Nozick's Kantian Roots

The 1970s was an exciting time for Kantian scholarship on theories of justice. Monumental figures debating justice and Kantian philosophy in the English-speaking world at the time included John Rawls, Onora O’Neill, and, of course, Robert Nozick. From a historical point of view, these Kantian discussions were peculiar in that they were not grounded on Kant’s main legal and political text (the Doctrine of Right in The Metaphysics of Morals) but instead on Kant’s (meta )ethical writings (the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason). Philosophically, a main challenge facing any Kantian working within these textual parameters is Kant’s insistence that imperfect duties are not enforceable. This seemingly entails that coercive (re )distribution of material resources in response to human need and suffering is morally impermissible because it would make freedom impossible. And this is the line Nozick defends. This chapter starts by providing an overview of these Kantian features of Nozick’s theory, from his arguments regarding “side constraints” to “historical” and “end-result” principles. I also show ways to deepen these discussions by engaging the relevant arguments of Kant’s in the Doctrine of Right before, in the last part of the paper, I sketch why and how some contemporary Kant interpreters end up with political philosophies closer to Nozick’s minimal state while others end up further away from him. Here I pay special attention to how these positions deal with questions regarding both private property appropriation and the transition from the state of nature to civil society—as their responses track whether they agree or disagree with Nozick’s basic claim that only a minimal state’s uses of coercion are just.