s “equality of resources.” Or everyone could be entitled to precisely equal shares of social output, if that’s how you like to roll. I, of course, do not roll thus—but that’s not baked into this particular distinction.

Also, I hoped it would be obvious that I didn’t intend to use “entitled” in a purely positive or descriptive way (though I can see how the examples I picked might give that impression), since of course we’re partly talking about debates over what the law should be—a question where asking what someone is legally entitled to is, of course, pointless. I have my off moments, but I’m not a total halfwit.

[F]or all the horrors of the current recession it’s been managed much better than the Great Depression of the 1930s was. Progress is happening. The only way to make more rapid progress on the science of macroeconomic stabilization would be to have many more recessions so as to gather better data. Paul Krugman emphasizes that to understand the problems facing the American economy today you have to focus on the special economic properties of a large economy in an liquidity trap. But (fortunately), human history isn’t littered with examples of such a situation, so it’s challenging for him to compile a quantity of data sufficient to persuade all of his colleagues.

This isn’t a perfect analogy, but the problem made me think of forest management, it’s long been understood that attempting to wholly prevent forest fires is usually a bad idea—the dry growth builds up until the fires you don’t manage to prevent quickly rage out of control, to far more devastating effect. Instead, we have periodic “controlled burns.” I suppose live vaccination is another example of the same idea: Deliberately expose enough of the population to a weak pathogen at staggered intervals (sometimes causing mild symptoms) and a serious epidemic becomes much less likely. (Though this, too, creates the same trade-off a level up: When an epidemic does happen, the society that’s done a good job at prevention may be ill-equipped to respond.)

Obviously, it would be perverse for any number of moral and practical reasons (not to mention a political non-starter) to suggest deliberately creating small economic crises, whether the purpose was to gather data, experiment with different policy responses, or create some kind of general vaccine effect (whatever that might mean). But it might be worth counting this as one possible cost of policy designed to preserve macroeconomic stability. The nature of the problem, alas, is that it’s probably impossible to estimate the magnitude of the cost very well, precisely because you don’t the counterfactual.

Perhaps the most obvious problem with balancing metaphors is that they suggest a relationship that is always, by necessity, zero sum: If one side rises, the other must fall in exact proportion. Also implicit in balancing talk is the idea that equilibrium is the ideal, and anything that upsets that balance is a change for the worse. That’s probably true if you’re walking a tightrope, but it clearly doesn’t hold in other cases. If you have a perfectly balanced investment portfolio and somebody gives you some shares of stock, the balance is upset (until you can shift some assets around), but you’re plainly better off—and would be better off even if for some reason you couldn’t trade off some of the stock to restore the optimal mix.

In my own area of study, the familiar trope of “balancing privacy and security” is a source of constant frustration to privacy advocates, because while there are clearly sometimes tradeoffs between the two, it often seems that the zero-sum rhetoric of “balancing” leads people to view them as always in conflict. This is, I suspect, the source of much of the psychological appeal of “security theater”: If we implicitly think of privacy and security as balanced on a scale, a loss of privacy is ipso facto a gain in security. It sounds silly when stated explicitly, but the power of frames is precisely that they shape our thinking without being stated explicitly.

There’s a deeper problem, though: Embedded in the idea of the scales is a picture of a process for arriving at sound decisions—which if the metaphor is sufficiently pervasive we may come to think of as the only method for making sound decisions. A scale is a machine for reducing diverse objects—or in the metaphor, interests and values—to a single shared dimension. You might have items as varied as toasters and giraffes on the opposing plates of the scale, but all the scale cares about—or all we care about when we employ it—is that they both have weight and mass. Every other difference between the items in the balance is irrelevant so long as they have this one shared property, this one dimension along which they intersect, which allows us to quantify each in terms of the other.

