I’m happy to see something good came of that silly Stephen Metcalf hit on Robert Nozick: The smart folks over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians have decided to form a sort of online book club to reread Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In the first section, Nozick attempts to show how a (minimal) government could arise from an anarcho-capitalist state of nature, even on quite optimistic assumptions about most people’s commitment to respecting the sort of libertarian rights advocated by someone like Murray Rothbard. This is very much a historical argument geared to showing what would really happen under highly favorable circumstances—as opposed to a kind of thought experiment meant to reflect an ideal bargain, and thereby help identify principles of justice. Since, of course, we know that existing states didn’t arise this way, many readers have wondered just what all this is supposed to prove. As Nozick himself later observes, a thief is hardly justified by the observation that, after all, his victim could have voluntarily made a gift of the stolen property. Expressing a similar thought, Jason Brennan writes:

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.

(1) One of my first thoughts upon getting my hands on an iPad was: “You know, once they get a camera in this thing and come up with a well-tailored group video chat client, this could really change the way people socialize.” At present, in-person, face-to-face socialization and digital communication with people not present are inherently sort of at odds. We’ve made them a little more compatible by limiting the extent to which the virtual interaction pulls you out of the physical one—so instead of excusing yourself to answer a call or a GChat, you can just glance down at your phone and, at a convenient moment, tap out a quick reply to a text or a tweet. Google’s circle-based “Hangouts” (and it’s vital that you can quickly and easily launch a video “room” open just to one or another of your preselected groups) combined with camera-enabled tablets open the door to a way of integrating the two. Potentially, the tablet becomes a sort of wandering window—a Stargate, if you want to be extra geeky about it—between not just individuals, as with your standard Skype chat, but between two or more groups of physically co-located people. Popular as Skype is for certain purposes—grandparents who want to see the new baby, partners in long-distance relationships—most of us don’t make a whole lot of use of videoconferencing for the same reason lots of us prefer text based asynchronous chat to phone calls: It tends to demand your full attention for a fixed period of time, except it’s even more intrusive and demanding than a phone. Making it mobile at a suitable-for-public-viewing size changes things, in a way because it changes the norms around it. You won’t necessarily be expected to give your full attention as you would to a person-to-person call. Instead, the use could be more like ordinary physical socialization at a party: Maybe you notice a friend passing by the “window” and strike up a conversation for a bit, maybe someone else joins in—but then maybe it just sits “open” for a while as you flit off to talk to other people. Everyone’s more comfortable opening the channel and leaving it active because it’s not making the same kind of demands as a phone call.

So, for instance, maybe I’m having a beer with a couple neighbors on my porch, a bunch of other folks are across town where a BBQ I plan to swing by later is getting into gear, and another friend is stuck in a hotel room in the Midwest on a reporting trip and doesn’t want to totally miss out. Most of us are probably talking to our co-located people, but the experience is shared without anyone having to retreat from socialization to tap at their phones. If I want to know when a critical mass of folks I know have arrived at the BBQ, there’s no need to keep checking Twitter, and no need for them to go out of their way to announce their arrival—I just notice out of the corner of my eye that folks are there and, hey, maybe it’s time to hop a bus over. Our friend in the hotel can do his work, but also perhaps welcome the occasional distraction as a friend walk by the Stargate and checks in. Could be a short-lived fad, but I think it could also be as socially normal, in the relatively near future, to have social gatherings connected by virtual windows as it is to text friends about what you’re doing.

(2) The feature most immediately likely to be useful is huddle, which facilitates more conventional text/IM style communication with a select group in a kind of mobile-friendly chat room—handy when you’re trying to coordinate plans with a dozen people.

I note though, that there may be some interesting side effects of integrating virtual social networks more closely into actual socialization. With social circles—as opposed to Circles—the boundaries are fuzzy and ad-hoc. Even among a somewhat well-defined group of friends, it’s always somewhat a matter of happenstance which particular subsets of people end up communicating and making plans on any given day. A person may gradually drift out of touch with once circle and into another in a gradual and almost imperceptible way, ideally with no hard feelings on either side.

