Understanding Utopia And The Natural Rights In Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia

The main argument is that the salient contrast, in Nozick's theory, between the natural rights theory combined with the entitlement theory, on the one hand, and the utopian theory, on the other hand, is not given by the fact that one method starts from certain moral assumptions, while the other from certain epistemological constraints. The argument for this affirmation is that the general principles that are agreed upon, in both cases, are quite similar (in our studied case, full background rights to liberty and property). Nevertheless, the difference is given by the fact that the first approach is based on an invisible hand process explanation, while the utopian approach is based on a contractarian explanation. On short, while the invisible hand process uses an unchangeable moral given from which all the implications should be derived, the contractarian method used by utopia is subject to local bargaining.