Political Philosophy: Justice, Rights & the State
Core Philosophical Problems
Course 3 · Chapter 7 · Political Philosophy: Justice, Rights & the State
Three Pictures of the State of Nature
Social contract theory imagines what human life would be like without any government at all — the "state of nature" — to work out what could ever legitimately justify one. Three real, genuinely different answers:
Life without government is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" — a real, exact quote — a war of all against all. People surrender their freedoms entirely to an absolute sovereign in exchange for basic security.
People hold real, pre-existing natural rights to life, liberty, and property even before government exists, bound by moral law. Government's only legitimate purpose is protecting those rights by consent — and can be rightfully overthrown if it violates them.
Legitimate society requires citizens to fold their individual will entirely into the collective "general will," with direct popular sovereignty — Rousseau real, explicitly rejected representative government as insufficiently legitimate.
Locke's real theory went on to directly shape real, world-changing events — his natural-rights framework is a documented, direct influence on both the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution's own Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Rawls Revisited
Course 2, Chapter 9 already covered John Rawls's real 1971 A Theory of Justice in depth — the veil of ignorance, designing a society's rules without knowing what position you yourself will occupy in it, guaranteeing basic liberties no aggregate calculation can override. Rawls's own approach judges justice by the fairness of the end state a society produces — an "end-result" or "patterned" theory of distribution.
Nozick's Libertarian Challenge
Robert Nozick's real 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a direct, explicit response to Rawls, defending instead a genuinely minimal state — "limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, [and] enforcement of contracts." Nozick's own real entitlement theory judges justice not by whether a distribution matches some ideal pattern, but by the real history of how holdings came about: justice in acquisition (how unowned things become owned), justice in transfer (how property changes hands legitimately), and justice in rectification (correcting past violations of the first two).
Nozick's real, famous thought experiment: start with any distribution you consider perfectly just (D1) — Rawls's own favored pattern, say. Now suppose a million people each freely choose to pay basketball star Wilt Chamberlain 25 cents to watch him play. Chamberlain ends up with $250,000, and the resulting distribution (D2) no longer matches the original pattern — yet every single transaction that produced it was entirely voluntary. Nozick's real conclusion: maintaining any fixed "just" pattern requires the state to continually interfere with people's own free, voluntary choices, which he argues makes patterned theories of justice fundamentally incompatible with real liberty.
Mill's Harm Principle, Applied
Course 2, Chapter 6 already covered Mill's real harm principle in depth — power may be rightfully exercised over someone against their will only to prevent harm to others, never merely for their own good. Applied here: Hobbes would tolerate real, significant state paternalism in the name of order; Locke and Nozick would both resist it strongly as a rights violation; Rawls's own basic-liberties principle sits closer to Mill's own position than to Hobbes's.
| Thinker | What legitimizes the state | View of individual liberty |
|---|---|---|
| Hobbes | Escaping a brutal state of nature | Sacrificed heavily for security |
| Locke | Protecting pre-existing natural rights | Strongly protected; government can be overthrown if it fails |
| Rousseau | Expressing the general will directly | Folded into collective sovereignty |
| Rawls | Fair rules chosen behind a veil of ignorance | Basic liberties protected from aggregate override |
| Nozick | Protecting rights through a minimal state only | Maximal — any redistribution beyond rectifying injustice is itself unjust |
Questions to Sit With
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau each imagine the state of nature completely differently — brutal, morally governed, or simply pre-political. How much of each thinker's own political conclusion actually follows from that starting picture, rather than from anything else?
The Wilt Chamberlain argument shows that maintaining a fixed just distribution requires ongoing interference with free choices. Does that convince you patterned theories of justice are flawed, or does it just show that some ongoing redistribution is a legitimate cost of fairness?
Which of the five real positions in this chapter's own closing table comes closest to your own actual view of what makes a government legitimate?
Quick Reference — Chapter 7
- Hobbes (1651) — state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"; absolute sovereign for security
- Locke (1689) — pre-existing natural rights (life, liberty, property); government by consent, overthrowable if it violates them; real influence on the American and French Revolutions
- Rousseau (1762) — the general will; direct popular sovereignty over representation
- Rawls (Course 2) — the veil of ignorance; a "patterned"/end-state theory of justice
- Nozick (1974) — entitlement theory (acquisition, transfer, rectification); the Wilt Chamberlain argument against patterned distributions
- Mill's harm principle (Course 2) applied across all five positions