DOING EVIL THAT GOOD WILL COME OF IT

Most deontologists find bedrock in the Pauline doctrine that it is morally objectionable to do evil in order that good will come of it. Uncontroversially, this doctrine condemns the killing of an innocent person simply in order to maximize the sum total of happiness. It rules out the conscription of a worker to his or her certain death in order to repair a fault that is interfering with the live broadcast of a World Cup match that a billion spectators have been enjoying. It rules out such sacrifice even if it would maximize the sum total of everyone's happiness. An act utilitarian, by contrast, would require the sacrifice of the one whenever this latter condition obtains, since such a utilitarian is committed to the view that one ought always to act so as to bring about the greatest sum total of happiness.

An act utilitarian might, however, consistently hold that a large number of rather insignificant pleasures, such as that which a spectator derives from witnessing men in shorts running around and kicking a ball, is never sufficient to justify the infliction of a great harm on a single individual. 4 He might take such a position without abandoning utilitarianism by denying that the sum total of such minor pleasures could ever be sufficiently great to outweigh the harm of death to the one. Under the inspiration of John Stuart Mill, a utilitarian might draw a more general distinction between serious and trivial harms and pleasures and maintain that no amount of a trivial pleasure could ever amount to a sum of happiness that is greater than the disutility of a serious harm.

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is recognized as a classic of modern political philosophy. In tandem with John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), it is widely credited with breathing new life into political philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. It effectively moved libertarianism from a relatively unimportant subset of political philosophy to the center of the discipline.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) was written whilst Nozick was a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences in Stanford during the academic year of 1971-972. It constitutes the combination of three separate projects that Nozick was working on at that time. Part I is based on a talk concerned with how a state would arise out of the state of nature that Nozick presented to a student group at Stanford, whilst also incorporating some of the ideas developed in his 1971 paper “On the Randian Argument.” Part II primarily results from his engagement with John Rawls's theory of justice, which led to the formulation of the entitlement theory of justice, much of which Nozick developed whilst co-teaching a course on capitalism and socialism at Harvard with Michael Walzer. Part III , in turn, derives from Nozick's contribution to a panel on utopia at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Although Nozick initially wanted to work on the problem of free will whilst at Stanford, he instead ended up combining these three projects, yielding ASU.

Despite the contemporary enthusiasm for sanitary reform, few Victorians wrote poems about drains. One exception was Kipling, who gave his poem the daringly unpromising title 'Municipal'. The speaker is a district commissioner who, when menaced by a stampeding elephant, took refuge in a blocked-up outfall wearing regulation 'snowy garments':

The experience has made him 'believe in well-flushed culverts' and, as a result, the death-rate in his district has gone down. Kipling's vision of empire extended to the infrastructure of railways, riverboats, bridges and sewage systems. In his prose and poetry, his fascination with technology and its consequences shows up in unexpected places, foreign, imperial and domestic. On his visit to Brazil in 1927, he sent rapturous dispatches to the ultra-conservative (and often xenophobic) Morning Post praising the mountain railways, the giant hydroelectric installations, and the laboratory where snakes and spiders were milked for their venom. ‘“They” ’ heads towards the mystical and redemptive, but it starts by evoking the joys of motoring through rural England, and does not stint on technical details: ‘I was on the point of reversing and working my way back on the second speed.’

Reading Kipling in India may seem as natural an activity as reading Kipling in England, or perhaps only a little less so, for he was an English writer with a crucial Indian dimension. Born in Bombay, he grew up speaking an Indian language, Hindustani, more fluently than he did English and was mollycoddled and indulged by a small army of Indian servants that included a dear ayah and a bearer. Kipling was sent (back?) to England at the age of six, as nearly all children of the Raj were, to prevent them from being contaminated in their formative years. He then spent the next six years of his life in the boarding-house in Southsea that he later described as the 'House of Desolation' where he had been introduced to 'Hell ... in all its terrors'.

