20.14.01 · philosophy / political-philosophy

Political philosophy — justice, authority, and the state

shipped3 tiersLean: none

Anchor (Master): Rawls A Theory of Justice (1971); Nozick Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974); Hobbes Leviathan (1651); Locke Second Treatise (1689); Sen Development as Freedom (1999)

Intuition Beginner

Political philosophy asks how we should live together under shared rules. Three questions run through it. What is a just society? What gives a government the right to tell people what to do? And when, if ever, is the use of force rightful?

Imagine a group of people with no government. They must decide the rules for their life together. Each person wants to protect their own interests. But they also know that living under rules made by the strongest alone would be dangerous for everyone, themselves included.

The central idea of the social-contract tradition is that the rules are fair if they are the ones people would agree to before they know who will end up rich or poor, strong or weak. Not knowing your future position forces you to pick rules that are good for everyone, because you might be anyone.

That is the intuition behind thinking of justice as fairness. The rest of political philosophy argues about whether this is the right test, what it implies for taxes and rights, and who counts as a party to the agreement.

Visual Beginner

A table of the three load-bearing questions a complete political philosophy must hold together.

Question	Asks	Sample answers
Justice	How should benefits and burdens be shared?	Rawls: fair to the least advantaged; Nozick: respect holdings from just transfers
Authority	What gives the state the right to rule?	Consent (Locke); natural duty of justice (Rawls)
Legitimacy	When is coercion accepted as rightful?	Democratic consent; just institutions

The three pillars name the questions that any theory of the state must hold up at once.

Worked example Beginner

Rawls asks us to imagine a choice. You and others must pick the basic rules for your society. You do not know your sex, your wealth, your talents, your religion, or your race. This is the veil of ignorance.

Behind the veil you are offered two principles to rank.

Principle 1 — Equal basic liberties for all (freedom of speech, of the vote, and of conscience).

Principle 2 — Social and economic inequalities are allowed only if they (a) attach to jobs open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and (b) benefit the least-advantaged members. Part (b) is the difference principle.

Because you might turn out to be the least-advantaged person, the safe choice is to rank Principle 1 first and to allow inequalities only under Principle 2's limits. You would not gamble on a rule that lets the winners take everything, because you might be a loser and you cannot buy insurance against it before knowing your place.

That, in plain form, is the original-position choice.

Check your understanding Beginner

Formal definition Intermediate+

Political philosophy is the branch of philosophy concerning the justification of coercive collective authority and the normative principles governing the distribution of rights, duties, and social goods. Its central notions ^{[Rawls 1971]} are:

The state: a political institution claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force over a defined territory and population.
Political authority: the normative power of the state to issue binding commands and enforce them, including (on some theories) a duty of subjects to comply.
Legitimacy: the property of an arrangement of power such that coercion under it is morally permissible and widely accepted as rightful.
Justice: the standard fixing the fair distribution of benefits — rights, liberties, opportunity, income, the social bases of self-respect — and of burdens such as taxes and duties.
Rights: normative entitlements that constrain what may be done to persons or required of them; side-constraints in Nozick's terminology.
The social contract: a hypothetical or historical agreement among free and equal persons establishing the terms of political association.
The original position: Rawls's choice-device in which representative parties select principles of justice behind the veil of ignorance, applying the maximin rule to the prospects of the worst-off representative person.
The difference principle: inequalities in primary goods are permissible only insofar as they maximise the long-term expectations of the least-advantaged representative group; for the least-advantaged person $L$ , an allocation $A$ is ranked above $B$ when the primary goods $L$ enjoys under $A$ are at least those under $B$ , i.e. $g_{A} (L) \geq g_{B} (L)$ .

