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We almost considered skipping Chapter 6 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, since Nozick himself invites his readers to do so on p. 120: “The reader who wishes to pursue the main flow of our argument may proceed directly to the … Continue reading →

Before we resume our review of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU), let’s take a snapshot of the overall structure and organization of Chapter 6 of ASU, the last chapter of the first part of the book. This chapter is titled … Continue reading →

In addition to my in-depth page-by-page review of the first five chapters of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, I have been working on two other projects this fall. First, I wrote up a short paper titled “The Case for Bayesian Voting” … Continue reading →

In addition to the first five chapters of Robert Nozick’s classic book “Anarchy, State, and Utopia“, we read, tried to read, or began reading the following few books over the holidays: 1. Karl Sigmund, “Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The … Continue reading →

Let’s keep this party going! We will resume our review of Nozick on Monday or Tuesday.

It’s time to wrap up our review of Chapter 5 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU). The last two subsections of Chapter 5 (pp. 113-119) are philosophical garbage disappointing. Why? Because Nozick concludes with two Panglossian claims, and neither rosy … Continue reading →

To his credit, Nozick recognizes the reciprocal nature of the relationship between private protection agencies and independents in the sixth subsection of Chapter 5 (pp. 110-113). Specifically, if a protection agency decides to prohibit independents from exercising their right of … Continue reading →

Nozick appears to equivocate in the fifth subsection of Chapter 5 (pp. 108-110). He now claims that everyone has procedural rights (p. 108): “Everyone has the [natural] right to defend against procedures that are in fact not, or not known … Continue reading →

Do individuals have procedural rights in the state of nature? (Or conversely, do victims of harms or their allies have a moral duty to use only “fair and reliable” guilt-finding procedures before imposing any punishment on wrongdoers? Aren’t both formulations … Continue reading →

New year … same ol’ blog, so let’s continue with our review of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick identifies a major gap in natural law theory in the third subsection of Chapter 5 (pp. 96-101). Nozick sums up this enormous … Continue reading →