Tale of a Slave

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David St

The following is take from Tom Wood's now book, Rollback, pgs 184-185. I feel stupid that I never heard of Nozick's Tale before.

DRS

 

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick recounts what he calls the Tale of a Slave, and invites the reader to consider himself as the slave in the story. The story moves through nine stages:

 

First: You are a slave at the mercy of a brutal master, who forces you to work for his purposes and beats you arbitrarily.

 

Second: The master decides to only beat you for breaking the rules, and even grants you some free time.

 

Third: You are part of a group of slaves subject to this master. He decides, on grounds acceptable to everyone, how goods should be allocated among you all.

 

Fourth: The master requires his slaves to work only three days per week, granting them the other four days off. They can do as they wish during their free time.

 

Fifth: The master now allows the slaves to work whenever they wish. His main caveat is that they must send him three-sevenths of their wages, corresponding to the three day's worth of work they once had to do on his land very week. In an emergency he can force them to do his biding once again, and he retains the power to alter the fraction of their wages to which he lays claim.

 

Sixth: The master grants all 10,000 of his slaves, except you, the right to vote. They can decide among themselves how much of their (and your) earnings to take and what outlets to fund with the money. They can decide what you are and are not allowed to do. We can suppose for the sake of argument that the mater irrevocably grants this right to the 10,000 slaves. You now have 10,000 masters, or a single 10,000-headed master.

 

Seventh: You are granted the freedom to try to persuade the 10,000 to exercise their vast powers in a particular way. You still do not have the right to vote, but you can try to influence those who do.

 

Eighth: The 10,000 grant you the right to vote, but only to break a tie. You write down your vote, and if a tie should occur, they open it and record it. No tie has ever occurred.

 

Ninth: You are granted the right to vote. But functionally, it simply means, as in the eighth stage, that in case of a tie, which has never occurred, our vote carries the issue.

 

Nozick's question is this: at what stage between 1 and 9 did this become something other than the tale of a slave?

 

 

 

 

 

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