Individuals may have a moral obligation to do so, but it is not an enforceable one. His task is to steer a course between the Scylla of anarchism, the absence of all government, and the Charybdis of the welfare state, or (horror of horrors!) socialism – although to be fair Nozick may have in mind by “socialism” something nearer to communism with its command economy and class war rather than simply the idea that society has a responsibility to care for its less fortunate members, even though he rejects that too. The main thought for Nozick is that, other things being equal, the less government we have the better. Morally speaking we enter society from the outside, already fully formed.

It is a system of individuals, separate and inviolable, who may be “social products” in that they benefit from the doings of their contemporaries and their ancestors, but who owe no “general floating debt which the current society can collect and use as it will” ( ASU: 95). This is a problem not only for left-libertarians but for ‘philosophical anarchism’ more generally.The moral basis of Nozick's system rests firmly on rights then: rights of acquisition, rights of transfer, and rights to compensation. Hence the issues of a state’s justness and a state’s political authority cannot be dealt with separately. States without political authority are intrinsically unjust in that sense. Institutions, I argue, are intrinsically unjust when they have legal liberties and powers without having the corresponding moral liberties and powers. The reason is that institutions can be unjust independently from what they achieve or do: they can be ‘intrinsically unjust’. Against Vallentyne, I try to show that states without political authority have to be judged unjust even if they successfully promote justice. Vallentyne has argued that one can indeed assess a state’s justness without assessing its political authority. For that reason, left-libertarians like Peter Vallentyne understandably hope that states without political authority could nonetheless implement left-libertarian justice. From a left-libertarian perspective, it seems almost impossible for states to acquire political authority.

Anarchy utopia