What is a good StatE?? A good state is one that does (well) whatever governments should do, and it does nothing else. This platitude makes it more pressing that we try to find out what governments should do--what their proper functions are, and are not.
We might be tempted to say, as nearly everyone can agree, that the purpose of the state is to protect rights and to preserve justice. But this raises more questions than it answers. Which and whose rights? What sort of justice? There are, after all, many different conceptions of what rights we have, and what justice consists of.
It is on those questions that one can find the differences between ConservatisM?, WelfareStateLiberalism?, LibertarianisM, SocialisM, and FascisM?. There are a handful of anarchists (see AnarchisM) among the Socialists (see TraditionalAnarchism) and the Libertarians (see AnarchoCapitalism). But everyone else agrees that the existence of some kind of government is morally justified. What they disagree about is what government should do.
One fairly useful way to conceive of the differences between these different views is as how much they want government to do. For a stark and timely contrast, consider two of these views: LibertarianisM, which wants the state to do only a few things, and SocialisM, which wants the state to do a lot of things.
LibertarianisM, in political theory, is the view that that state governs best that governs least.
SocialisM, nearly on the other end of a continuum, is the view that the state is responsible for an equitable distribution of wealth and for controlling the means of production and distribution of resources in an economy. This has been loosely and popularly known as "CommunisM"; but philosophers use the term "communism" to mean one stage in the progression of a socialist society. Anyway, a socialist believes that we have a right not just to life; we have a right to all the essential means of sustaining life, such as food, clean water, shelter, and so forth. An important right that many socialists say we do not have is the right to private property. Justice, moreover, consists not only of everyone having adequate amounts of those basic rights; it consists also of the lack of large discrepancies in wealth and other resources between people. And so the functions of the government are many and varied, everything from running electric and water utilities, to providing welfare benefits for those who cannot work, to running factories, and so forth. So socialists want the government to be in virtually every productive area of life. They maintain that governments are morally justified in being a part of all of those different areas.
Obviously, we do not have the time to weigh the merits of libertarianism and socialism, or any other theories about the function of government. I just want you to understand that once we have given some justification for the existence of the state at all, we are faced with the question of what governments are morally justified in doing, which is another way of saying what their purposes or functions should be. As you can see, this turns to be one of the most important questions, not only of philosophy, but of any inquiry.
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