Nozick's nonsense

In 'the essential Robert Nozick', Aeon J. Skoble writes- 

Nozick begins Anarchy, State, and Utopia with the claim “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)” (p. ix).

This may also be true of animals, plants, rocks, rivers, intellectual property of various kinds, and items of religious or cultural significance. Rights and remedies are matters of law or convention. There is nothing inherently political about them.  

Incautious critics sometimes take this to mean that Nozick simply assumes rights and then proceeds from there, but he does have an argument for rights. For better or worse, this doesn’t appear until the third chapter of the book, but it is there. He understands rights as “moral side constraints upon what we may do” (p. 33).

These constraints may be immoral. Equally, there may be no constraint involved. There may be no remedy provider for the right's violation.  

If there were no other beings, we would be free to do whatever we wanted to do, constrained only by the laws of physics.

This would also be the case if we didn't interact with them.  

Morality comes into play when we are considering our interactions with others. Hence, the reality of other people creates limits on our actions.

It may do, it may not. Speaking generally, grown-ups only see employers as setting limits on their actions while at work. Criminals might feel the presence of a police-man places a limit on his ability to make a living by committing a crime. A nudist may feel the presence of other people restricts him from taking his pants of. But most people aren't criminals or nudists. They don't feel constrained by other people even at work if they are habituated to the routine or are good at what they do. 

...rights are a moral concept that establish the boundary conditions of justified action (as opposed to the boundary conditions of physically possible action).

This is not the case. Rights are a legal concept though they may have a moral component under the relevant vinculum juris or bond of law. They do not establish 'boundary conditions'. They may provide an immunity- e.g. the right to self-defence may give you an immunity to use violence- but the thing is defeasible. Your immunity may be defeated by the others right not to harmed in a disproportionate manner. This varies by jurisdiction. In a 'stand your ground' state, you may have an immunity for shooting a guy who enters your property illicitly. In other jurisdictions, this may be considered disproportionate. The onus may be on you to retreat 

Smith’s rights are thus the boundary conditions on Jones’ actions.

No. They are a consideration merely. What if Jones is the obligation holder with respect to a right Smith has under a bond of law? This means there is a reason to fulfil that obligation unless there is a better reason not to- e.g. not wanting to spend the time and money required.  

Nozick understands this model of side-constraints as rooted in the “fact of our separate existences” .

No 'separate existence' is required. Suppose I dismiss my lawyer and my accountant and act for myself. I may neglect to discharge the obligation to myself to maintain accounts or protect my legal interests. 

As distinct individuals with our own lives, no one could naturally have a claim over the life of another.

They might do. I save your life at great risk to mine. You may feel you have an obligation to do the same. Speaking generally, your country has a claim to your life for purposes of collective Defence. But, it may also claim your life quite literally if you commit treason, murder, piracy, arson etc.  

Individuals are not to be regarded as means to others’ ends; they are ends in themselves. A hammer, for example, is a tool that exists in order to help people do things, it doesn’t have its own independent reason for existing apart from this.

And yet it does exist. Plenty of people who had an independent reason to exist, stopped existing or- like the son I should have had with Beyonce- never existed at all.  

It doesn’t exist for its own sake. But people do exist—they are ends in themselves, not the means to another’s ends.

Nothing wrong with hiring a person to do a particular job for you. He may use the money you give him for his own purposes.  

“Individuals are inviolable” because each is a person with his or her own life to live.

The law may take away the life or liberty of an individual.  

So it is the fact that “there are different individuals with separate lives” that produces the side constraint that no one is entitled to use another as a tool.

Don't use me as a spanner or as a spade. On the other hand, beautiful women are welcome to use me as a sex machine. 

Using a person as a means to another’s ends “does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person and that his is the only life he has” .

Yet, heads of governments may have to do so- e.g. by introducing conscription and sending young men into battle.  

So a person’s rights just are the flip side of the others’ constraints: That Jones is morally constrained to respect the separate personhood of Smith, and thus can’t act upon Smith nonconsensually, implies that Smith has the right not to be used in this way.

Thus, Zelensky is being immoral when he conscripts Ukrainians and sends them into battle. The problem with talk of rights is that they are defeasible. Ukrainians have to give up some rights in the short to medium term in order to be able to live as a free and independent people. 

Since Nozick sees rights as boundary conditions on the permissible treatment of others, he argues that to reject this conception of rights would entail either a rejection of all morality entirely—no one has any constraints at all on how they may treat others—or else a rejection of the idea of the reality of the uniqueness of each person.

No. It is enough to think of rights as defeasible Hohfeldian 'incidents'- rights are immunities or entitlements linked by a bond of law to remedies provided by obligation holders. The problem is that if remedies are not 'incentive compatible', then the remedies will disappear or be subject to arbitrary rationing.  

One school of thought that might be inclined to reject this conception of rights is utilitarianism, a view on which what is morally significant is total aggregate utility (understood as pleasure or happiness).