If you think about the cases in which we employ balancing rhetoric, though, it’s often unclear just what this shared dimension is supposed to be. Sometimes that implicit dimension seems to be the universal currency of happiness or utility—the ultimate good that more concrete values like privacy or utility are presumed to serve. But often the imaginary scales conjured by balancing talk conceal the fact that we don’t have a clear sense of what that shared dimension is supposed to be, what single quantity is supposed to serve as our standard for comparing such heterogenous goods. The jurist or political philosopher who assumes a scale—perhaps without realizing he’s doing so—may be rather like the economist in the old joke who begins by assuming a can opener.

Paradoxically, this may make disagreement seem more intractable than it really is. We often say that even when people are agreed on the facts, they may “assign different weights” to competing values, which if we really did have a single agreed upon scale or dimension along which to balance, could only be understood as some kind of irreducible brute preference.

The distortion is magnified if the values we hope to “weigh” are not just qualitatively different from each other, but internally plural or diverse. Legal scholar Dan Solove, for instance, argues forcefully that “privacy” is not a monolithic value defined by any singular essence, but a cluster concept defined instead by overlapping family resemblances. (The classic example from Wittgenstein is the idea of a “game,” instances of which range from football to chess to Myst to the unstructured pretend-play of Cops and Robbers.) In Solove’s schema, privacy encompasses an array of quite different interests: Colloquially speaking, we recognize that one’s privacy may be violated by physical intrusion on the seclusion of the home, by the disclosure of sensitive or embarrassing personal facts, by the denial of autonomy to make intimate medical or sexual decisions, by the mere knowledge that one’s actions (even one’s “public” actions) are being systematically monitored and recorded, by having one’s image (again, even an ordinary photograph snapped on a public street) plastered on billboards and television without one’s consent. The point is not, of course, that the law should forbid all these things; merely that we find it perfectly intelligible to describe each as, in some sense, an incursion on privacy.

Even bracketing the zero-sum framing problem, think about how squeezing all these dimensions of privacy on to a unidimensional metaphorical scale tends to flatten the debate, at least outside the context of the scholarly journals inhabited by folks like Solove. Obviously, we need to use shorthand terms like “privacy” and “security” to keep discussion manageable, but is it really especially illuminating to treat every proposed security measure as though its consequences can be reduced to quantity subtracted from an undifferentiated lump of privacy stuff, and a quantity added to a blob called security? The task of analysis is always aided when we can render heterogeneous interests more easily comparable by reducing them to some uniform measure, of course, but balance metaphors imply that we’ve already achieved this. This may be why so many legal opinions employing “balancing tests” feel so thin, and so many arguments about where to “strike the right balance” between competing values founder. The metaphor assumes a lot of analytic background work that hasn’t actually been done—and conceals the fact that it still needs to be.

Ned ends with this thought:

So perhaps the only way to directly experience the existence of an omnipotent God is to be that God.

Actually, this strikes me as posing some parallel epistemic problems—as illustrated, by the by, in a delightful bit of short fiction from Robert Nozick.  Suppose you’re God: How can you be sure you’re omnipotent? Perhaps you can accomplish anything you can imagine in your own corner of reality—a lucid dreamer can say that much—but there’s some greater reality you’re not even aware of in which, like the dreamer wakened, you’d have no such power. Or maybe even within reality as you know it, there are gaps in your power you aren’t aware of because you can’t even think of the relevant tests. The obvious response is that you’d know all these things because you’re omniscient—but of course, the same problem arises. How do you know you’re really omniscient? At most, there might not be any questions you’re aware of being unable to answer—but that’s hardly the same thing. The subjective feeling of omniscience might in fact be a symptom of a profound ignorance—being unaware even of the existence of those domains of knowledge you lack. How, for that matter, do you know the answers are right? This is a particularly thorny problem when combined with omnipotence: If reality is whatever you decide it is, does it even make sense to speak of true or false beliefs? Beliefs, after all, are supposed to be true or false of an independent reality.

I am not, of course, a believer, but if I were, I’d prefer to imagine a deity occasionally plagued by these thoughts—an agnostic God who sometimes doubts Himself.