This excerpt fromRobert Nozick‘s 1974 critically acclaimed philosophical masterpiece Anarchy, State and Utopia inspired today’s column.
Does someone violate another’s rights by performing an action without sufficient means or liability insurance to cover its risks? May he be forbidden to do this or punished for doing it? Since an enormous number of actions do increase risk to others, a society which prohibited such uncovered actions would ill fit a picture of a free society as one embodying a presumption in favor of liberty, under which people permissibly could perform actions so long as they didn’t harm others in specific ways. Yet how can people be allowed to impose risks on others to whom they are not in a position to compensate should the need arise? Why should some have to bear the costs of others’ freedom? Yet to prohibit risky acts (because they are financially uncovered or because they are too risky) limits individuals’ freedom to act, even though the actions actually might involve no cost at all to anyone else.
The Impracticality of Freedom
So the man who chooses not to purchase medical insurance exacts a cost upon the others who will pay the (they presume) inevitable hospital bill. The others must therefore mandate that he will take from his own resources to buy insurance. That is, others will require a sacrifice from him that he would not require of himself.Of course this makes sense, for again, others would bear the cost of his lack of coverage. It’s only fair. Or is it?
Allow me to rephrase: Others exact a cost onto the man whose (they presume) eventual ill-health would be, were he allowed to go uninsured, the source of their future burden. How then, in the interest of fairness, will the others compensate the man for his very real current sacrifice? After all, there’s no guarantee that his demise won’t come in the form of a quiet, yet massive, instantly fatal heart attack. In which case he had sacrificed the enjoyment of his own resources (his cost of insurance), while the others he was forced to protect sacrificed nothing. What’s fair about that? More importantly, what’s free about that?
Remember Q from past conversations with A? He’s not buying this one.