Making it technologically easy to communicate with groups means that, for activities involving more than a relative handful of people, that technology becomes more likely to be the default mechanism of interaction. Individuals will define their own Circles, but there will be a tendency toward convergence. But these aren’t fuzzy-bordered circles, they’re Circles in which membership is really an either-or. I wonder if we won’t find ourselves feeling the need to make uncomfortably explicit, conscious decisions about who’s in the “folks I meet for drinks after work” or “always invited to parties” group—which seems rather more freighted than the question of who happened to get asked to come out for a specific round of drinks or a particular party.. People, of course, don’t see which circles anyone else has included them in, but to the extent they’re the basis of actual group interaction, it should be readily apparent to everyone quickly enough who is and isn’t part of the conversation. I’m guessing this sets up some potential awkwardness as people figure out how to navigate all that.

(3) Finally, as Mike Masnick observes, some people are already worrying about a potential privacy “loophole” in G+: Items shared with one “circle” can, by default, easily be RE-shared by the members of that circle. I agree with Mike that it’s weird to treat this as some kind of disturbing privacy violation on Google’s part: After all, in general, everything we share with one set of friends might be shared by them with others. Something you say in conversation might be repeated; a photo you e-mail can be forwarded. Normally, the solution is to ensure that your friends know when you don’t want a specific bit of informatoin shouted to the four winds.

That said, a lot of privacy has more to do with ease of information sharing than whether it’spossible, and more to do with the clarity of norms than explicit prohibitions. Someone could copy the contents of a private e-mail (or, by hand, the contents of a private letter) and forward it to hundreds of friends. But that would be both effortful and rude. If I share a photo with my “Friends” circle, I realize they could save and reupload it if there’s not sharing functionality built in… but they’d have to be big jerks (and ergo probably not “Friends”) to make the effort to do so, in particular if I’ve signaled via my settings that I don’t expect these pictures to be more widely circulated.

It’s not a question of Google “violating my privacy,” which is the unhelpful frame of stories about social networks much of the time. But what Google can do is facilitate social signalling about the information norms we expect friends, peers, and colleagues to respect. On most Twitter clients, for instance, while you can always copy-and-paste text into a retweet, the one-click retweet button is inactive for tweets from locked accounts. Obviously, that doesn’t literally prevent anyone from sharing a message on a private feed—it just means it’s hard to do it thoughtlessly, and the very fact that you’ve got to take the unusual extra step of doing it manually reminds you that, hey, your friend doesn’t actually expect this stuff to be more widely distributed. Increasingly, I think, having “good privacy practices” as a social networking site isn’t going to be so much about what the site does with your information (important as that is), or even about the literal control they give you—since “control” over information in any really strong sense is always pretty chimerical—but how fluidly and organically they allow us to establish norms and articulate expectations about how our peers will use the information they have access to.

Notwithstanding the stereotype that libertarians care about little other than low taxes, I don’t write much about tax policy. But I was reflecting today on Nozick’s coyly Marx-inflected comparison of taxation to compulsory or stolen labor—which however overblown as rhetoric got me thinking about how different types of people might respond to the same tax incentives differently. Often you’ll hear opponents of high taxes make an Atlas Shrugged–style argument to the effect that people will be less productive if their take-home pay is decreased, diminishing their incentive to work ever harder for that marginal dollar. Perhaps unsurprisingly, proponents of higher taxes tend to associate that opposition with selfish materialism—the obsession of people with no higher concern than maximizing their bank balances.

