Skepticism About Distributive Justice | Political Philosophy with Jason Brennan | Libertarianism.org 

Hey Jason Brennan, Man, I wish your videos were longer! Never before was I able to understand so well the motivations and ideas behind libertarian thinkers. Especially in this video it would have been great, though, if you had pointed out the premises underlying Hayek’s and Nozick’s arguments more clearly. Especially for people like me that come from another place on the ideological spectrum, I think it is easy feeling a bit deceived otherwise. Here is what I would have liked to be pointed out (more clearly, or earlier on): Nozick (and Hayek?) are not trying to justify the current unequal distribution of wealth. I am very sure that many people felt like quitting this video and giving it a dislike because this was only clarified in an afterword. Nozick and Hayek seem to me to rely very strongly on a notion of freedom that includes negative, but in no sense positive freedom. I get this impression because Nozick (in my impression from only your video) treats freedom as a zero-sum game. When he says “Unequal distribution of wealth is just what happens when people have freedom over their own lives”, he implies that people don’t gain or lose freedom by gaining or losing their coin. He seems to suggest that, in his ideal scenario where everyone follows the principles of the Entitlement Theory, people have maximum freedom all the time. This is only possible if you define people’s freedom as the absence of certain rules. Otherwise, if we had a huge inequality of wealth distribution after a few generations, people born dirt poor would not be free at all if we made use of a positive definition. I think this really needs to be pointed out. It also leads me to my second big question mark: What are the ideal rules for any Entitlement Theory Scenario? I know you said it was a complicated matter, but nevertheless I sense that not only the implementation is hard, but also justifying the very idea of setting up those rules raises serious problems. The reasoning behind this is: You derive moral judgment from nothing else but those rules. But (how) can you say that these rules are themselves just? You could say: Yes. There are other moral principles that we derive these rules from. This, however, kind of messes everything up because people will have different moral views so that there needs to be done a huge bulk of explaining why these ultimate moral principles are correct. Oh boi! Or, you could say: Nope. The fact that we agreed on these rules is enough to vindicate them. But what about people who disagreed? And what about people who came into this world only after the rules were set? Do you periodically have to “reset” society, so that we wouldn’t be forced to live under the moral views from people who lived 3000 years ago? I say this, on the one hand, to show a conceptual problem of Nozick’s ideas. This theory needs to be heavily backed up with metaethical justifications of these rules. You can’t just say that there will be some rules and they will make everything alright. The serious questions only start there. On the other hand, it is also meant as a demonstration that, in my opinion, Nozick’s idea would fail in reality, and fail hard. I know, I am just as much annoyed by people saying that a theory is bad overall simply because it can’t be implemented. It would have still been nice, though, if we had heard some critical voices pointing this out, and maybe even heard some defence why this theory is important nonetheless. I know I want too much, and I’m sorry! I just hope there might be a video some time in the future in which you will go into more detail on these theories and their criticisms. Best wishes, Inkjar

I like you Brennan but Nozick makes a terrible argument here. Markets are human-made, not created by random chance like a meteor destroying the dinosaurs, this is a false analogy. Markets are driven by human needs and wants, all of which are based on human choices, or at least, this is the initial premise of economics. Also, the distribution of friends and relationships is heavily dependent on previous goods and advantages or disadvantages, specifically psychological predetermined factors that individuals have no meritocratic claim towards. For example, if you are "good looking" friends and relationships are far easier for you than others who are less attractive, this is almost 100% dependent on genetics that an individual has no claim to either way. The initial distribution of materials would only work if each new generation of wealth is based on an equal starting position. Even this, say a 100% death tax, would not bring about equality of opportunity, but it most certainly would be a start.

Example about meteorites is not acceptable, because it presume, that everything is predetermined and not worth to question. In other words - god given. In other words - we must make "leap of faith", or "philosophical suicide" and just to be content with what is. Very nice position if you are in the top of social classes. I guess the same logic was used by kings some ages ago, before heads started to roll... So, in my opinion, in social relations between people: 1. Freedom comes not free, from the very moment you are not alone in the world. 2. Equality is impossible. Nor in opportunities, nor in results. 3. It is not possible to talk about perfect balance between freedom and equality, without consideration of concrete society as closed system in stopped time.

While it is a worthy idea to try to return wealth to the people it was stolen from, great care must be taken to accurately trace events so as to not just redistribute generally but to compensate actual victims from the wealth of actual victimizers. The problem is that time has eroded knowledge and responsibility over generations, so such a case tends to be very difficult to make. Also, the privileged who have taken other people's wealth and inherited it over generations are truly too big and powerful to mess with, so these kind of redistributive programs usually don't take the care that is due and just aim to redistribute from the middle class and self-made individuals, since they are a much easier target to take wealth from. They also do not spend much thought into it goes to, since they usually give to the lower classes of rich nations without any regard for historical events, or much more simply, to be taxed by politicians to increase their power via public spending.

Entitlement = the convenient cant of selfish wealth (Joseph Chamberlain, 1885)

Wrong. That is one of the reasons polygamy is illegal. Keeps powerful men from having harems and hoarding women leaving lower-class men without any mates