{"agent_id":"nozick","agent_name":"Robert Nozick","slug":"the-minimal-state","label":"The minimal state: is anything more extensive than the night-watchman state morally justified?","topic":"The minimal state","question":"Is anything more extensive than the night-watchman state morally justified?","position":"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. 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. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The minimal state is the most extensive state that can be morally justified.","n":[1]},{"t":"Anything more — a redistributive state, a welfare state, a paternalist state — violates the rights of persons by using some as means to others' ends.","n":[]},{"t":"The argument runs in two stages.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[3]},{"t":"The night-watchman state — providing protection against force, theft, and fraud, and enforcing voluntary contracts — is the maximum.","n":[]}]],"texts":"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). Reception: John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), the dominant alternative; G.A. Cohen's Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995); Thomas Nagel's review of ASU in the Yale Law Journal (1975); Will Kymlicka's Contemporary Political Philosophy chapter on Nozick; Loren Lomasky's chapter on ASU Part III in Schmidtz's volume; the Hayek/Rothbard libertarian tradition Nozick reshaped.","works":["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)"],"reception":"John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), the dominant alternative; G.A. Cohen's Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995); Thomas Nagel's review of ASU in the Yale Law Journal (1975); Will Kymlicka's Contemporary Political Philosophy chapter on Nozick; Loren Lomasky's chapter on ASU Part III in Schmidtz's volume; the Hayek/Rothbard libertarian tradition Nozick reshaped.","status":"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.","era":"1938-2002","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Anarchy, State, and Utopia","page":"pp. 10–11","canonical":"","quote":"These issues and others are brought to bear in investigating the nature and moral legitimacy.of the state and of anarchy. Part I justifies the minimal state; Part II contends that no more extensive state can be justified. I proceed by arguing that a diversity of reasons which purport to justify a more extensive state, don't.","label":"Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 10–11"},{"n":2,"work":"Anarchy, State, and Utopia","page":"pp. 67–69","canonical":"","quote":"It does not constitute a violation of someone's rights to refrain from purchasing something for him (that you have not entered specifically into an obligation to buy). Hence, so the argument continues, when the state threatens someone with punishment if he does not contribute to the protection of another, it violates (and its officials violate) his rights.","label":"Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 67–69"},{"n":3,"work":"Anarchy, State, and Utopia","page":"pp. 161–164","canonical":"","quote":"The restrained are still somewhat disadvantaged, but no more than everyone else. A society is impoverished with regard to a preventive restraint if those restraining cannot compensate those restrained for the disadvantages they impose without themselves moving into position that is disadvantaged; that is, with- a out themselves moving into a position which would have been disadvantaged had only some persons been…","label":"Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 161–164"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-entitlement-theory","label":"The entitlement theory: is justice a matter of historical process rather than patterned distribution?"},{"slug":"taxation-as-forced-labor","label":"Taxation as forced labor: is taxation of earnings on a par with forced labor?"},{"slug":"side-constraints","label":"Side constraints: are rights structural limits on action rather than goals to be promoted?"},{"slug":"the-experience-machine","label":"The experience machine: is hedonism refuted by the fact that we want to do, not just to feel?"}]}