In contrast, Kipling’s initial years in India came to be seen by him as a lost paradise, which he later revisited in fantasy and by proxy through the child-hero of his greatest work, Kim (1901). Thirteen when the novel begins and seventeen when it ends, Kim leads a carefree, footloose, hybridised and adventurous life, which takes him over vast tracts of India in the company of a richly varied array of surrogate father figures and avuncular well-wishers, including the Lama, Mahbub Ali and, to a lesser extent, Colonel Creighton and Hurree Babu.

'If Kipling were with us today,' L. C. Dunsterville (Stalky's original) told the 1,600 members of the Kipling Society just after the start of the Second World War, 'he would doubtless give the nation a message of faith in our righteous cause, and courage to meet our inevitable losses and hardships leading to ultimate victory.' What Dunsterville didn't mention is that Kipling might reasonably have scrawled 'I told you so' across his message, because in the years leading up to his death in 1936 he had been as indefatigable in urging his fellow countrymen to prepare more effectively for the looming showdown with Hitler as he had been consistently critical, in the decades before the First World War, of Britain's grossly inadequate planning for that cataclysm. As the interwar years drew on, however, fewer and fewer people were willing to listen to Kipling, and having been in his pre-1918 heyday 'the most widely read and influential writer on war in the English-speaking world', he found himself all too often whistling in the wind. 'As the pacifist revulsion against the first World War intensified in the early 1930s,' Frank Field has observed, 'as the flood of autobiographies and memoirs denouncing war now poured from the presses ... the views of an unregenerate imperialist, Francophile and Germanophobe like Kipling carried little weight. Many believed that Nazism was a product of the harshness of the Versailles settlement that Kipling had denounced for its softness.'

INTRODUCTION

Surely the most famous statement in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) is the manifesto with which it opens: “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do.”

In Part II of ASU, Nozick elaborates that view as follows:

INTRODUCTION

The first and longest part of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) is substantially devoted to a defense of the minimal (nightwatchman) state against the challenge of the individualist anarchist. In this chapter I explore the contest between Nozick and the individualist anarchist by examining responses that Nozick offered, could have offered, or should have offered to the anarchist challenge. I conclude that the best Nozickian response to the anarchist challenge vindicates a state which is more than minimal because, although it provides only the service of rights protection, it funds the production of its services by requiring at least some of the recipients of those services to purchase those services. In this introductory section I will provide a sketch of the structure of this exploration.

Nozick begins ASU with the well-known proclamation that “[i]ndividuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)” (p. ix). He immediately adds: “So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?” (p. ix). Pursuing these questions, the individualist anarchist maintains with considerable plausibility that, if one takes these individual rights as seriously as Nozick thinks one should, one must reject even the minimal state in favor of a system of competing private protective agencies.

Tales for children

Rudyard Kipling is famous as a storyteller for children, some of whom fell in love with his stories and grew up to be authorities on Kipling. Roger Lancelyn Green became a Kipling enthusiast as a schoolboy 'playing Jungle'; Harry Ricketts heard 'my mother read me the Just So Stories'; Daniel Karlin re-read the Jungle Books 'dozens of times' between the ages of eight and twelve; and Joyce Tompkins thrilled to 'a sense of something wild and deep and old [that] infected me as I listened'. I too read Kipling as a child, taking my first conscious delight in word-play from the Just So Stories and later relishing the rhetoric of the Jungle Books. Yet few children in the twenty-first century know more of Kipling than the Disney cartoon of Mowgli, Baloo and Bagheera, unless they happen to hear the Just So Stories read aloud by an adult enthusiast or to join the Cub Scouts. This is not because Kipling's stories are too difficult and 'literary' to appeal to children acclimatised to TV and computer games, for children who wouldn't read the Jungle Books listen to them with great pleasure (though I have yet to meet a contemporary child who liked the Puck books).