But it seems perfectly plausible to me that tax incentives could work quite the other way as well. As a writer and geek, I’m surrounded by folks who could probably be making a good deal more money doing something else, but have chosen journalism or activism or wonkery because they enjoy it, find it interesting and important, and so on. Many people without particularly expensive tastes just want to find intrinsically enjoyable work that will allow them to maintain a middle class standard of living—and if that threshold is met, cannot easily be induced to trade leisure time, or the non-economic rewards of the job, for even relatively substantial sums of money. Folks like this, in other words, are income satisficers for whom the marginal utility of an extra dollar drops off quickly once they have enough to afford some fixed set of amenities. Those requirements can, of course, change over time: I’ll sometimes see a writer who was making a comfortable living writing as a childless single decide—perhaps with a twinge of regret—that with a baby on the way, that it’s time to take a higher-paying corporate job and open a college fund for Junior.

For folks like this, the conventional prediction about the effects of taxation may be quite reversed: Since they are highly motivated to achieve some relatively fixed acceptable income level (assuming the cost of sustaining their lifestyle remains constant), but their interest in money past that point drops off sharply, raising taxes may actually cause them to increase effort or productivity in order to keep hitting the same target they achieved with less work at the lower rate. Something similar might happen in a double-income household (assuming two satisficers with comparable thresholds): If they can make it on one income, they prefer that one partner stays home with the kids, or takes time out of the workforce pursuing a dream of starting a business or launching a new career or, hey, going on American Idol… even if they’d be substantially wealthier with two incomes.

If this is true of a significant number of people, it might sound like a great debating point for advocates of tax hikes: a too-good-to-be-true, tastes great and less filling combination of more tax revenue for the government and more economic productivity! But of course, the folks at the top of the income distribution—the ones paying the bulk of the taxes—are also most likely to be the ones who do care about making a lot of money, and most likely to have the accumulated wealth to sustain their lifestyles even if they are (or, as they age, have become) satisficers.

Intuitively, it’s lower down the ladder you’d expect to find to find the income satisficers whose behavior is more susceptible to being shifted by tax incentives in this way: People who, having met their income threshold (at the lower tax rate), were either taking a good deal of their “compensation” for their jobs in the form of the intrinsic satisfaction of the work, or who had opted for less-demanding jobs that left time for their hobbies or other projects. By the narrow criterion of GDP, this might seem like a good thing: You’re getting the slackers off their butts and mobilizing fallow productive capabilities! But it also seems a little more unsettling from a moral perspective, because it’s more clear that what you’re taking from people is time—time away from the people and projects they love. For the folks at the top, this might not be something we lose much sleep over: Don’t want to give up your leisure time? Well, settle for a marginally less opulent lifestyle (though the cost of that choice in GDP terms is also especially high). For satisficers in the middle whose tastes and expectations are more modest, though, that seems a little colder, because it’s more likely to force a choice between a significant sacrifice of personal time and job satisfaction or a more conspicuous drop in living standard.

Get further down the income ladder, of course, and the argument looks different: You’ve got people who may not be paying much in taxes (though, of course, everyone pays sales taxes) but might be getting by, thanks to public assistance, with one job (rather than having to look for a second, or for outside income), or as a student, or on unemployment while they look for a job that suits their skills rather than just taking the first one that comes along. This is, in fact, exactly the argument you sometimes hear for the benefit of a generous welfare state to creativity and entrepreneurship. In other words, your J.K. Rowlings and assorted indie rock bands can make it on the dole for a couple years while they hone their skills, rather than having to spend every spare hour scrambling to survive; the prospective entrepreneur can take a risk starting a small business without fearing he’ll be wiped out; the out-of-work programmer waits for the market to rebound so she can get a coding job instead of moving out of the Valley to work retail. At the bottom of the income ladder, of course, the whole satisfice/maximizer distinction becomes irrelevant, because pretty much nobody (maybe excepting a few extreme ascetics) “satisfices” in grinding poverty. The further down the ladder you go, the more likely it is that the people situated there would already be deploying any excess earning capacity if they had it—but some combination of market conditions and personal barriers to work just leave them without much choice. Under current economic conditions, that’s presumably a whole lot of people. Still, if you find the safety net argument plausible at the bottom, and a decent chunk of the population are satisficers, it seems similarly plausible that there’s a flip-side phenomenon corresponding to lower tax burdens as you move into the middle.