Counterexamples to common slips

Authority is not mere power. An armed robber has the power to coerce but no authority; authority includes a claim to a duty to obey, the contested normative element that power alone lacks.
Legitimacy is not consent. A tyrant accepted out of terror may be effective but lacks normative legitimacy; conversely a just law binds even the citizen who voted against it.
Justice is not efficiency. Maximising total welfare can leave the worst-off worse off; the difference principle deliberately accepts a lower total to protect the least-advantaged.
The veil is not ignorance of human nature. The parties know general facts of economics, psychology, and political sociology; they are denied only knowledge of their own particular place and ends.

Key argument Intermediate+

Argument (Rawls, for the two principles). The parties in the original position are rational and mutually disinterested, and they choose under the veil of ignorance. They seek a stable scheme of primary goods but cannot tailor principles to their own case. Three features of the choice — that there is no agreed probability distribution over who one will turn out to be, that the decision cannot be revisited, and that the thin theory of the good (the goods any rational life requires) is shared — make the maximin rule rational here: guard against the worst outcome before optimising the average. Maximin rejects utilitarianism, because under utilitarianism the basic liberties and prospects of some may be traded for greater total welfare, and a party cannot risk being that someone. Maximin also rejects a regime of natural liberty, because it permits distributions with very low prospects for the worst-off. The only principles that protect the worst-off while securing equal basic liberties for everyone are, first, an equal-basic-liberties principle ranked lexically prior, and, second, fair equality of opportunity paired with the difference principle. $□$

This is one position on a contested question. Nozick's reply draws the opposing line on redistributive justice. On Nozick's entitlement theory — a normative claim of that framework — justice in holdings is historical, not patterned: a distribution is just if it arises from just acquisition and just transfer, regardless of its end-state shape. Taxation of earnings from labour in order to fund redistribution is, on this view, on a par with forced labour, because it overrides the voluntary transfers from which the holdings arose. The Rawlsian difference principle is a patterned principle, and so, by Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain argument, it demands continuous interference with voluntary exchange. The same question — is redistributive taxation just? — therefore receives opposite answers: yes (Rawls, on grounds of fairness to the worst-off) and no (Nozick, on grounds of side-constraints on holdings). Both positions are live; the disagreement turns on whether justice is a property of the resulting distribution or of the history of transactions that produced it.

Bridge. This argument builds toward 20.07.01 (democracy), where the principles chosen in the original position become the standard by which democratic institutions — voting, deliberation, constitutional rights — are assessed, and appears again in 20.15.01 (history of philosophy) as the modern successor to the social-contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. The foundational reason the original position matters across political philosophy is that it converts the question "what is just?" into "what would free and equal persons agree to?", and this is exactly the move that lets Rawls reconcile individual liberty with egalitarian redistribution; the central insight, that fairness is a constraint imposed by choice behind a veil of ignorance, generalises from domestic justice to international and intergenerational justice; putting these together, the bridge is that contractarian choice under uncertainty is the shared device linking legitimacy, justice, and democratic authorship.

Exercises Intermediate+

Exercise 5 (medium, symbolic).

Political obligation raises a second contested question. Contrast the consent-based account (Locke) with the natural-duty account (Rawls). State one difficulty for each.

Hint

Consent: when is it given? Natural duty: why is it owed to this state rather than to just institutions anywhere?

Answer

On the consent-based account, the state's authority over a person arises from that person's voluntary agreement, express or tacit; the difficulty is that genuine consent is hard to find, since most citizens never explicitly agreed. On the natural-duty account, we have a natural duty to support and comply with just institutions where they exist, and this duty binds regardless of consent; the difficulty is particularity — explaining why the duty is owed to one's own state rather than to just institutions in general. Both are live positions; neither settles the question.

Exercise 7 (hard, symbolic).

Reconstruct Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain argument as a step-by-step inference, then state the strongest Rawlsian reply.

Hint

Begin from a just distribution $D_{0}$ , add voluntary transfers, and track what the patterned principle must do.

