prior probability

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 conclusion is supported by any actual evidence. First, he claims that a territory’s dominant protection agency will eventually become “a statelike entity” (p. 118), since it will prohibit non-clients from enforcing their rights in their dealings with the clients of the protection agency. Next, Nozick concludes that the phase transition from private protection racket to statelike entity will occur without anyone’s natural rights being violated, since the dominant agency will agree to compensate non-clients by providing them in kind protection services. Seriously? Who is he kidding? Nozick begs a number of fundamental questions in reaching these unsupported and speculative conclusions. In particular, and putting aside the free rider…

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 self-help against due-paying members of the agency (on the pretext that the guilt-finding procedures of independents are unreliable and unfair), such a prohibition would impose a significant disadvantage on independents. So, what is to be done? In a word: compensation.

In summary, Nozick re-introduces his principle of compensation from Chapter 4 of ASU (p. 110, emphasis added by us): “The clients of the protection agency, then, must compensate the independents for the disadvantages imposed upon them by being prohibited self-help enforcement of their own [natural] rights against the agency’s clients.” So far, so good. But, alas, to make this scheme workable, Nozick qualifies his compensation principle in a major…

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 to be, both reliable and fair.” But as we noted in a previous post (2 Jan 2018), this claim raises a whole new set of complicated questions — questions that the natural law tradition, unfortunately, are unable to answer. In particular, since no guilt-finding procedure will be perfect, what level of imperfection is consistent with fairness and reliability? Nozick also makes another extraordinary conjecture in the fifth subsection of Chapter 5. In brief, building on his earlier conclusion (from Chapter 2 of ASU) that a single private protection agency will end up becoming the “dominant” one in the state of nature, Nozick now further conjectures that this dominant agency will…

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 of this question the same?) Surprisingly (to us), although Nozick is prepared to announce that “individuals have rights”, he is ambivalent about the moral status of procedural rights in the state of nature! Nozick is considering interactions between “independents” and private protection agencies in the fourth subsection of Chapter 5 (pp. 101-108). More precisely, what if a due-paying member of a protection agency has committed a wrongful act against an independent? May the protection agency prohibit the independent from enforcing his rights? Suffice it to say that Nozick has trouble answering this question because of the uncertain status of procedural rights in the state of nature.

Nevertheless, in the course…

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 gap or gaping hole in natural law in a single eloquent and memorable sentence (p. 101): “The natural rights tradition offers little guidance on precisely what one’s procedural rights are in a state of nature …” This is not only a frank and intellectually honest conclusion; it is a damning one, especially for those of us (myself included) who believe in natural law and in the natural rights tradition.

But why is Nozick’s frank and stark conclusion so significant? Because as Nozick notes on pp. 91-101 of ASU, the scope of the right to self-defense depends on what procedural rights one has. Although we might all agree that one…

Clarification (June 11, 2020): I wrote and posted this part of my extended review of Nozick’s classic book “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” back in December of 2017. Recently, however, one of my readers brought to my attention that Robert Nozick’s critique of Rawls’s “fairness principle” is based on a misconception (by Nozick himself no less!) of Rawls–namely, that Nozick is wrong to assume that Rawls’ principle of fairness implies “group rights” or “collective rights.” Based on our back and forth in the comments section below, I was persuaded that my reader’s diagnosis is correct, so please keep this in mind (i.e. that Rawls’s principle of fairness need not imply group or collective rights) when you read my original December 2017 blog post below.

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The second subsection of Chapter 5 of ASU (pp. 90-95) marks, to us, a critical turning point in the history of ideas. It is…

Nozick addresses a very intriguing question in the first subsection of Chapter 5 of ASU (pp. 88-90): when does a private protection agency in a (Lockean) state of nature have the moral right to prohibit a non-member from enforcing his natural rights? After all, according to Nozick, not only does every person have rights; every person also has the right to enforce his rights. But enforcement can be a risky business. What if, for example, a non-member uses enforcement procedures that are too risky or dangerous? Or, in the words of Nozick (p. 88): “An independent might be prohibited from privately exacting justice because his [enforcement] procedure is known to be too risky and dangerous–that is, it involves a higher risk (than another procedure) of punishing an innocent person or overpunishing a guilty one …” We call this the problem of risky independents.

Without getting bogged down in the details…

Nozick valiantly tries (alas, without success) to solve the stubborn problems of blackmail and criminal threats in the last subsection of Chapter 4 (pp. 84-87) of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. How? By drawing a distinction between positive-sum, value-producing “productive exchanges” (in which both parties are made better off by the exchange) and negative-sum, value-destroying “non-productive exchanges” (in which only one of the parties is made better off by the exchange). Although this familiar game-theoretic distinction is intuitively appealing, it is not of much help in the case of blackmail. After all, just because a victim of blackmail may feel betrayed and exploited by a blackmailer’s threat to reveal the victim’s secrets, the victim does, in fact, receive something of value if he pays the blackmailer: the latter’s silence. Worse yet, Nozick neglects the reciprocal nature of the blackmail problem: if the blackmail victim had not engaged in disgraceful conduct…