I’ll write a more serious post tomorrow. But here’s a little lighthearted fun.

Nozick is often interpreted as grounding his main arguments in Anarchy, State, and Utopia on self-ownership. People view him as making the following kind of argument, the Self-Ownership Implies Libertarianism Argument:

Every moral agent is a self-owner. To be a self-owner implies very strong, nearly absolute rights over one’s own body, as well as (under the right circumstances) strong rights to acquire, hold, and transfer property at one’s will. For the modern nation-state to produce (most) regulation, paternalistic laws, public goods, and social insurance, it has to violate these rights. Therefore, the modern nation-state is to that extent unjust.

Now, I think Nozick, as of writing ASU, does accept something like this argument. But at the same time, I think he recognizes that it’s controversial, and so doesn’t make much use of it. In fact, he doesn’t make much use of the concept of self-ownership at all.

The term “self-ownership” appears only once in ASU, on p. 172. (Try searching the text on Amazon to see for yourself.) In that passage, Nozick says that certain conceptions of distributive justice do seem to represent a shift from the classical liberal thought that people own themselves to a view that people have partial ownership rights in one another. You could delete this short paragraph from the book, and it would have little effect on the overall argument.

In contrast, the terms “self-ownership” or “self-owner” appear on nearly every page of G. A. Cohen’s famous critique of Nozick, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Perhaps Cohen overestimates the importance of the concept of self-ownership in ASU or in Nozick’s thought. Cohen certainly makes a bigger deal out of it than Nozick does. Granted, the fact that Nozick hardly mentions self-ownership by name doesn’t definitively prove self-ownership isn’t driving his argument. But if you read through the book again, you’d be surprised at how dispensable the idea of self-ownership is to Nozick. At any rate, I’ll try to show you this is true over the next few weeks or months.

It’s also worth noting that Nozick doesn’t talk much about freedom or liberty. He doesn’t seem overly concerned to defend a negative conception of liberty against a positive conception or anything like that. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t cite or mention Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” or mention negative vs. positive liberty.

So, take the following argument:

Liberty is the fundamental, most important value, which must be respected and promoted above all other values. Only negative liberty–understood as the absence of wrongful interference–is real liberty; positive “liberty”–the power to achieve one’s ends–is not really liberty. Only a libertarian minimal state or anarcho-capitalist society could fully respect liberty. Therefore, only a libertarian minimal state or anarcho-capitalist society can be fully just.

Now, again, perhaps Nozick accepts this argument. But, if he does, he seems to recognize that it would be controversial, and so it plays little to no role in his arguments in ASU.