Maybe this is just my perception, but it seems as though—for all politicians gear their public rhetoric (as opposed to their policies and private assurances) to appeal to the middle class—arguments about tax policy and economic justice tend to focus on the extremes. That is to say, the super-wealthy and those who are just barely scraping by. Both are groups we tend to think of as earning about as much money as they possibly can—one by disposition, the other as a matter of necessity—which tends to reinforce a picture we have of people as income maximizers. But I bet that’s not a terribly accurate picture, and it would be interesting to see some empirical research geared toward figuring out just how much variation there is in our dispositions, and to what extent, especially in the broad middle, people are satisficers at one threshold or another, or tax-rate-insensitive maximizers, or who knows what all.

Talking more explicitly about the range of economic dispositions might make us more apt to think of taxation as much in terms of effects on time and satisfaction as on bank balances. It also might give a little pause to those of us who suspect we probably could be making a good deal more money doing less interesting work (or with less free time) than we currently do. Political ideology aside, I’m as likely as the next guy to feel distaste for the high earner who fails to give more than a pittance to charity and carps at higher taxes: It seems obvious someone that well off should be doing more to help the needy. But what about the journalist and the academic and the non-profit staffer who could be high(er) earners but prefer their compensation in the non-taxable form of leisure and job satisfaction? I don’t think I’d much like being a consultant or practicing corporate law, but I like to imagine that I could probably do one or the other competently, have a hell of a lot more income to transfer to the needy, and still keep a comparable or higher material standard of living. I don’t look as greedy as the guy who fails to share the wealth, because I’m deriving my utility from a less readily quantifiable and transferable source. But if that’s partly a matter of choice (it’s hard to say, since for all I know I’d actually be awful at better-paying professions) is there all that much moral difference between us? (Those of you who think “libertarian pundit” is already about as immoral as it gets, kindly restrain yourselves.)

What I’m calling varying dispositions (“satisficer” and “maximizer”), an economist might say are just arbitrary groupings of personal utility functions, or of indifference curves between income and other goods. And probably there’s already an economic literature elaborating (or falsifying!) with rigor and precision these various crude thoughts. But in popular discussion—and especially moral discourse and conversations about economic justice—it seems as though we more or less treat people as being a good deal more uniform than they are in their pursuit of income versus other goods. (Maybe because those conversations are mostly conducted by people who might be bothered by the ethical implications of acknowledging the gap between their potential and chosen-actual earnings?) For readers in search of the agenda shoe dropping: I haven’t thought it through enough to have a sense of whether it would tend to push us in a more or a less libertarian direction if we did take more explicit account of this kind of interpersonal variation. But it would probably be more interesting.

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.

Responding to yesteday’s post, Matt Yglesias argues that Stephen Metcalf is still kinda on point because, even if Nozick remained a libertarian on some grounds—maybe pragmatic or consequentialist ones—he nevertheless abandoned the deeper philosophical opposition to redistributive taxation that characterizes Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Matt does, however, back off when I point him to pages 281-282 of Nozick’s final (2001) book Invariances, where Nozick writes:

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.

In a piece over at Slate, Stephen Metcalf seems determined to prove that there’s nothing too fundamentally confused to be published on the site as long as it gets in a few good jabs at libertarians. My Cato colleagues Jason Kuznicki and David Boaz have already chimed in on the topic, but I wanted to add a couple comments of my own.  In part, as David notes, this is because I’m a great admirer of Robert Nozick, who I interviewed way back in 2001 as a student at NYU. A central contention of Metcalf’s rambling essay is that Nozick—whose influence outside the academy I think he probably overstates severely—eventually totally repudiated his old libertarian views.  But, as you’ll see in the interview—and can hear him say to me for yourself—Nozick always thought of himself as a libertarian in a broad sense, right up to his final days, even as his views became somewhat less “hardcore.” (Not terribly surprising: Like many people who continue to think of themselves as “libertarians,” my own views are a good deal less extreme than those of 1974-vintage Nozick, let alone someone like Murray Rothbard, but it’s still the closest fit for how I think.)  I see it had slipped off my site in one of the updates I’ve done over the years, until I reposted it today, but it’s been floating around the Web this whole time, and you’d think a little Googling might have turned it up.

