Inequality and Nozickian Historical Justice

I’d like to summarise here a point I make at greater length in my piece “Left-Libertarianism, Class Conflict, and Historical Theories of Distributive Justice.”

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick famously criticises approaches to distributive justice that look at how resources are currently distributed without taking the past into account, and defends a more “historical” approach that assesses the justice of present-day distributions by looking to the causal process by which they arose.

A frequent objection to this historical approach is that it serves to legitimate existing massive inequalities of wealth. But is this true?

To be sure, the historical approach would legitimate these inequalities, if they had emerged by a series of just transfers from just original appropriations (or else from a series of transfers and appropriations whose injustices had all been properly rectified). But then it is equally true that, e.g., utilitarian and Rawlsian approaches would legitimate such inequalities, if the inequalities promoted social advantage (aggregate or mutual, respectively). So why is this hypothetical urged more strongly against the historical approach than against the utilitarian and Rawlsian approaches – especially since few people believe that the antecedent is satisfied in any of the three cases?

I suspect it is because of the widespread assumption that the historical approach, if strictly adhered to, would be likely to eventuate in a distribution of holdings broadly comparable to existing inequalities (even if the specific holdings would in many cases belong to different people from those they currently belong to). Even Nozick himself seems to think of his arguments as legitimating an economic landscape broadly comparable to our own; for while he insists that applying his historical principles of justice would probably require a radical redistribution of existing holdings – a point seldom stressed by either his defenders or his critics – he does not appear to envision its entailing any radical change in the overall structure of wealth distribution. (For example, he takes for granted that the implementation of his entitlement theory will involve the dominance of traditional “capitalist” firms – as opposed to, say, workers’ cooperatives.)

But what is distinctive about historical theories of a broadly Nozickian sort is not so much that they focus on the past as that they focus on means of acquisition, including not just past but ongoing acquisition. Given the extensive involvement of state violence in the process by which the corporate elite not only achieved its wealth in the past but continues to maintain and augment it in the present, it is clear that the massive inequalities of wealth that characterise present-day “capitalist” society are radically inconsistent with any approach to justice in holdings that is even remotely Nozickian.

Of course such inequalities can presumably be challenged on utilitarian and Rawlsian grounds too. But the advantage, as I see it, of the historical challenge to existing inequalities is that it lays bare the class structure of society, and the roots of such inequalities in state violence. Merely pointing to the fact that some people have a lot more than others is less compelling as a critique; it invites the response “So what? Those who have more aren’t hurting anybody; you’re just appealing to envy.” By contrast, being able to show that those who enjoy a higher socioeconomic status have to a considerable extent achieved and maintained that status by forcibly expropriating and oppressing the less affluent provides for a far more effective indictment.

My point is that the historical critique correctly identifies what is surely a morally relevant fact, and one that end-oriented critiques tend to ignore: namely, that in many, many cases those who have more are getting it at the expense of those who have less. Now of course utilitarian and Rawlsian approaches may also make the claim that, in some sense, those who have more have it at the expense of those who have less; but in order to substantiate that claim without appealing to historical (i.e. causal) considerations, they have to defend a baseline of equality. My present argument is not that such a defense is impossible, but only that the need to defend it places an additional and somewhat recondite burden on end-oriented challenges to inequalities – whereas the historical challenge, by identifying past and ongoing acts of violent expropriation rather than merely pointing to the existence of differential shares, provides a much more straightforward, intuitive, and unambiguous basis for condemning the present structure of wealth distribution in “capitalist” society.

For the fuller version of the argument I’ve just summarised, see here. For David Friedman’s criticisms of my argument, and my first stab at a reply, see here.