A great deal of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is meant to respond to left-liberals.

Left-liberals think that each person has an extensive set of negative civil liberties, i.e., rights against interference from others in making personal decisions about what to wear, what to worship, what to read, and with whom to associate. But left-liberals think that the extent of our negative economic liberties should be determined on instrumental grounds, on the basis of whatever turns out, empirically, to produce socially just results. So, suppose it turned out that forbidding Catholicism somehow helped to realize the Difference Principle. Rawls would say that, nevertheless, we must not outlaw Catholicism. But suppose it turns out that forbidding joint-stock companies helped realize the Difference Principle. Rawls would say that’s sufficient reason to outlaw them.

Nozick asks, why treat economic liberty this way? Why think that the economic liberties are outweighed by concerns for social justice, but the civil liberties have priority over these concerns?

One of Rawls’s arguments has to do with the idea of “two moral powers”. I don’t think this argument can be made to work. See chapter 4 of Against Democracy or see the critique starting on p. 105 of this primer on political philosophy.

Nozick’s general method in ASU is, first, to list purported reasons that the left offers for downplaying economic liberty, second, to find parallel cases with civil liberties, and third, to ask why the left-liberal’s purported reason to limit economic freedom isn’t also a reason to limit civil freedom. What this reveals, in most cases, is that the left-liberal’s purported argument against economic liberty isn’t doing any real work for him. Rather, the left-liberal has already decided, on some other grounds, that economic freedom is less important that civil liberty.

To illustrate, here’s an excerpt from a draft of the book Bas and I are working on.

….consider the following analogy, which we borrow in modified form from Robert Nozick[i]:

Suitors

Suppose Robert and Steve both want to marry Gjertrud. Suppose Gjertrud goes on a date with both men, and decides to pursue a relationship with Robert. She prefers Robert’s better looks and keen intelligence. Suppose this leaves Steve devastated. He feels life is not worth living without Gjertrud’s love. He later dies miserable and alone.

Suppose someone suggested that Robert and Gjertrud owe Steve compensation for the harm they’ve done to him. Or suppose someone suggested that Robert or Gjertrud owed it Steve money to get plastic surgery done, or to take classes to improve his intelligence, so that he would find another marriage partner like Gjertrud. Or suppose that Steve insisted Robert get plastic surgery and brain damage to worsen Robert’s looks and cut his intelligence, and thus to give Steve an equal chance of winning Gjertrud’s heart. Or, suppose Steve lobbied his congressperson to prevent Gjertrud from being able to marry Robert, with the hope that Gjertrud will then marry him instead. Most of us would regard such suggestions as absurd or evil, even though Robert in some sense greatly “hurts” Steve by out-competing him, or though Gjertrud breaks Steve’s heart when she picks Robert over him.

  Nozick uses a thought experiment like this to point out something odd about how some left-liberals (and others) think. They often maintain that certain arguments or reasons justify restricting economic liberty, or, at more weakly, forcing those who do better under freedom to compensate those who do worse. For instance, someone on the Left might say, “Allowing competition on the market can hurt competitors, so we should restrict economic freedom or require winners to compensate losers.” But, Nozick points out, none of them would also say, “Allowing competition for friends and lovers can hurt competitors, so we should restrict freedom of association or require winners to compensate losers.”[ii]

This shows that many of the putative arguments the Left gives for restricting economic freedom (or for requiring certain kinds of compensation and transfers) aren’t doing much independent work for them. When a left-liberal invokes the harms of competition as a reason to restrict economic liberty or to require that winners compensate losers, they tend to presuppose rather than prove that economic freedom has a lower moral status than personal or civil liberties. They have already concluded that people are not entitled to economic freedom (or that these entitlements are weak), and so their complaints about competition harming competitors are not doing much work.

UPDATE: Eric Mack told me he presented an objection like this to a famous left-libertarian philosopher, and the philosopher said that, yes, Robert and Gjertrud owe Steve compensation.

[i] Nozick 1974, 237.

[ii] Nozick 1974, 150-9. Cohen 1995. 229-244, takes the bait and wonders about redistributing eyes. Cecile Fabre, Whose Body Is It Anyway? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), argues for the forced redistribution of eyes and other organs.