Answer

(1) Let $D_{0}$ be a distribution that satisfies the patterned principle $P$ . (2) A million fans voluntarily pay Chamberlain 25 cents each to watch him play; each transfer is just. (3) The resulting distribution $D_{T}$ no longer satisfies $P$ , since Chamberlain now holds far more. (4) To restore $P$ the state must forbid or reverse these voluntary transfers. (5) Therefore maintaining any patterned principle requires continuous interference with liberty. The strongest Rawlsian reply is that holdings are not acquired against a background of entitlement alone but against a background of basic institutions (property law, markets, money) that are themselves a cooperative scheme; the patterned principle governs the choice of those background institutions, not each transfer, so step (4) does not follow.

Exercise 8 (hard, symbolic).

Compare Rawls's and Sen's standards for a just distribution. Identify the case each handles better than the other.

Hint

Primary goods are means; capabilities are what a person can actually do or be.

Answer

Rawls ranks distributions by the bundle of primary goods held by the least-advantaged; Sen ranks them by the substantive freedoms — capabilities — that people actually enjoy, which depend on personal conversion factors (disability, age, environment). Rawls handles institutional design cleanly, since primary goods are things a basic structure can distribute. Sen handles cases where equal primary goods leave people unequal in real freedom: a person in a wheelchair and a person without one need different resources to achieve the same mobility, a fact invisible to a primary-goods index.

Lean formalization Intermediate+

lean_status: none. Political philosophy is a prose-first normative discipline; the correctness gate is argument reconstruction and source fidelity, not formal proof. The parts of the subject that admit formal treatment live elsewhere in the curriculum: social-choice theory (Arrow's impossibility theorem, Sen's liberal paradox) and axiomatic bargaining are developed in the decision-theory and game-theory chapters (§44) and the probability-and-statistics chapters (§37), and the modal and deontic logic relevant to rights and obligation is treated in §42. What a human reviewer must verify here is the accuracy of each reconstructed argument and the fairness with which contested positions are presented.

Advanced results Master

The distributive-justice debate opened in the Key argument has a parallel debate on political authority, where two positions again divide the literature. The consent-based account, descending from Locke, locates the state's right to rule in the actual or tacit agreement of its subjects; its standing difficulty is that genuine consent is rare, and tacit consent — riding a road, remaining in a territory — is too weak to bind. The natural-duty account, defended by Rawls, holds that we have a natural duty to support and comply with just institutions wherever they exist, independent of any act of consent; its standing difficulty is particularity, the problem of explaining why the duty is owed to one's own state rather than to just institutions in general. A third, fairness-based account (Hart, Rawls's principle of fairness) grounds obligation in the duty not to free-ride on a cooperative scheme whose benefits one accepts. Each account answers the same question — what gives this state authority over this person? — with a different normative foundation, and none commands consensus ^{[Locke 1689]}.

Against the Rawlsian framework, the libertarian position taken by Nozick holds (as a normative claim of the entitlement theory) that rights function as side-constraints on what may be done to persons, not as inputs to a social maximand; the state that emerges legitimately is at most a minimal night-watchman state, and any redistribution beyond rectifying past injustice violates rights. The communitarian critique, advanced by MacIntyre and Sandel, attacks from the other direction: it argues that the Rawlsian "unencumbered self" who chooses behind the veil is a fiction, that persons are constituted by their communal attachments and conceptions of the good, and that a liberalism pretending to neutrality between such conceptions smuggles in its own (normative) individualism. Where Nozick presses Rawls from the side of liberty, MacIntyre and Sandel press from the side of community and shared goods.

The capability approach of Sen and Nussbaum reframes the metric of justice entirely. Where Rawls measures advantage in primary goods (means), capabilities theory measures the substantive freedoms — the combinations of functionings — that a person can actually achieve, given personal and environmental conversion factors. On this view a just arrangement is one that expands what people can do and be, not merely what they own. The shift matters for cases — disability, geographic disadvantage, age — in which equal primary goods leave people unequal in real freedom; it also matters for development policy, where Sen argues that wealth is a means to freedom rather than freedom's measure ^{[Sen 1999]}.