INTRODUCTION

In some ways, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) has been a victim of its own success. For over thirty-five years it has been one of the most provocative works in political philosophy, and the preeminent defense of Lockean libertarianism. Almost all readers have read it with an eye to its conclusions. Statists and redistributionists see it as something to be combated and defeated; libertarians start out to defend it or, at least, modify it in constructive ways. Given this it is hardly surprising that the second part of ASU, arguing against the redistributive state, has been the focus of by far the most extensive, and famous, discussions. One shudders to think of how many essays have been written on Nozick's witty, four-age, Wilt Chamberlain example. The first part of ASU, in which Nozick argues against the anarchist, showing that minimal state is (in some sense) justifiable, has received much less attention. Eric Mack's contribution to this volume is an insightful analysis of Nozick's substantive case against anarchism, and how it might be modified to achieve success.

If within ASU the first part generally goes unnoticed, within that part Nozick’s path-breaking analysis of invisible-hand explanations is almost entirely ignored in political philosophy.Readers focus on Nozick’s substantive claims, and not what he calls his “abstract” and “metatheoretical” comments about explanation and justification (p. 3). This is partly Nozick’s own doing; he directs readers away from his metatheoretical comments about the benefits of state of nature theories and invisible hands to his substantive account of the state of nature and the rise of the minimal state (p. 4).

A line of Kipling critics have identified the late short fiction as his best writing. Although this remains a minority view, the later collections are central to debate on his relationship to modernism. Kipling's extended career meant that he had a worldwide reputation at the end of the nineteenth century, but was still publishing new work in the 1930s at the end of the modernist period. Here the focus will be on evaluating the later fiction precisely as 'late' and 'untimely' work.

Little or no reference is made to Kipling's later writing in a number of classic accounts of the short story. H. E. Bates in his 1941 study only refers to Kipling's Indian writing and dismisses him for his support for imperialism. Indeed Bates finds Kipling no more than 'an interesting pathological study', with no signs of 'fine quality' in the writing. Frank O'Connor offers more in the way of engagement with Kipling's writing in his The Lonely Voice (1962). He notices that Kipling was more interested in groups and on the effect his tales had on his readers than on internal character development. Seen as in flight from the loneliness in his own life and therefore afraid of depicting isolation in his stories, Kipling is seen by O'Connor as unable to become 'the lonely voice', the truly modern short fiction writer who expresses the isolation of the modern individual.

'The ambiguous status of Kipling's poetry', observes Jan Montefiore in her 2007 critical study Rudyard Kipling, 'is aptly summed up by Dan Jacobson's exasperated tribute to "Kipling, a poet I cannot abide yet cannot stop reading".' This sentence might stand as an epigraph for any discussion of Kipling's poetry.

Jacobson's remark was made in the Times Literary Supplement in 2005. A century earlier in 1904, a cartoon by Max Beerbohm was fuelled by a similar combination of extremes. (This was in the immediate aftermath of the Boer War, during which Kipling had 'come out' as the undisputed bard of empire and literary spokesperson for imperial values.) In the cartoon, a diminutive, check-suited Kipling, kicking up his heels and blowing on a toy trumpet, hangs on the arm of a tall, languid Britannia. The two have swapped hats: he wears her war helmet, she his bowler. She leans away, seemingly unimpressed by his pipsqueak imperial trumpetings. The caption, mimicking the cockney idiom of his soldier ballads, reads: 'Mr Rudyard Kipling takes a bloomin' day aht on the blasted 'eath, along with Britannia, 'is gurl.' Only someone well versed in Kipling's work could have put the knife in so wittily.

'Kim dived into the happy Asiatic disorder which, if you only allow time, will bring you everything that a simple man needs.' Rudyard Kipling was far from being a 'simple man'. But in his most successful novel, he wrote about a boy whose enjoyment of 'happy Asiatic disorder' matched his own. The Irish orphan travels among all sorts of Indians with enviable freedom and street smarts while watched over by a diversity of caring father figures: the Teshoo Lama, Mahbub Ali, Lurgan Sahib, Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, Col. Creighton. These surrogate fathers are sure that Kim is the very person they need, either to play the Great Game or, in the case of the Lama, to help find the sacred River of the Arrow. And Kim does not disappoint. Kipling's ideal boy is 'Friend of all the World'. He is delighted by almost all aspects of India as well as by his own escapades: 'It was all pure delight ...' (K 207).

