Nozick vs Kantorovich & Yale's Potty Mouth Prof.

Philosophy, Plato's Socrates tells us, begins with the palinode- i.e. something non linear, 'non first-orderizable', and the reverse of 'Megethology is Mathematics' because even partial ordering is out of the window. Wolfram and Voevodsky denote two opposite poles to approaching this, not frozen limbo, but fecund 'barzakh'.

Fagin's theorem, I see from Wikipedia, dates from 1973, the same year as this quote from Nozick

“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.

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).”

What does this mean?

I suppose Nozick is saying there is a closest possible world to ours which is wholly just. All entitlements and transfers there are in accordance with certain principles of just proceeding.

If so, there must be some configuration of preferences and endowments such that that perfectly just world deforms continuously to this one. This is interesting for us because it suggests a way to move from where we are to that perfectly just world.  Indeed, if Justice is 'super-fair' or 'envy free' then we can very easily reverse engineer the path (because all transactions could always be unwound). Thus, so long as people want to live in a perfectly just world, they could always do so by a path as objective and empirical as any topic in Engineering or Operations Research.

Obviously, I am ignoring the fact, as Nozick does, that justiciable things only exist because Knightian Uncertainty causes missing 'Open Markets'.

However, I am doing so for a good heuristic reason.

What is it?

Well, if one believes in free markets and the fundamental theorems of Welfare Economics, then Nozick's claim is precisely that there exist two principles, one relating to acquisition, the other to transfer, which jointly solve the Monge-Kantarovich transportation problem. By Kantorovich's duality result, it follows that there must be an Enterprise- Justice, in this case- which can make a profit doing so while still leaving everybody else better off. Notice that even factors with a zero shadow price get a fair shake of the sauce bottle because signalling can be made 'independent' of allocation- thus incurring no efficiency cost. It follows that, by a wholly non coercive path, the too fecund proletariat, which has negative Shapley value, can nevertheless become 'decisive' or Arrow 'Dictatorial'.

In other words, even if most people aren't particularly bothered about Justice, they could be paid to acquiesce to our world's being put on a trajectory to the closest possible one exhibiting perfect justice. What's more that 'adherence' would be the opposite of subaltern. Backward induction has that power. It can reverse, locally, the arrow of time under circumstances Huw Price has illumined.

Notice, however, if these two principles were known or could somehow be 'action guiding' even if not known, then these same principles of Justice would provide very lucrative- indeed magical!- solutions to all sorts of Economic, Engineering, and Scientific problems. In other words, the principles Nozick appeals to could turn this world into an earthly paradise greatly to be preferred to a Just World because, as Hamlet observes- 'Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?'

The truth is nobody in their right mind gives a shit about Justice as an end in itself. We want Grace and entrance to a wholly unmerited Paradise.

There is an old Tamil story about a woman who was granted a boon, by the God of Righteousness, on condition that her mother-in-law would get double what she was herself granted. So she asked for one of her own eyes to be knocked out!

The point about this story is that Righteousness, or Justice, or Religion, or Morality or whatever variety of pi-jaw pedants currently talk up, is only of interest to the extent it permits better correlated equilibria for everyone. But, this is precisely why Justice could, if idiographically Just, more than pay for itself.

In my previous post, I've explained why Nozick, properly repaired to account for advances in Math, is perfectly compatible with an epistemologically egalitarian, anti-Straussian, paideia of the sort that I assume Prof. Jason Stanley imparts to the the scions of such Legacy Yalies as I used to party with in the early Eighties- mainly because I was under the impression that Elihu Yale spoke Tamil (which he probably did- at least, better than wot I do now) and looked like Sivaji Ganesan (fuck! just checked on Wiki! The dude is a slightly less fat fuck than Sivaji Saar!). Also, Yale had an elective in Carnatic Music. I recall going into the showers and hearing 'Lambodara Lakumikara' and thinking 'which sad fuck Tambram dude is this?' and getting the shock of my life when a blonde Beau Bridges type came out of the stalls.

Also this Jason dude, according to Google, got into hot water for potty-mouthing some homophobic 'Christian Right' a-holes. I approve coz them dudes weren't Christian and that's just so not Right.