Tuesday, November 5, 2019
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Nozik and MacIntyre Notes
1) Throughout this reading, Nozick analyzes a key claim made by Rawls. What is this claim? (That is to
say, what claim does Rawls make that is the object of Nozick's analysis in this text?) Does Nozick see
Rawls' claim as viable?
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2) Provide an overview of Nozick's points concerning equality.
3) What is the key point or take-away from MacIntyre's argument? How does it contradict or complement
Aristotle's claims?
Key Point 1: Must view life from a narrative perspective to make
The key takeaway from MacIntyre’s argument is that in order to understand the moral character of an
individual’s actions, and determine them as intelligible, we must apply a narrative perspective in which
past, present, and future intentions are accounted for. In doing so, a history is established that
characterizes intentions behind actions and places it within context of situations at a given point in time.
Since every individual has a narrative and a history, our histories and narratives interweave. Because of
the interwoven nature of our narratives, constraints are exerted by humans onto one another.
We are living out our lives “individually and in relationship with one another with a common conception of
a possible future” in which a conception of the good is sought; it is in that pursuit of seeking out the good
that we will be enabled to order other goods
in our pursuit of a certain telos; we know not what lies ahead in our pursuit, but we do know that virtue is
what guides us in our quest toward telos and develops our knowledge of ourselves.
Aristotle and MacIntyre agree on the fact that in life we are limited by the constraints that others exert
upon us and sometimes find ourselves a part of actions that we are not the authors of. Aristotle and
MacIntyre also look
MacIntyre is essentially saying that the modern conception of morality and moral judgements
opposes the essence of viewing human life as a unity, and as part of a larger narrative. Instead,
modernity has created a view of human life and the self in which “life comes to appear as nothing but a
series of unconnected episodes” and that virtue has thus been conflated with professional skills.
MacIntyre’s view is that in order to understand how virtues, especially the virtue of a common
good, a narrative approach must be used in which history and action are seen as intertwined. We must
reject the individualistic approach taken to trying to understand common virtues held by all of mankind
because taking an individualistic approach will always result in different conceptions of what is considered
“common good”. He states that
Aristotle sees all human actions as working towards one common “ultimate good”, “eudaimonia”. Aristotle
sees intellectualism as the component of human life that leads to ultimate good and happiness; in
contrast to MacIntyre, who sees intentions (in the long term and the short) as essential to
Aristotle: The end of the city is not mere life, nor an alliance for mutual defense; it is the common
promotion of a good quality of life
“So too we become just by doing just acts”
“By doing acts the acts that we do in our transactions with men we become just or unjust”
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“States of character arise out of like activities”
“We must examine the nature of actions and how we ought to do them; for these determine also the
nature of states of character and
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Nozik : Anarchy, State, and Utopia
• Distributive Justice
• The minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified.
Any state more extensive violates people’s rights
• Point of his essay is to counter claims for a more extensive state
• Claim being considered is:
• “a more extensive state is justified, because necessary (or the best
instrument) to achieve distributive justice
• Says in a free society there is no central distribution
• “Diverse persons control different resources, and new holdings arise
out of the voluntary exchanges and actions of persons “
• “A principle of justice in holdings describes (part of) what justice tells us
(requires) about holdings.”
• Nozik proposes first what he takes to be the correct view about justice in
holdings, and then discusses alternate views
Section I: Entitlement Theory
• Justice in holdings, three major topics
• 1. Original acquisition of holdings - appropriation of upheld things
• How unheld things may come to be held, the process, or
processes by which unheld things may come to be held, the
things that may come to be held by these processes, the
extent of what comes to be held by a particular process
• Principle of Justice in Acquisition
• 2. Transfer of Holdings from one person to another
• General descriptions of voluntary exchange, and gift and
fraud, as well as reference to particular conventional details
fixed upon in a given society
• Principle of Justice in Transfer
• “If the world were wholly just, the following inductive definition would
exhaustively cover the subject of justice in holdings”
• 1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of
justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding
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2. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of
justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is
entitled to the holding
• 3. No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications of
1 and 2
• The complete principle of distributive justice would say simply that a
distribution is just if everyone is entitled to the holdings they possess under
the distribution
• Not all actual situations are generated in accordance with the two principles
of justice in holding
• “Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them,
seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose,
or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges”
• “The existence of past injustice (previous violations of the first two principles
of justice in holdings) raises the third major topic under justice in holdings:
the rectification of injustice in holdings”
• If past injustices has shaped present holdings in various ways, some
identifiable and some not, what now, if any thing, ought to be done to
rectify those injustices?
• Nozik takes a theoretical approach to supposing a “principle of rectification”
• Uses historical information about previous situations and injustices
done in them and information about the actual course of events that
flowed from these injustices, until the present, and it yields a
description (or descriptions) of holdings in the society
• The principle of rectification presumably will make use of its best
estimate of subjunctive information about what would have occurred
(or a probability distribution over what might have occurred, using the
expected value) if the injustice had not taken place
• The general outlines of the theory of justice in holdings are that the holdings
of a person are just if he is entitled to them by the principles of justice in
acquisition and transfer, or by the principle of rectification of injustice
• If each persons holdings are just, then the total set (distribution) of
holdings is just.
