It is fair to say that Nozick’s adaptation of Locke’s famous proviso regarding the just original appropriation of property serves as the linchpin of his “entitlement theory” of justice. By conditioning just acquisition on the satisfaction of certain criteria, Locke sought to show that the system of property rights he envisioned would not worsen the situation of non-appropriators. In an earlier post I explain that Nozick interpreted Locke’s construct to include a “historical shadow” following property from owner to owner, and show that this enables him to resolve what might otherwise be fatal objections to his view regarding the stringency of property rights.
The key insight is that Locke’s proviso regarding the original appropriation of property is grounded in the concern that such acquisition not violate any other party’s natural right of self-preservation. Given this perspective, we need not resort to a particular, hypothetical welfare baselines to judge whether a system of capitalist property rights is worsening the plight of others. Ultimately, any such baseline is arbitrary. Rather, we should look to the proviso itself for guidance.
This perspective has profound implications for libertarian policy regarding poverty relief, which I explore in Chapter 6 of my Nozick’s Libertarian Project. After outlining this proposal, I rebut Jonathan Wolff’s criticisms. I reproduce below a near final draft of this portion of Chapter 6 (pp. 139-41).
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Rather than formulating a welfare baseline for the disadvantaged based on a comparison of an entitlement-based system with one based on an alternative model of property, I believe that a libertarian standard of justice for the innocent needy can and should be derived from considerations internal to the Entitlement Theory. As argued in the previous section, the moral legitimacy of Lockean appropriation is grounded in a natural right of self-preservation, but one subject to the equal rights of others. There, we showed that a system of property rights based on this principle does not include the “right” to deny innocent persons life-saving access to property in exigent circumstances. On the same logic, the right of original appropriation comes attached with certain potentially broader obligations to innocent non-appropriators.
These obligations arise from the fact that the institution of secure private property takes all other forms of (non-capitalist) property ownership off the table. By doing so, it eliminates certain liberties only available to people in a state of nature, e.g. to graze ones cattle on the commons, the freedom to travel without having to contend with fences and trespass laws, etc.[1] While most members of society will benefit from this transformation, some might not, and they did not get to choose.
Nozick acknowledges that those persons for whom the advantages of life under capitalism do not outweigh the loss of liberty incurred thereby are entitled to compensation. (see ASU, 178-79n). This rationale does not require us to select (without justification) a particular counterfactual welfare baseline for the “losers” under an entitlement-based system. Rather, we can view the requirement of a guaranteed minimum as the appropriate moral deference owed to persons for having been involuntarily thrust into the entitlement system. In this light, it is reasonable, I believe, to view the appropriators’ commitment to provide a social safety net as a condition precedent for privatization to proceed.
This interpretation of Nozick’s views is consistent with his justification for modifying property rights in the “all the water in the desert case.” There he notes that he is not asserting that the monopolist’s rights are overridden by other, external considerations, such as positive claims by others to the water. Rather, “Considerations internal to the theory of property itself, to its theory of acquisition and appropriation, provide the means of handling such cases.” (ASU, 180-81). Similarly, we are not claiming here that the innocent needy under capitalism have some independent right to assistance, but instead have it as a condition of Lockean appropriation.
Jonathan Wolff expressly considers the possibility that minimal welfare benefits are an implication of the Locke/Nozick model of appropriation.[2] He levels two criticisms against the idea that this feature of original appropriation rebuts the claim that Nozickian libertarianism is an implausibly cruel theory of justice. First, he notes that, there will be those who will not be covered by the social safety net because their situation arises not from being deprived of the liberties they enjoyed in the pre-property world, but because of their own irresponsibility. Accordingly, he says, “the undeserving poor, whose plight is the consequence of their own fecklessness, would have no claim even on the surplus of others.”[3]
In response, I claim that the distinction drawn here between the deserving and undeserving poor is a verdict of our ordinary moral consciousness. Claims of assistance by children and responsible persons exert a significantly greater normative pull on us than those asserted by irresponsible individuals. In fact, even most egalitarian-minded theorists make this distinction.[4] This is not to say that the affluent should ignore the suffering of the irresponsible, merely that the case for coercing such support is dramatically weaker.
Second, Wolff suggests that if we interpret the Lockean proviso in the way described above, it would “severely weaken Nozick’s claim to have produced an entirely unpatterned theory.”[5] But although Wolff’s comment is undoubtedly correct, I am unclear as to why this should count as a defect in Nozick’s theory of justice. Nowhere does Nozick assert that we should prefer an unpatterned to a patterned theory simply on this basis. Rather, the former is to be preferred because it alone instantiates the Entitlement Theory. Obviously, Nozick’s theory rests on the formulation of a satisfactory principle of “justice in acquisition.” Since the interpretation of the Lockean proviso just described would shape this principle in a way consistent with both its underlying values and with commonsense morality, this modification can hardly count against the Entitlement Theory.
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[1] See Gibbard, “Natural Property Rights.”
[2] See Wolff, Robert Nozick, 111.
[3] Ibid.
[4] See Gosepath, “Equality,” sec. 3.6; Holtug and Lippert-Rasmussen, “Introduction to Contemporary Egalitarianism,” 18; and Barry, Modern Political Theory, 258-59.
[5] Wolff, Robert Nozick, 111-12.