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.

Yesterday over at Cato, I poked some fun at an ill-conceived boycott of the Huffington Post, which has committed the sin of (a) making money and (b) inviting an assortment of people to voluntarily contribute unpaid blog posts. Matt Yglesisas wrote a rather less snarky post similarly defending the practice, prompting a response from Erik Loomis with the bizarre premise that Yglesias—who has been making his living writing on the Internet for his entire professional life—is somehow unable to conceive of the Internet as a workplace. I think Loomis is the one who “doesn’t get it” here, but it may be instructive to unpack why. His guiding principle is that “large corporations have the obligation to pay workers for labor.” And there’s the rub: The Internet economy does tend to blur the lines between “work” and things that are done for pleasure, or at any rate, from motives other than monetary compensation. If your main mental point of reference is an industrial sweatshop, it’s easy to assume that this is some kind of cover for exploitation—downtrodden workers “agreeing” to work for subsistence wages because they have no other choice if they want to feed themselves. The trouble is that Loomis is trying to impose an industrial model, where people fall neatly into categories like “worker” and “employer” and “capitalist” on an Internet economy characterized by what Yochai Benkler calls “peer production.” At the heart of that model is the idea that lots of people, acting from motives other than direct expectation of monetary compensation, can produce enormous social surpluses in aggregate.

Consider open source software. It’s produced by hundreds or thousands of coders, many of whom are not paid directly for their contributions to the software they help produce—and which, because it’s often distributed at no cost, is an enormous economic benefit to (among others) corporations that might otherwise have to license software. Some contributions will be useful, others will not, but an evolutionary process will tend to preserve the improvements. If you shoehorn open source into an industrial model, all of those programmers might well look like exploited “workers.” But the genius of open source, as Benkler so ably explains, is that it allows a range of talents to be brought to bear on coding problems in a way that simply would not be possible if every individual coder had to be treated like an “employee” of the companies using that software. It works, in large part, because open source licenses allow anyone to take and use software with the assurance that individual contributors aren’t going to come along and demand their share of whatever profit their code helped generate. Creative commons does something similar for creative works, allowing authors to declare: Take this, use it, remix it, redistribute it, and (depending on the specific license) make money from it. Some of those authors just want to share their thoughts; some may be hoping to drive attention to their other endeavors (buy my book!) or raise awareness for a cause; still others may, indeed, hope that that exposure they get will lead to paying work down the road. It makes no sense, in this context, to just lump everyone together as “labor” just because some third party gets a benefit from the writing.

One odd aspect of Loomis’ argument is that, like a caricature of a Chicago School economist, he seems to want to insist that the economic motivation must really be the dominant one, though that actually seems pretty seriously implausible for the vast number of HuffPo writers who are clearly not young, unknown, aspiring writers—but rather established academics, celebrities, or activists. Here’s the reduction to the “cash nexus” for you: If some people write for money then all writing (at least if it appears in a for-profit publication) must be treated as “labor” and not truly voluntary or done for its own sake. As the existence of vanity presses shows, plenty of writers aren’t just willing to write for free, but will pay money to get their work out to an audience—maybe because they’re hoping for a lucrative deal with a conventional publisher down the line, but maybe because they just want someone to read what they have to say. Does anyone think we’d do those writers a favor by forbidding vanity presses from taking their money (and turning a profit)? Would it make a difference if the vanity press were paid, not by the author, but by an advertiser who stuck a flier in each book?