A standing methodological split runs beneath these positions. Rawls seeks reflective equilibrium between considered judgements and principles; Nozick seeks a theory that respects historical entitlement; Sen seeks an information base broad enough to capture real freedom. The split is not resolvable by the data of any one case; it is a disagreement about what counts as the relevant information for judging a social arrangement.

Synthesis. Political philosophy supplies the normative categories — justice, authority, legitimacy, rights — that every other inquiry into collective life presupposes; the contractarian argument reconstructed here builds toward 20.07.01 (democracy), where the principles chosen behind the veil become the test for democratic institutions, and appears again in 20.15.01 (history of philosophy) as the modern chapter of a debate that runs from Hobbes through Locke and Rousseau to Rawls and Nozick; the foundational reason the field recurs across the curriculum is that any account of collective life must commit on what gives coercive authority its right and what a fair share consists in, the central insight, that fairness is a constraint on the choice of principles rather than a feature of outcomes alone, generalises from domestic to international and intergenerational justice; putting these together, the bridge is that the same choice-under-uncertainty device links legitimacy, justice, and democratic authorship, and the pattern generalises to the social-choice and bargaining results formalised in §37 and §44.

Full proof set Master

Proposition (instability of patterned principles). Let $D_{0}$ be a just distribution satisfying a patterned principle $P$ , and let $D_{T}$ be the distribution that results from applying to $D_{0}$ a finite sequence of voluntary, rights-respecting transfers $t_{1}, \dots, t_{n}$ . Then $D_{T}$ is just by Nozick's entitlement theory. For any pattern $P$ that fixes shares by a feature varying across persons, maintaining $P$ requires forbidding or reversing some such $t_{i}$ .

Argument. By the principle of just transfer, each $t_{i}$ preserves the justice of holdings, since both parties voluntarily agree and no third-party right is violated; by induction on $n$ , $D_{T}$ is just. Now let $P$ be a pattern fixing shares by some feature $F$ (need, desert, equality, the maximin condition). Since $D_{0}$ satisfies $P$ , the shares of the parties conform to $F$ . A voluntary transfer $t_{i}$ that moves holdings between parties who differ in $F$ need not preserve conformity to $F$ ; the Wilt Chamberlain case is the instance in which one party receives many small voluntary payments and thereby leaves the pattern. Once $D_{T}$ has departed from $P$ , the only means of restoring $P$ is to forbid $t_{i}$ in advance or to confiscate afterwards, and either is a continuing interference with voluntary exchange. Hence no patterned principle is stable under voluntary transfer without coercion. $□$

The result formalises Nozick's central objection to Rawls. The Rawlsian reply, noted in Exercise 7, is that the patterned principle governs the choice of the basic structure — the background institutions within which transfers occur — rather than each transfer taken in isolation, so the conclusion that maintenance of the pattern requires interference with particular liberties does not follow once the unit of evaluation is the basic structure itself.

Connections Master

Metaphysics 20.11.01. The Rawlsian veil presupposes a conception of the person — free, equal, capable of choosing a conception of the good — that inherits the metaphysics of identity and persistence: the party behind the veil is the same person who will later occupy a particular station, and the argument requires that identity hold across this uncertainty.
Democracy 20.07.01. The principles of justice selected in the original position are the standard against which democratic procedures — voting, deliberation, constitutional rights — are measured, and the legitimacy of those procedures depends in turn on whether the basic structure they constitute satisfies those principles.
History of philosophy 20.15.01. The contractarian line reconstructed here — Hobbes from fear, Locke from consent, Rousseau from the general will, Rawls from fairness — is a continuous chapter in the history of modern philosophy, and its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources are the primary texts any deeper study must return to.
Game theory and social choice 37.07.01. The formal apparatus that bears on the contractarian tradition — the analysis of bargaining, of the state of nature as a strategic interaction, and of impossibility results for aggregating individual preferences — is developed in the probability, game-theory, and decision-theory chapters.

