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PROFESSOR: So the topic of
today's lecture, as you can
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see from the title,
is liberty.
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And the best way to get a sense
of the project in which
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we will find ourselves engaged
today is to contrast the
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opening pages of Rawls' Theory
of Justice with the opening
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pages of Nozick's Anarchy,
State, and Utopia.
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So you'll recall that when we
were reading the Rawls--
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for some reason the remote is
not working, that's a pity but
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you'll recall that when we were
reading the Rawls, Rawls
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began his text by speaking of
justice as the first virtue of
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social institutions.
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It plays the role with regard
to the legitimacy of an
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institution that truth plays
with regard to the legitimacy
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of a system of thought.
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Each person, says Rawls,
"possesses an inviolability
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founded on justice that even
the welfare of society as a
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whole cannot override." For
this reason, says Rawls
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famously in these opening pages,
"justice denies that
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the loss of freedom for some
is made right by a greater
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good shared by others"
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So Rawls is concerned with and
inviolability of humanity
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based on a notion of justice.
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Nozick is also concerned with
a kind of inviolability.
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But rather than seeing the core
of that inviolability as
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lying in some notion of justice
he sees it as lying in
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a notion of rights.
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So he says in the opening of
the preface, the first
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sentence which you
read for today.
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"Individuals have rights and
there are things that no
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person or group may do to them
without violating those
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rights." And he goes on to say
that "the minimal state
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limited to the narrow functions
of protection
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against force, theft, fraud, the
enforcement of contracts
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and so on is the most extensive
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state that can be justified.
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Any state more extensive than
the minimal state violates
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people's rights."
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So there's something
extraordinarily interesting
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going on in this
pair of works.
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Both of them are concerned with
the fundamental question
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which we first encountered in
the context of Hobbes: how
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could it be that it's legitimate
to have a state?
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Both of them are concerned with
structuring the state in
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such a way that it doesn't
violate that which is
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perceived as being on their
picture as inviolable.
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But they differ profoundly in
what sort of state they end up
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calling legitimate.
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Perhaps because at the core of
Rawls's picture lies the
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notion of justice, whereas at
the core of Nozick's picture
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