For Nozick a strictly limited set of near absolute individual rights constitute the foundations of morality. Such rights for him "express the inviolability of persons" and "reflect the fact of our separate existences." The rights are these: each individual, so long as he does not violate the same rights of others, has the right not to be killed or assaulted, to be free from all forms of coercion or limitation of freedom and the right not to have property legitimately acquired, taken, or the use of it limited. He has also the secondary right to punish and exact compensation for violation of his rights, to defend himself and others against such violation. He has the positive right to acquire property by making or finding things and by transfer or inheritance from others and he has the right to make such transfers and binding contracts. The moral landscape which Nozick explicitly presents contains only rights and is empty of everything else except possibly the moral permissibility of avoiding what he terms catastrophe. Hence moral wrongdoing has only one form: the violation of rights, perpetrating a wrong to the holder of a right. So long as rights are not violated it matters not for morality, short of catastrophe, how a social system actually works, how individuals fare under it, what needs it fails to meet or what misery or inequalities it produces. In this scheme of things the basic rights which fill the moral landscape and express the inviolability of persons are few in number but are all equally stringent. The only legitimate State on this view is one to which individuals have transferred their right to punish or exact compensation from others, and the State may not go beyond the night-watchman functions of using the transferred rights to protect persons against force, fraud, and theft or breaches of contract. In particular the State may not impose burdens on the wealth or income or restraints on the liberty of some citizens to relieve the needs or suffering, however great, of others. So a State may only tax its citizens to provide the police, the law courts and the armed forces necessary for defence and the performance of the night-watchman functions. Taxing earnings or profits for the relief of poverty or destitution, however dire the need, or for the general welfare such as public education is on this view morally indefensible; it is said to be "on a par with" forced labour or making the government imposing such taxes into a "part owner" of the persons taxed.
Nozick's development of this extreme libertarian position is wide-ranging. It is full of original and ingenious argument splendidly designed to shake up any complacent interventionist into painful self-scrutiny. But it rests on the slenderest foundation. Indeed many critics have complained of the lack of any argument to show that human beings have the few and only the few but very stringent rights which Nozick assigns to them to support his conclusion that a morally legitimate government cannot have any more extensive functions than the night-watchman's. But the critics are wrong: there is argument of a sort, though it is woefully deficient. Careful scrutiny of his book shows that the argument consists of the assertion that if the functions of government are not limited to the protection of the basic stringent rights, then that arch-sin of ignoring the separateness of persons which modern critics impute to utilitarianism will have been committed. To sustain this argument Nozick at the start of his book envelops in metaphors all policies imposing burdens or restraints going beyond the functions of the night-watchman State, and the metaphors are in fact all drawn from a description of the arch-sin imputed to utilitarianism. Thus, not only is taxation said to be the equivalent of forced labour but every limitation of property rights, every restriction of liberty for the benefit of others going beyond the constraints imposed by the basic rights, are [sic] described as violating a person, as a sacrifice of that person, or as an outweighing of one life by others, or a treatment of a distinct individual as a resource for others. So conceptions of justice permitting a graduated income tax to provide for basic needs or to diminish social or economic inequalities are all said to neglect the basic truth "that each individual is a separate person, that his is the only life he has." To hold that a person should bear costs that benefit others more is represented as a "sacrifice" of that person and as implying what is false: namely that there is a single social entity with a life of which individual lives are merely part just as one individual's desires sacrificed for the sake of his other desires are only part of his life. This imputation of the arch-sin committed by utilitarianism to any political philosophy which assigns functions to the state more extensive than the night-watchman's constitutes I think the foundation which Nozick offers for his system.
(H. L. A. Hart, "Between Utility and Rights," Columbia Law Review 79 [June 1979]: 828-46, at 831-3 [italics in original])