Historical & philosophical context Master

Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) posed the problem of political authority with a thought experiment: in the absence of a common power, human beings live in a state of nature that is, in his famous phrase, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," a condition of war of all against all ^{[Hobbes 1651]}. Reason, Hobbes argued, leads individuals to authorise a sovereign whose power is near-absolute, because only such power can enforce the peace that makes commodious life possible. Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689) qualified this: the state of nature is not Hobbes's war but a condition governed by natural law, and government is instituted by consent to secure life, liberty, and property; when government breaches its trust, the people retain a right of revolution ^{[Locke 1689]}. Rousseau's Du Contrat Social (1762) recast the contract in terms of the general will, in which each citizen, obeying a law he has helped to make, remains "as free as before."

The modern contractarian revival begins with Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), which replaced the mythic founding contract with a choice-device, the original position, designed to yield determinate principles of justice — equal basic liberties and the difference principle — from a constraint on information rather than from a bargain among actual interests ^{[Rawls 1971]}. Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) replied with the entitlement theory and the Wilt Chamberlain argument, defending a minimal state and rejecting patterned principles of distributive justice as inherently rights-violating ^{[Nozick 1974]}. Sen's Development as Freedom (1999) and Nussbaum's work on capabilities then widened the metric of justice from goods held to freedoms enjoyed, connecting political philosophy to development economics.

Bibliography Master

@book{Hobbes1651,
  author = {Hobbes, Thomas},
  title = {Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill},
  year = {1651},
  publisher = {Andrew Crooke},
}

@book{Locke1689,
  author = {Locke, John},
  title = {Two Treatises of Government},
  year = {1689},
  publisher = {Awnsham Churchill},
}

@book{Rousseau1762,
  author = {Rousseau, Jean-Jacques},
  title = {Du Contrat Social; ou, Principes du Droit Politique},
  year = {1762},
  publisher = {Marc Michel Rey},
}

@book{Rawls1971,
  author = {Rawls, John},
  title = {A Theory of Justice},
  year = {1971},
  publisher = {Harvard University Press},
}

@book{Nozick1974,
  author = {Nozick, Robert},
  title = {Anarchy, State, and Utopia},
  year = {1974},
  publisher = {Basic Books},
}

@book{Sen1999,
  author = {Sen, Amartya},
  title = {Development as Freedom},
  year = {1999},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
}

@book{Kymlicka2002,
  author = {Kymlicka, Will},
  title = {Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction},
  year = {2002},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
}

@book{Wolff2006,
  author = {Wolff, Jonathan},
  title = {An Introduction to Political Philosophy},
  year = {2006},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
}

@book{MacIntyre1981,
  author = {MacIntyre, Alasdair},
  title = {After Virtue},
  year = {1981},
  publisher = {University of Notre Dame Press},
}

@book{Nussbaum2000,
  author = {Nussbaum, Martha},
  title = {Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach},
  year = {2000},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
}

Prerequisites

20.11.01

Tier anchors

beginner: Wolff An Introduction to Political Philosophy; Sandel Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
intermediate: Kymlicka Contemporary Political Philosophy; Wolff An Introduction to Political Philosophy
master: Rawls A Theory of Justice (1971); Nozick Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974); Hobbes Leviathan (1651); Locke Second Treatise (1689); Sen Development as Freedom (1999)

References

Hobbes — Leviathan · 1651, Parts I-II: the state of nature, the laws of nature, and the authorization of the sovereign
Locke — Second Treatise of Government · 1689, chapters II-VIII: the state of nature, property, and the consent that founds civil government
Rousseau — Du Contrat Social · 1762, Books I-II: the social compact and the general will
Rawls — A Theory of Justice · 1971, Part I: the original position, the veil of ignorance, and the two principles of justice
Nozick — Anarchy, State, and Utopia · 1974, Part II: the entitlement theory and the Wilt Chamberlain argument
Sen — Development as Freedom · 1999, chapters on capabilities, functioning, and substantive freedom

Estimated time

beginner: 15m
intermediate: 45m
master: 90m