Justice is a service industry which creates utility. It is enough to have a 'Law & Econ' conception of defeasible Hohfeldian incidents and to do a bit of 'mechanism design' to improve incentive compatability.  

For utilitarians, there aren’t constraints on the permissible treatment of others per se, it’s just that the total goodness achieved must outweigh the bad. With such a theory, it would not make sense to talk about the inviolability of persons, since we can easily imagine situations in which sacrificing one would benefit several others.

This is what obtains in practice.  

Nozick therefore explicitly addresses utilitarianism, arguing that it implies wildly counterintuitive results. Since utilitarianism calculates utility subjectively, we can imagine a “utility monster” who “gets enormously greater gains in utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose”.

This may be a good thing. X is super-smart. Give him more and more resources and he can endow mankind with free, 'zero point' energy. He may even be able to give us faster than light travel so that we can populate distant planets.  

This would make it morally required to sacrifice everyone to the monster in order to maximize total utility. In addition to running a foul of our intuitions about the equal dignity of all persons,

there is no such intuition. We merely virtue signal about this. Why not say 'all sentient beings have an immortal soul and are equally valuable to God'? 

this makes the theory self-undermining; implausible at least, if not internally inconsistent.

It is obvious that we don't really think a serial killer on death row is equal in  dignity to the Pope.  We may say, as a matter of Religious faith, that his immortal soul is just as valuable to God. But that is not an 'intuition'. It is a great mystery. 

It won’t even do, Nozick adds, to think in terms of aggregating amounts of respect for persons, such that we respect the rights of some large group at a cost of failing to treat some other group of persons as inviolable.

What we can aggregate is cost and benefit in money terms. It is reasonable to permit an action from which a million benefit to the tune of 10,000 dollars each even though, statistically speaking, some five or ten people may end up losing a hundred dollars.  

Rather, each individual person is to be regarded as an end and not a means, and no person should be used as a tool for others’ purposes.

Jobs should be abolished.  

He gives the example of violating the rights of an innocent person to prevent a mob rampage which would itself  yield many rights violations. He argues that this is to misunderstand the point of side constraints. It’s not that we figure in the rights of others while evaluating end states in which the rights of some are traded off for the rights of others; rather the rights of others determine how you may treat them.

We may not know when we violate another's rights. That's one reason courts will still exist even if everybody is law-abiding.  

Otherwise, they are not actual moral side constraints. Ultimately, Nozick argues that we can ground the inviolability of persons in the human capacity for self-directedness. “A person’s shaping his life in accordance with some overall plan is his way of giving meaning to his life; only a being with the capacity to so shape his life can have or strive for a meaningful life” (p. 50).

This is nonsense. A mentally incompetent person may not be able to formulate a plan. But their life would still be meaningful.  

So it is our capacity for formulating life plans and acting on them that the moral side constraints protect.

Budgets matter. Plans only matter if the budget permits their being carried forward. 

This is why recognizing the reality of other persons implies the impermissibility of using them as means to others’ ends.

Why stop there? Why not say 'recognizing reality is real implies recognizing other people really exist' ? One could then go on to say 'It's really important to recognize that recognizing reality matters' and so forth.  

Minimally, we would each see this as implying our own inviolability, and it takes only a little maturity to see why this must extend to others. So, the claim advanced on the first page of Anarchy, State, and Utopia’s preface is not without foundation after all: people have rights as a matter of their status as distinct individual human beings with the capacity for self-directedness, and that means that some things that one might do to another will be in violation of those rights, which, while physically possible, are morally impermissible.

All sorts of entities may have legal personality.  

The connection between “rights” as a moral concept and “rights” as a political concept is found in Nozick’s observation that groups of persons cannot be morally justified in doing something that the individuals that comprise the group are not justified in doing.

This is clearly false. Churchill was not allowed to go to war with Germany in his personal capacity. Only the Crown in Parliament had that legal authority.  

That is, if Smith is not morally justified in violating Jones’ rights, then a large group of which Smith is a member (or leader) will also be not morally justified in violating Jones’ rights.

Churchill's government was justified in bombing the shit out of Hitler's Germany. No British subject had the authority to do so save as part and parcel of the Government's war effort.  

Although it is true that an individual may sacrifice something for the sake of her own greater good (say, skipping a party to study for an important exam), “there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good.

Nonsense! The British Government had to sacrifice a great deal in order to fight Hitler. One might say, 'The price for American support was Churchill having to give up his dream of hanging on to the Indian Empire.'  

There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others” (pp. 32-33).

A Nation's leader has to do so. Zelensky doesn't want a single Ukrainian to suffer, yet he is obliged to send men in to battle.  

Individuals acting jointly can’t be justified in doing something they couldn’t morally do on their own.

The reverse has always been the case.  

So the rights that people have as moral side constraints against the predation of other individuals will turn out to be the rights that delineate the proper scope of government as well.

I don't have the right to blow up the world. But POTUS may be obliged to do so. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Nations must do things which none of its own nationals are permitted to do in their private capacity.