Nozick on LeBron James and Social "Justice"

...with minor qualifications

On the popular conception of social "justice," justice is equality of outcomes.  One can determine whether an economic arrangement is just simply by looking at the distribution of whatever commodity or good one is interested in and seeing whether the distribution is equal.  On the heals of last night's NBA championship, here is an updated selection from Robert Nozick's "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" (pp. 160-1) showing that this is false:

[Suppose that there is some just distribution of money, D1.] Now suppose that LeBron James is greatly in demand by basketball teams, being a great gate attraction.  (Also suppose contracts run only for a year, with players being free agents.)  He signs the following sort of contract with a team: In each home game, fifteen dollars from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him.  (We ignore the question of whether he is "gouging" the owners, letting them look out for themselves.)  The season starts, and people cheerfully attend his team's games; they buy their tickets, each time dropping a separate fifteen dollars of their admission price into a special box with James's name on it.  They are excited about seeing him play; it is worth the total admission price to them.  Let us suppose that in one season one million persons attend his home games, and LeBron James winds up with $15,000,000 a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone else has.  Is he entitled to his income?  Is this new distribution D2, unjust?  If so, why?  There is no question about whether each of the people was entitled to the control over the resources they held in D1; because that was the distribution (your favorite) that (for the purposes of argument) we assumed was acceptable.  Each of these persons chose to give fifteen dollars of their money to James.  They could have spent it on going to the movies, or on candy bars, or in donations to the Huffington Post, or Salon or for a Hillary Clinton speech.  But they all, at least one million of them, converged on giving it to LeBron James in exchange for watching him play basketball.  If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1, isn't D2 also just?  If the people were entitled to dispose of the resources to which they were entitled (under D1), didn't this include their being entitled to give it to, or exchange it with, LeBron James?  Can anyone else complain on grounds of justice?  Each other person already has his legitimate share under D1.  Under D1, there is nothing that anyone has that anyone else has a claim of justice against. 

Jonathan Wolff on Radical Reaction to Nozick's Arguments

Keith Burgess-Jackson:

Jonathan Wolff on Radical Reaction to Nozick's Arguments

The reactions of radicals to Nozick's criticisms will be mixed. Few, probably, will give up all their objections in the face of Nozick's replies. Many will simply refuse to listen. But those who have been prepared to do so have had to think very hard to find replies. One virtue of Nozick's work is that a great deal of honing and sharpening has had to be done to improve the rigour of radical objections to capitalism, once Nozick's defences are taken into account. It is no longer acceptable to criticize capitalism by platitude.

(Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State, Key Contemporary Thinkers [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991], 133)

Note from KBJ: This is an interesting (and revealing) paragraph. Progressives are so convinced of their own rectitude, not to mention the correctness of their factual and conceptual claims, that they refuse to engage those who disagree with them. They create echo chambers for themselves in which all they hear are the echoes of their own voices. Academia, of all places, has become a progressive echo chamber. This is scandalous, for academia should be the one place where argumentation and criticism flourish, where every belief, hypothesis, theory, or point of view is both expressible and, just as importantly, criticizable. I suspect that many progressives would have been happier if Robert Nozick's book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) had not been published. I've heard progressives say as much. They think the book will give libertarianism (a theory they despise) credibility it does not deserve (by their lights). (God forbid anyone should be persuaded by the book!) This is, of course, shocking. If your views and values are correct, then they will withstand criticism; so subject them to criticism! In the process of defending them, your argumentative and critical skills will be sharpened. I hope one day progressives realize that by being progressives first and intellectuals second, they do long-term damage to their ability to argue, criticize, analyze, and synthesize.

Robert Nozick on Equality

The legitimacy of altering social institutions to achieve greater equality of material condition is, though often assumed, rarely argued for. Writers note that in a given country the wealthiest n percent of the population holds more than that percentage of the wealth, and the poorest n percent holds less; that to get to the wealth of the top n percent from the poorest, one must look at the bottom p percent (where p is vastly greater than n), and so forth.  They then proceed immediately to discuss how this might be altered.  On the entitlement conception of justice in holdings, one cannot decide whether the state must do something to alter the situation merely by looking at a distributional profile or at facts such as these.  It depends upon how the distribution came about.  Some processes yielding these results would be legitimate, and the various parties would be entitled to their respective holdings.  If these distributional facts did arise by a legitimate process, then they themselves are legitimate.  This is, of course, not to say that they may not be changed, provided this can be done without violating people's entitlements.

The entitlement conception of justice in holdings makes no presumption in favor of equality, or any other overall end state patterning.  It cannot merely be assumed that equality must be built into any theory of justice.  There is a surprising dearth of arguments for equality capable of coming to grips with the considerations that underlie a nonpatterned conception of justice in holdings.  (However, there is no lack of unsupported statements of a presumption in favor of equality).

                      ~Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), pp. 232-3.

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? Some Hypotheses From a Libertarian

I just read philosopher Robert Nozick's essay where he offers several hypotheses for social scientists to test.  Read the whole thing, it's short, clear, and an easy read.  (Too bad we know that social scientists won't be eager to take up that task.)

Here is an excerpt:

Is it that capitalism is bad, unjust, immoral, or inferior, and that intellectuals, being intelligent, realize this and therefore stand in opposition? This would be the straightforward answer. The straightforward explanation of why we believe something is that it is true, and we somehow know it. But even those of you who are not convinced, as I am, that capitalism is a morally justifiable system, perhaps can suspend your disbelief in it, at least temporarily, to follow me in my quest for an explanation of the intellectuals' opposition. For even if the intellectuals are right in their opposition, the explanation of their opposition need not be the straightforward one. Though what is believed is true, it might not be believed because it is true; the explanation of why it is believed need not or may not involve its being true.

There is reason to think that something more is at work in the opposition of intellectuals to capitalism than merely their realizing the truth about capitalism. Let me describe to you an experience I have often had. A particular complaint is made about laissez-faire capitalism, perhaps that it leads to monopoly, or pollution, or too much inequality, or involves exploitation of workers, or despoils the environment, or leads to imperialism, or causes wars, or thwarts meaningful work, or panders to peoples' desires, or encourages dishonesty in the marketplace, or produces for profit and not for use, or holds back progress to increase profits, or disrupts traditional patterns to increase profits, or leads to overproduction, or leads to underproduction, or whatever. Someone makes the particular complaint, and I discuss it in detail, probing it, showing its unexamined assumptions-mistakes of fact or logic or history or economics. In any case, the person concedes my particular point or at least becomes unsure about the validity of his or her particular complaint against capitalism. Does the individual then change his or her mind? No, the individual drops the point, and quickly leaps to another. "But what about child labor, or the racism built into it, or the oppression of women, or urban slums, or in simpler days we could do without planning but now things are so complex that ... ,or advertising seducing people into buying things or.... " And so it goes. We painstakingly discuss this next complaint and once again it cannot be sustained. The person leaps to yet another point, "But what about. ..?" Point after point after point is given up. One complaint after another is dropped. What is not given up, though, what is not dropped, is the opposition to capitalism. For the opposition is not based on those points and complaints, it does not depend on them and so it does not disappear when they do. There is an underlying animus against capitalism. This animus gives rise to the complaints, it generates them. The complaints rationalize the animus. After some resistance, the particular complaint will be dropped and, without a backward glance, tenfold others will surge forward to perform the same function, to rationalize and justify the intellectual's animus to capitalism.

[...some hypotheses...]