Even in the case of the aspiring writers who are hoping for a paycheck down the line, of course, “write free for exposure” (like “let a coffeeshop hang up your art for free might very well be a reasonable choice. Loomis’ argument relies—explicitly—on the paternalistic presumption that all those people are dupes, that their hopes are false, and that he knows better than they where and on what terms they ought to write. Hell, maybe they are: Lots of aspiring writers ultimately discover there isn’t a market for their work. But isn’t that up to them? It’s one thing to argue that a low-skilled worker with kids to feed and few employers to choose from isn’t really acting voluntarily when he “agrees” to low wages or poor conditions. But when that kind of argument isn’t pretty strictly limited to the most “coercive” types of circumstances, it risks meddling with people’s genuinely free choices.

The irony here is that it’s the unknown writers looking to get started who’d most likely lose out if HuffPo were bullied into only publishing paid content. Sure, they curate their blogs now, but they can afford to be relatively inclusive when it comes to the free writers—handing the keys to a large number of people and saying, in effect, “write as much or as little as you please.” If they’ve got to start paying people—which means administrative overhead on top of the actual fee for the writer—there’s a strong incentive to be more selective. So who gets cut? Not the “big names” Loomis says he’s not worried about, but the no-names who aren’t guaranteed to pull in traffic, or maybe the marginal paid staffer who’s no longer sufficiently subsidized by the ad revenue from the volunteer bloggers.

When Yglesias got started, I don’t think he planned to make a career of blogging. But it was easy for him to start a free Blogspot blog, because Blogger made their software and hosting service available so they could profit from running ads on all those free blogs—some of which were only ever read by a handful of people, some of which became wildly successful. Maybe Loomis is right, and it’s impossible for anyone starting out as a writer with a free, ad-supported blog to be the next Yglesias or Ezra Klein. Then again, maybe he’s wrong. Or maybe there are lots of people who benefit from sites like that who don’t want to be the next Yglesias—they’re just happy to have an audience, even if it’s a small one. Either way, I think we’re all better off having left the choice to those unpaid bloggers and their profit-seeking blog hosts rather than letting Erik Loomis decide, on the basis of his deep insight into writers’ motivations and the future of online media markets, what terms were acceptable.

I’m inclined to agree with Amanda Marcotte that the media feeding frenzy over Anthony Weiner’s extramarital sexting and online flirtation is unsettling insofar as it seems to abandon any pretense that some public nexus—lawbreaking, misuse of public authority, or at the very least a clear conflict with an official’s avowed political positions—is necessary to make a politician’s private misbehavior a fit subject of media attention. In a belated attempt to rationalize our collective prurience, some pundits are now suggesting that it’s relevant because either the underlying behavior or Weiner’s attempts to lie about it speak to his character and fitness for office.

As for the lying, I’m inclined to say that when you ask probing questions about someone’s sex life—and you’re not an active participant in said sex life—you generally shouldn’t feel entitled to expect an honest answer. Which means Weiner owes his wife an apology on that score, but not so much the rest of us. To be sure, Weiner shot himself in the foot here by claiming to have been hacked—and since “Congressman’s Twitter account hacked” is plainly a legitimate news story, one can hardly blame the press for following up and reporting on the falsehood of that claim. Exposing the falsehood was fair game, but the falsehood itself—insofar as it was directed at the public—I put in the same category as bowing out of a party because you’re “not feeling well” or “have a lot of work to get through” when you’ve actually had a raging fight with your partner, or have an appointment to get an embarrassing medical condition checked out. There are plenty of areas where most of us neither expect nor really desire complete honesty from friends and acquaintances, let alone public figures.