‘ Kim is many things’, writes Fred Lerner: ‘a spy story, a quest novel, a Bildungsroman, but above all, it is a love letter to India, a celebration of the sounds and smells and colours of the subcontinent.’ Kim is also an imperialist adventure tale with a boy-hero, akin to the novels of G. A. Henty. One of Kipling’s major innovations is making Kim, though Irish and therefore a ‘sahib’, more like the Indians he lives among than like an Irish or British boy.

The examples in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU) are among the most arresting ever constructed by a philosopher: the experience machine, Wilt Chamberlain, the distribution of mates, the distribution of grades, and pouring tomato juice in the ocean. Provocative though his examples have proven to be, they still strike me as somewhat underappreciated. This chapter reflects mainly on the second part of Nozick's book. There is some criticism here, and some extending to be sure, but my main purpose is simply to reconstruct some of Nozick's most important insights about justice.

RAWLS'S EXPERIENCE MACHINE

The agenda for contemporary philosophical works on justice was set in the 1970s by John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Nozick said: “Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls's theory or explain why not” (p. 183). There is truth in the compliment; yet when it came to explaining why not, no one did more than Nozick.

Rawls sought to model justice as a kind of fairness. Many sorts of things can be fair. Evaluations can be fair, or not. Shares can be fair, or not. As Rawls modeled the intuition behind his departure from strict egalitarianism, we initially assume we are entitled to an equal share of the pie, but realize we can make the pie bigger by encouraging each other to work harder. We encourage each other by rewarding efforts to make the pie bigger: offering more pie to those who do more work. In effect, we allow inequalities if and when doing so makes us better off. I call this the Precursor.

Insofar as postcolonialism is so often used as a synonym for anti-colonialism, one might infer that the relationship between the terms in my title is one of binary opposition rather than negotiation or conjunction. In such a reading (which will be contested in due course), Kipling might be understood simply as a figure whom later non-western writers engage with only to dismiss. There is certainly evidence to support such a reading. Given his long association with India, hostility towards Kipling is, understandably perhaps, especially apparent in the subcontinent and its diasporas, with Kim and The Jungle Books - the main focus of the discussion below - often identified by critics as embodying the most demeaning properties of colonial discourse.

Antipathy to Kipling is perhaps most widely evident amongst later South Asian writers with explicitly nationalist sympathies. An early example of such antipathy is Sarath Kumar Ghosh's epic novel The Prince of Destiny (1909). While never explicitly named, Kipling and his supposed imperial politics are recurrently the object of biting commentary, notably in the denunciations made by the protagonist Barath and his friend Naren, who complains: 'For twenty years [the banjo-poet] and his hundred imitators ... who write of India by his inspiration, have abused us and insulted us most deeply.'

A LITTLE PASSAGE WITH A BIG IMPACT

Nozick discusses the experience machine in a little (four paragraph) section of Chapter 3 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU). The section seems to be a mere speculative digression from Nozick's main line of argument, and yet it has come to be perhaps the most widely discussed passage of the book. It has been reprinted and paraphrased and discussed thousands of times. Yet it seems to me that the passage is a bit of a mystery - perhaps it functions as a kind of Rorschach test for readers. Different readers apparently fi nd different arguments in Nozick's remarks. It may seem that the various interpretations tell us more about the interests of the readers than about the argument that Nozick actually presented.

In section 3.2 I outline the context in which the controversial passage appears. What I say in this part may come as a surprise to anyone whose knowledge of the passage derives entirely from seeing it only as a selection in an anthology, isolated from its original context. After sketching the contents of the passage in section 3.3, I go on in section 3.4 to explain and evaluate some versions of one fairly popular interpretation of the argument. Under these interpretations, the argument is taken to be an attack on utilitarianism.