Three Principles of Justice: Acquisition, Transfer and Rectification

There's a lot of talk on Steemit about various libertarian ideals of small-government, minimal government, minarchism etc. After @aggroed posted about non-aggression and the Homesteading Principle, and @fatkat more broadly about necesseity of non-aggression in a voluntary society, I felt inspired to throw in what I know of the philosophy behind some of these ideas. The core of this post is actually an expansion of a very late comment I left for @aggroed - but I hope it's still got some value. There's some interesting principles here, and I offer my interpretaion of them, as well as a little bit of critque.

For me, the one of the go-to philosophers on these ideas is Robert Nozick. Champion of minimal government and the night-watchman state (a state that exists only to stop us from infringing on each other's liberties and property rights), Nozick lays out his ideas regarding distributive justice in Anarchy, State and Utopia.

Regarding who has the rights to which stuff, basically, Nozick says:

1. A person who acquires something fairly is entitled to it
2. A person who has something transferred to them fairly is entitled to it.
3. No one is entitled to anything except through repeated applications of (1) and (2).

This is underpinned by three principles:

• A principle of justice in acquisition - You are entitled to something, e.g.: natural resources, if no one has ever owned it before. This includes being first on the land as per the Homesteading Principle, but also the more general idea of mixing your labour with un-owned natural materials - e.g.: I find a rock that no one owns and turn it into a knife that I now own.

• A principle of justice in transfer - you are entitled to something transferred to you by another person if and only if they transferred it to you fully voluntarily. Nozick wasn't a big fan of taxation, seeing it as coercive in nature, and breaking with the correct function of justice as voluntary transactions between consenting persons.

• A principle of rectification of injustice - People who have had their stuff/holdings/property etc. taken away from them in violation of the previous principles (e.g.: murder, mugging, looting, coercive tax regimes, illicit coercion in general, fraud, enslavement, theft etc.) have a claim against the beneficiaries of these injustices.

This principle of rectification is tricky to work out in historical cases. I think it makes sense that there is a limit on such claims - one suggestion is that only those suffering disadvantage from the injustice can claim for rectification, and only form those who currently benefit from it. Whatever the case, I am continually and deeply frustrated that the idea of rectification of injustice is often absent from discussion of these sort of ideas.

Despite it's unpopularity, it is essential for two reasons:
One, we are not starting from scratch - past injustices did occur. We can't claim to hold to a system of voluntary transfer of property if we don't do anything about previous involuntary transfers. The whole basis of this conception of justice is that entitlement to something inheres in the history of that holding, so we don't get to ignore history.

Secondly, there will always be bad actors who will refuse to respect other people's right to only engage in transfers of property voluntarily. They may even fail to respect other people's liberty in general. No good system of justice can or should assume anything like full compliance with either laws or expected norms of behaviour if you want it to work in the real world. Bottom line is that if you take something from someone without their consent, you were never entitled to it, and the a principle of rectification of injustice is simply the logical extension of that.

Now, I've no doubt people freak out at rectification of injustice because of all the land that Europeans have taken without the consent of of its traditional owners. But, on the up side, you should also get compensated for all the non-voluntary tax you've paid over the years. So maybe things will even out OK. If you are completely confident that you are fairly entitled to what you currently hold in that none of it was ever taken involuntarily from anyone, you should have nothing to worry about.

There are important criticisms to be made of Nozick's ideas. Not least is that it could, as he admits, lead to very high levels of inequality - the talented and lucky, and the descendants of the talented and lucky may end up with most wealth in society. In my mind, dealing with this is where a measure of sensible pragmatism in how you run your minimal-state comes in. If it's the case that inequality causes infringement of liberties and property rights of it's allowed to get out of control, then maybe limiting it is the most prudent choice. Basically, if the most efficient way for a night-watchman state to protect the property of its citizens is to make sure that people aren't so poor & hungry that they break out the guillotines and slay the rich, then so be it!

This isn't to say there aren't other important criticisms of Nozick and these ideas. This schema relies entirely on the view that inequality is value-neutral or positive, and that setting up a society that allows it is a rational choice. All of these things are open to reasonable debate. But I'll leave some of of that for another day, when I post about other views on how best to structure justice and government.

Thanks for reading. Upvotes and comments always welcome.
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