When it comes to the underlying behavior that story was concocted to cover, it seems to me there’s one person who’s clearly entitled to pass judgment, and I’m disinclined to usurp her prerogative. Megan McArdle sees a need for a round of public shaming lest we otherwise signal that this kind of infidelity is normal or acceptable. But this seems a bit presumptuous. Assuming they didn’t have some kind of understanding about this sort of thing, the wronged party here is Weiner’s wife. Maybe she considers it an unforgivable betrayal and is only waiting for the media glare to die down so she can file for divorce. Maybe she sees it more as a symptom of his sad, immature need for validation than a serious breach of the relationship. Most likely her reaction is somewhere in the wide terrain between those poles. Relationships are complicated, and people have wildly varied views about the types of sexual or emotional relationships outside marriage they’re prepared to tolerate, about a spouse’s verbal flirting or porn viewing, and so on. Either way, that’s her judgment to make, and I haven’t heard her issuing any public calls for the rest of the country to rally to her assistance in reinforcing norms of fidelity. I suspect that however she wants to deal with the issue, she’d rather do it behind closed doors than with the assistance of cable TV bobbleheads.

Finally, as Matt Yglesias points out, Weiner has a long track record as a public official which seems a lot more obviously relevant to evaluating his “character” qua public official than any of his virtual liaisons. Indeed, we’ve got half a century of social science that very strongly suggests that “character” is pretty domain specific. Which is to say, the fact that someone is scrupulously honest (or not) in their business dealings isn’t a very good predictor of how well they’ll behave in other contexts, and the fact that Weiner was deceitful about his electronic flirtations isn’t much of a guide to his integrity qua legislator, at least not relative to… his actual record as a legislator.

None of this is to say that Weiner’s behavior doesn’t deserve condemnation, just that I can’t see how—in the absence of a genuine nexus to his public powers and responsibilities—it’s the place of people outside Weiner’s immediate social circle to deliver it, and certainly not if the person with the strongest right to complain would just as soon resolve this one without our “help.”

Addendum: Tracy Clark-Flory’s over at Salon has somewhat related thoughts worth a read.

Our politics has gotten so crazy lately that we seem to have developed a standard form for designating conspiracy theories, just as we mechanically append -Gate to the scandal du jour: the “-er” suffix. You know, “Truther,” “Birther,” and now (for those who suspect Osama bin Laden may still be alive) “Deather.” I wonder whether this doesn’t create a deceptive equivalence.

Just to be crystal clear in advance: I assume that bin Laden was indeed shot and killed in the course of the Abbotabad raid as we’ve been told. That said, I don’t think someone who harbors doubts on this front is on par with people who spin wild fantasies about Obama’s Kenyan birth or George Bush’s role in the 9/11 attacks. Suppose Osama bin Laden had been captured alive and was being interrogated. It would be pretty much impossible to conceal the fact that the raid had occurred—at least from other high-ranking Al Qaeda operatives. But it might be desirable to conceal for as long as possible the fact that he had become a potential source of intelligence. The easiest way to do this would be to announce that he’d been killed in the raid—assuming that when the truth was ultimately revealed, most Americans would forgive a necessary deception. Again, I don’t think this is what happened. But in contrast with the Birther and Truther conspiracies, this hypothesis doesn’t require one to cling to a fantastic speculation, in the face of mountains of evidence and everything we know about human motivation.

I say all this only because it’s worth bearing in mind that there are sectors of the government whose legitimate function is to engage in, for lack of a better word, conspiracies. Probably this one is as false as the others, but it is worth resisting the suggestion that all doubts about official government narratives are equally nutty. There’s plenty of stuff in the Church Committee reports that sounds like the paranoid delusions of a tinfoil-hat wearer, except for the fact that it happened.

In a recent post, I suggested that claims about “desert” are generally misplaced in arguments about copyright—whether they are deployed on behalf of “deserving” small fry artists or against “undeserving” labels. As some commenters pointed out, there’s no obvious reason this argument should be restricted to the domain of copyright—and quite right. I think most areas of political philosophy and policy—theory of just punishment springs to mind as a possible exception—would be better off if we just scrapped the concept of “desert” entirely, and just spoke about what people are entitled to.

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.