Robert Nozick on Rights as Side Constraints

Quote

"Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them without violating those rights."

— Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Chapter 3 (1974)

Historical Context

Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974, at the height of the Cold War and in direct response to John Rawls A Theory of Justice (1971), which had argued for a redistributive conception of justice. Nozick's book is the most influential libertarian work of the twentieth century: it defends a minimal state, the inviolability of individual rights, and the claim that any more extensive state violates the rights of its citizens. The sentence quoted comes from Chapter 3, "Moral Constraints and the State," where Nozick sets out the moral foundations of his position. It is the pivot of the entire book — the premise from which the minimal state is derived and the redistributive state is condemned.

The book's intellectual context was the revival of rights-based and anti-utilitarian moral theory in the 1970s. Rawls had grounded justice in a hypothetical contract behind a veil of ignorance; Nozick grounded politics in the actual rights of actual individuals. The appeal of the book lay partly in its rigor and partly in its style — Nozick wrote with wit and a taste for striking examples, none more famous than the "experience machine" and the "Wilt Chamberlain" argument, the latter designed to show that any pattern of distribution, however just at the outset, will be transformed by voluntary exchanges into a distribution that violates the pattern. The book is a defense of the priority of the individual against every form of collective goal, whether the maximization of utility or the redistribution of wealth.

Philosophical Interpretation

The sentence states that individuals have rights and that these rights impose limits on what others may do. Nozick's distinctive claim is about the kind of limits rights impose: they are "side constraints," not goals. A goal-oriented moral theory — utilitarianism is the paradigm — tells us to pursue the best overall state of affairs; rights, on such a view, are mere instruments, to be respected only when respecting them maximizes the good. Nozick rejects this: rights are side constraints on action, boundaries that may not be crossed even when crossing them would produce a better outcome. The difference is categorical. On the goal view, we may violate one person's rights if doing so prevents the violation of many others' rights; on the side-constraint view, we may not — the inviolability of the individual is not a hypothesis to be tested against aggregate results but a fixed limit of moral argument.

Why should rights have this absolute character? Nozick's answer is that the side-constraint view reflects the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means. The goal-oriented view treats persons as resources for the achievement of social goals — it is willing to sacrifice some for the benefit of others, which is exactly what treating persons as mere means comes to. The side-constraint view expresses the separateness of persons: there is no social entity that enjoys the sacrifices of individuals; there are only individual lives, each with its own plan, and no one may be used as a means to the ends of others without consent. The sentence is therefore not merely a political claim but a metaphysical one — a picture of the moral world as a world of separate individuals, each with inviolable rights, whose boundaries structure all legitimate social arrangements.

Related Concepts

The quote states the doctrine of rights as side constraints, the foundation of Nozick's libertarianism. It contrasts with the utilitarian and consequentialist treatment of rights as goals to be maximized, and with Rawlsian justice, which gives priority to fair distribution rather than to side constraints. The position connects to individualism, the Kantian principle that persons are ends in themselves, and to the theory of the minimal state and the entitlement theory of justice. It also raises the question of moral responsibility and the limits of what any group or state may do to individuals.

Learning Path

Begin with the site's answer on what justice is, to see the question Nozick addresses, and the site's answer on what ethics is for the moral framework. Then read the analysis of rights and of libertarian political philosophy. Compare Nozick's view with Rawls's justice as fairness and with the utilitarian tradition in Mill's Utilitarianism. For the wider debate, explore the relation between liberty and equality, and the arguments over the limits of state power in the site's discussions of political philosophy.