Philosophy 101, #7: What is Meta-Utopia?

The libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick writes in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) that the political philosopher should take value pluralism seriously. Value pluralism is the fact that people hold different social and political values - in other words, people hold different comprehensive doctrines.

Discussing political philosophy and how it can deal with value pluralism, Nozick introduces the concept of meta-utopia which is a high-level political environment in which societies with different ways of lives or utopias can co-exist. He writes:

Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others… utopia is meta-utopia: the environment in which utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular utopian visions are to be realized stably.

Nozick believed that if we could have this meta-utopian environment, a wide variety of different social organizations would emerge.

I believe that for libertarians, it is important to try and find practical ways through which meta-utopia can exist. Fortunately, there are different options to reach meta-utopia. From a cybernetic space perspective, we can already form thousands of online communities in which we can interact and cooperate with each other based on specific shared interests. From a real-life sociological perspective, we are making such maritime technological advances that we will eventually be able to create new societies on the oceans. Such societies could take the form of many different types of social organizations. The creation of such habitable dwellings on the oceans is called Seasteading. If we can allow people to Seastead, and to move freely from one Seastead to another, we will have realized a meta-utopia.