Nozick and the Natural Duty of Justice

Abstract

The two main rival theories of political legitimacy are Lockean consent theory and the Kantian natural duty theory. The Lockean theory says that a political organisation may only legitimately coerce if, inter alia, it is consented to by those it coerces. The Kantian theory says that we have a duty to the state because it is only through the state that we are able to extinguish our duties to respect one other’s freedom. Our obligation to the state is therefore not acquired through any voluntary act, but is rather naturally incumbent upon us. Robert Nozick’s libertarianism is famously Lockean, however, his justification for the state involves no affirmative act on the part of the governed. Instead, he offers an “invisible hand argument” in which we come to have an obligation to the state in virtue of the processes through which that state emerged, even though none of them involve our expression of consent. In this essay I will argue that Nozick’s argument, with a little reconstruction, is a far more plausible alternative to both Lockean philosophical anarchism and Kantian statism. It affirms the normative importance of even imperfectly just coercive institutions that all acknowledge deference to, whilst affirming the normative reality of our rights outside of those contingent institutions. What is missing in Nozick’s account is the assurance problem. Kant thinks that it applied to anarchy; actually it applies to all situations of distrust.