prior probability

We are now ready to resume our review of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The fourth subsection of Chapter 4 (pp. 59-63) contains an extended digression into retributive and deterrence theories of punishment. Nozick takes a probabilistic approach to punishment (pp. 59-60), an approach which is music to our ears: “A person’s option of crossing a [moral] boundary is constituted by a (1 – p) chance of gain G from the [wrongful] act, where p is the probability he is apprehended, combined with the probability p of paying various costs of the act [if caught].” According to Nozick (p. 60), these costs include C, the payment of compensation to the victim; D, the emotional costs to the wrongdoer of being caught and tried; and E, the financial costs of getting caught and going to trial. As Nozick notes (p. 60): “Prospects for deterrence look dim if…

Before we press on with our review of Nozick’s masterpiece Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU), we want to say a few words on why Nozick is worth reading and why we are so excited about Nozick’s ideas, especially Chapter 4 of ASU, despite the many criticisms of Nozick’s work we have made thus far. Recall from our previous post Nozick’s distinction between “Compensation Systems” (consisting of moral boundaries that can be crossed so long as compensation is paid) and “Prohibition Systems” (consisting of moral boundaries protected by strict prohibitions against any non-consensual boundary crossings). Doesn’t this distinction look a lot like the existing legal distinction between civil liability and criminal liability?! That, in a nutshell, is why we are so fascinated by ASU, for Nozick is actually trying to answer a hard theoretical and practical question in law: Why are some harmful acts crimes, while others are mere torts

The third subsection of Chapter 4 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (pp. 58-59) narrows down and reformulates the problem of enforcing moral boundaries in terms of two hard questions (p. 59): (i) why not allow or permit boundary crossings so long as the boundary crosser is required to pay full compensation to his victim? Or in the alternative, (ii) why not strictly prohibit all non-consensual boundary crossings, regardless of the boundary crosser’s willingness or ability to pay full compensation to his victim? (For future reference, let’s call all compensation-based schemes or permissive methods of enforcing moral boundaries “Compensation Systems” and all paternalistic, prohibitive, or punishment systems “Prohibition Systems“.) As Nozick notes, if we were to favor a “Compensation System” of enforcing moral boundaries, two related problems will arise. One is the problem of measurement: how should harms or boundary crossings be measured and priced? The other…

The second subsection of Chapter 4 is only two pages long (pp. 57-58), but it deserves our careful attention for several reasons: (i) One reason is Nozick’s geometric visualization of morality. As Nozick puts it (p. 57): “an area in moral space” or moral boundary surrounds every individual. (ii) Another reason is that Nozick raises (yet again!) a fundamental question, an inquiry so important that it will take up the rest of Chapter 4. Specifically, Nozick poses a subtle query about the nature of this geometric moral boundary. Should the moral line surrounding each person be treated as an impenetrable wall — one that others are forbidden to transgress — or merely as a suggestion or default position — a moral line that others are permitted to step over so long as they compensate the person whose moral boundary has been crossed? (Before proceeding, it’s worth noting that this fundamental…

Nozick (pictured below) presents an important theoretical problem in the first subsection of Chapter 4: the problem of independents, or how should a private protection racket deal with non-members? Additionally, Nozick raises a further theoretical problem in a footnote (p. 55): What happens if a non-member’s land is completely surrounded by land owned by members of a protection racket? How can the non-member leave his land to make a living without trespass, i.e. without violating the natural rights of his neighbors? See, for example, Parcel “L” pictured below. (For what it’s worth, Nozick says that he will address the surrounding-person problem in Ch. 7.)

Recall from previous chapters that, according to Nozick, people in a state of nature will establish “mutual protection associations” to protect their natural rights and that these protection rackets will compete with each other for clients until there are just few dominant agencies left, via…

Nozick ends Chapter 3 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia by drawing up a tantalizing road map of the rest of his philosophical project (p. 53, emphasis in original):

“The remainder of Part I … attempts to justify the minimal state. In Part II, we argue that no state more powerful or extensive than the minimal state is legitimate or justifiable …”

As a result, Part I of the book (Chapters 1 to 6) corresponds to a world of stateless anarchy–a world of private protection rackets with each one dominant on its own turf–and the remainder of Part I (Chapters 4, 5, and 6) will explain how, in Nozick’s own words (p. 52), “the transition from [private protection rackets] to a minimal state must morally occur.” Next, Part II of ASU (Chapters 7, 8, and 9), which corresponds to the world of the classical liberal nightwatchman state, will argue that such…