David Runciman

On 1 April, the Guardian admonished the Prime Minister to remember the importance of living up to his good intentions:

Putting Iraq to rights, in Mr Blair’s view, should be the whole world’s business. The more that all nations make common cause to do this, the better. The less this happens, the more vital it is to balance any absence of common cause with a sense of equitable and...

“If states such as Iraq are what is important, then the threat is manageable again; but if the threat is manageable again, then there is no need for the world’s most powerful state to feel threatened. It is this paradox – the post-Hobbesian paradox – that explains the rift between Europe and America, not the clash between Hobbesians and Kantians.”

Imagine that in the near future another terrible famine strikes sub-Saharan Africa, at a time when most Western governments are preoccupied with fighting and funding the never-ending war on terrorism. The ghastly images are duly laid out for public consumption on the nightly news, but the public is jaded by too many images of a suffering world. Then some bright spark in one of the...

What is wrong with the idea of a world state? John Rawls, the world’s most celebrated living political philosopher, believes that the answer is relatively straightforward. ‘I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace,’ he writes, ‘in thinking that a world government – by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central...

Wilt ‘the Stilt’ Chamberlain, the former American basketball player, has three distinct claims to fame. First, there is the basketball, of which modest art he was, as his nickname suggests, a preternaturally gifted exponent. Then there is his much repeated claim to have slept with over ten thousand women during the course of his playing career, a boast which has generated fascination, disapproval and scepticism in equal measure, and transformed him, if such a thing is possible, into the Georges Simenon of the American locker-room, the object of a whole new kind of attention. And third, there is his improbable place at the heart of modern American political philosophy. It was, peculiarly, Wilt Chamberlain on whom the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick chose to hang his full-blown critique of the interventionist state. The argument runs as follows. Imagine a society of perfect distributive justice according to any model you happen to prefer, in which everyone possesses precisely what they ought to possess for justice to prevail. Now imagine what happens when someone like Chamberlain comes along, the most exciting basketball player in the world (this was 1974, when Chamberlain was the most exciting player in the world, and his extra-curricular activities were a secret between him and a few thousand others). Large numbers of people want to watch him play, and are quite happy to pay $1 for the chance to do so, knowing that for every dollar they hand over he gets to keep 25c. No one in this just world minds the loss of a dollar, and no one thinks it unjust that some of it should go to the man who induced them to part with the money in the first place. During the course of a season, one million people pay to see Chamberlain play. He ends up with $250,000. He is now considerably better off than he would have been under the original model for the perfectly just society. Injustice has been born out of a series of perfectly just transactions. So, Nozick wants to know, what do you plan to do about it?