The minimal state: is anything more extensive than the night-watchman state morally justified?

Robert Nozick, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The minimal state is the most extensive state that can be morally justified. Anything more — a redistributive state, a welfare state, a paternalist state — violates the rights of persons by using some as means to others' ends.¹ The argument runs in two stages. The first stage shows that even a minimal state can emerge from anarchy without anyone violating anyone's rights, by an invisible-hand process in which rational individuals form protective associations that compete and consolidate into a dominant association morally indistinguishable from a minimal state.²

The second stage shows that any state more extensive than this requires coercive transfers from some persons to others that no consent has authorized — and that no patterned theory of distributive justice can warrant such coercion without treating persons as means rather than as ends in themselves. The night-watchman state — providing protection against force, theft, and fraud, and enforcing voluntary contracts — is the maximum.³⁴

Sources

1. Hence, he concludes, the state itself is intrinsically immoral. The state grants that under some circumstances it is legitimate to punish persons who violate the rights of others, for it itself does so. How then does it arrogate to itself the right to forbid private exaction of justice by other nonaggressive individuals whose rights have been violated?

   Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 52

2. More precisely, we have partially explained in invisible-hand fashion the existence of the ultraminimal state. What is the explanation of how a minimal state arises? The dominant protective association with the monopoly element is morally required to compensate for the disadvantages it imposes upon those it prohibits from self-help activities against its clients.

   Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 119–120

3. Becoming clear about these complicated issues would require investigating them far beyond their marginal importance to our central concerns in this book.

   Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 149–150

4. It seems only fair to remind the reader that intellectual honesty has its dangers; arguments read perhaps at first in curious fascination may come to convince and even to seem natural and intuitive. Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth. The contents of this volume are its particular arguments; still, I can indicate further what is to come.

   Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. xi–xii

Where the argument is made

• Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Part I (the invisible-hand argument from anarchy to the minimal state) and Part II (the argument that nothing more extensive is justified)

How the argument was received

The structuring polarity of contemporary political philosophy since 1974 has been Rawls-versus-Nozick: the welfare-state egalitarianism of A Theory of Justice against the libertarian minimalism of ASU. The mainstream consensus in contemporary political philosophy is broadly Rawlsian; Nozick's position is the canonical principled opposition. Cohen's Marxist critique attacks the self-ownership thesis on which the entitlement theory rests; Nagel and Kymlicka have argued that side constraints cannot do the work Nozick demands. Sympathetic developers (Schmidtz, Lomasky) emphasize that the meta-utopian framework of ASU Part III is more pluralist than critics acknowledge.