Does anyone know if Nozick deals with the problem in his Entitlement Theory that almost all property that currently exists would not meet his standard for legitimate property holdings, given that the property distribution has been influenced by war, and force without rectification.
Does Nozick set up a limit to his history condition in another piece of writing or in Anarchy, State and Utopia?
Does anyone know of a notable criticism of the problems with the practical applications of his entitilement theory? That is, one cannot defend the property one or someone else owns and has used no force to gain, because there were previous injustices that lead to this distribution of property.
Blech…I know there’s something good about historical injustice and Nozick, but I honestly can’t remember who it was; I can’t find it in Anarchy, State, and Utopia…ugh.
On property theory, the first thing to find out is if your school’s library (if you’re at a university) has a copy of Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate, edited by Hillel Steiner and Peter Vallentyne. If they don’t have it, you might check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on libertarianism, which was written by Peter Vallentyne and so has a distinctive left-libertarian slant. Specifically take note of the second part. The works cited section is sort of a laundry list of resources for dealing with this question, so that would be a good place to look as well.
A library at the University I go to has that book, so i will check it out. Thanks for the help. [:)]
The reason I was asking is because I am writing a paper on Nozick and Eminent Domain (specifically Kelo vs. New London) and when I asked my prof about this question he was unsure of the answer to the question that I posed.
On the relationship between states and their territories, you might be interested in Simmons’ “On the Territorial Rights of States” (jeez, that’s like the third time it’s come up in like a week!)
Yes, Nozick deals with the problem of rectification in Anarchy, State and Utopia [pp. 151-153 & pp. 230-231].
His entitlement theory is based on the application of three principles: justice in acquisition, justice in transfer, and recitifcation of past injustices. He understands the latter as an approximation of what would be the current state of the world if no injustice in acquisition or transfer had ever taken place. There is no time limit to the need to compensate for injustices.
In the absence of sufficient historical information to determine the exact distribution of holdings under just conditions, he suggests that some patterned principle of distribution (like Rawls 2nd principle) could be adopted as a “rough rule of thumb for rectifying injustices”. This being said, this wouldn’t end up justifying as radical a form of redistributivism as socialists advocate; and the chosen rule of thumb should always approximate as best as possible the outcome of a strict application of the principle of rectification, in the particular society in question.
Thanks for the reference to the second set of pages, I had found the first vague principle of justice in rectification in the cases of injustices in the distant past (comparing the current distribution with what the distribution would look like had those injustices not occurred), but had not found the second one, regarding the possible use of a patterned principle.
Just remembered something! From David Schmidtz’s Elements of Justice:
What can a historical theory say about a world where few titles have an unblemished history? Or perhaps that is simply how it is; like it or not, there is no way from here to a world where distributions are just. Either way, Nozick may have been mistaken in seeing himself as addressing the topic of distributive justice, since his theory wants to go in a different direction. That is, his theory is about justice as how we treat each other rather than justice as cleansing the world’s distribution of original sin.
In other words…Nozick’s real claim should not be that a distribution is just if it arises from just steps from a just initial position. When Nozick said this, he obscured his real contribution. In truth, Nozick has a theory of just transfer, not a theory of just distribution: Roughly, a transfer from one person to another is thoroughly just if thoroughly voluntary. The theory ultimately is not so simple, but this is its true essence.
Voluntary transfer cannot cleans a tainted title of original sin, but any injustice in the result will have been preexisting, not created by the transfer. We are fated to live in a world of background injustice, all of us descended from both victims and victimizers, so it is a virtue of Nozick’s theory that it does not pretend we might achieve perfect justice if only we can “even the score.” Still, it remains possible for moral agents, living ordinary lives, to abide by Nozick’s principle of just transfer, and to that (admittedly imperfect) extent to have clean hands.
Damn right about the voluntayr transfers bit… but corrective justice isn’t distributive justice; hence, Nozick can deal with the first without having to accept any claim on the latter’s basis. Incidentaly, it is a point he also raises himself in relation to procedural rights and the emergence of the minimal state.
Agreed. Taking the point a step further, Hayek wrote in “The Atavism of Social Justice:”
“…there can be no distributive justice where no one distributes. Justice has meaning only as a rule of human conduct, and no conceivable rules for the conduct of individuals supplying each other with goods and services in a market economy would produce a distribution which could be meaningfully described as just or unjust. Individuals might conduct themselves as justly as possible, but as the results for separate individuals would be neither intended nor foreseeable by others, the resulting state of affairs could neither be called just or unjust.”
He deals with this almost immidiatley after his theory is postulated. If I remember correctly, the uncertainty of historical pasts combined with just transfers that occured after the justice, “dillute” the damaged parties’ claim to where it cannot be determined after a while (a generation or two) so that it would become an “unpatterned” distribution that would satisfy no one, as the first requirment for any distribution to be accepted is it to be consistently patterned.