Historical Principles and End Result Principles
• “The general outlines of the entitlement theory illuminate the nature and
defects of other conceptions of distributive justice. The entitlement theory of
justice
• Discusses the current time slice principle of justice
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Holds that the justice of a distribution is determined by how things are
distributed (who has what) as judged by some structural principle(s)
of just distribution
• According to this principle, all that needs to be looked at, in judging
what the justice of a distribution, is who ends up with what; in
comparing any two distributions, one need only look at the matrix
presenting the distributions
• It is a consequence of such principles of justice that any two
structurally identical distributions are equally just
• We construe the position we discuss too narrowly by speaking of current time
slice principles. Nothing is changed if structural principles upon a time
sequence of current time-slice profiles, and for example, give someone more
now to counterbalance the less he has had earlier
Patterning
• A principle of distribution is patterned if it specifies that a distribution is to
vary along with some natural dimension, weighted sum of natural
dimensions, or lexicographic ordering of natural dimensions. And let us say a
distribution is patterned if it accords with some patterned principle
• Principle of entitlement sketched is not patterned
• Discusses Hayek’s conclusion that
• “In a free society there will be distribution in accordance with value
rather than moral merit; that is, in accordance with the perceived
value of the persons actions and services to others”
• Says “despite his rejection of a patterned conception of distributive
justice, Hayek himself suggests a pattern he thinks is justifiable:
distribution in accordance with the perceived benefits given to others,
leaving room for the complaint that a free society does not realize
exactly this pattern
• “To think that the task of a theory of distributive justice is to fill in the blank in
“to each according to his —-“ is to be predisposed to search for a pattern;
and the separate treatment of “from each according to his ——“ treats
production and distribution as two separate and independent issues”
• “Whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other
held resources used in the process (transferring some of his holdings
for these cooperating factors) is entitled to it
• The situation is not one of something’s getting made and there
being an open question of who is to get it
How liberty Upsets patterns
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The general point of the Wilt Chamberlain example and the example of the
entrepreneur in a socialist society is that no end-state principle or
distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized
without continuous interference with people’s lives
Any favored pattern would be transformed into one unfavored by the
principle, by people choosing to act in various ways; for example, by people
exchanging goods and services with other people, or giving things to other
people, things the transferrers are entitled to under the favored distributional
pattern
To maintain a pattern one must either continually interfere to stop people
from transferring resources as they wish to, or continually (or periodically)
interfere to take from some persons resources that others for some reason
chose to transfer to them
“Any distributional pattern with any egalitarian component is overturn
able by the voluntary actions of individual persons over time; as is
every patterned condition with sufficient content so as actually to have
been proposed as presenting the central core of distributive justice”
Patterned principles of distributive justice necessitate redistributive activities.
The likelihood is small that any actual freely-arrived-at set of holdings fits a
given pattern; and the likelihood is nil that it will continue to fit the pattern as
people exchange and give
MacInntyre - After Virtue
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The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life, and the Concept of a Tradition
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Any attempt to forma mental picture of each human life as a whole, as a
unity, whose character provides the virtues with an adequate telos
encounters a philosophical and social obstacle
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Social obstacles come from the way in which modernity divides each
human life into segments, each with its own norms and modes of
behavior
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Work divided form leisure, private life from public, corporate
from personal
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We are taught to think and feel feel according to the
separations of these segments of life and not to the unity of
life of the individual
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Philosophical obstacles derive from two distinct tendencies
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One is rooted in analytical philosophy, the other from
sociological theory and existentialism
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The first is a tendency to think “atomistically” about human
action and to analyze complex actions and transactions in
terms of simple components
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Hence notion of a “basic action”
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That particular actions derive their character as parts
of larger wholes is a point of view alien to our dominant
ways of thinking yet one necessary to consider if we
are to understand how a life may be more than a
sequence of individual actions and episodes
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“Equally the unity of a human life becomes invisible to us
when a sharp separation is made either between the
individual and the roles the he or she plays - or between the
different role - and quasi-role - enactments of an individual life
so that life comes to appear as nothing but a series of
unconnected episodes - a liquidation of the self characteristic”
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“It is perhaps therefore unsurprising to realize that the self as thus
conceived cannot be envisaged as a bearer of the Aristotelian virtues”
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For a self separated from its roles in the Sartrian mode loses
that arena of social relationships in which the Aristotelian
virtues function if they function at all
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“For virtue is not a disposition that makes for success only in some
one particular type of situation. What are spoken of as the virtues of a
good committee man or of a good committee administrator … are
professional skills professionally deployed in those situations where
they can be effective, not virtues”
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“Someone who genuinely possesses a virtue can be expected to
manifest it in very different types of situation, many of them situations
where the practice of a virtue cannot be expected to be effective in
the way that we expect a professional skill to be”
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“We cannot characterize behavior independently of intentions, and we
cannot characterize intentions independently of the settings which
make those intentions intelligible to both agents themselves and
others”
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“Narrative history of some kind turns out to be basic and essential
genre fro the characterization of human actions” because “we render
the actions of others intelligible in this way because action itself has
historical character”
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