prior probability

More North Korean prop-art here. Image credit: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Hat tip: @jayvanbavel

More details here. (Hat tip: Tyler Cowen.)

We’re hitting the “pause button” on our extended review of Anarchy, State, and Utopia this weekend, as we’re attending a conference at The University of Georgia. In the meantime, check out this screenshot from our Twitter feed:

The last two subsections of Chapter 6 (pp. 137-146) contain an extended digression on the problem of punishment and the possibility of “anti-punishment” (my term) via preventive detention in “resort detention centers”, one of my favorite Nozickian thought experiments thus far. More to the point, Nozick identifies some serious problems with Locke’s state-of-nature theory:

• Don’t all persons (not just the victim) have the right to punish wrongdoers in the state of nature?
• What happens when people disagree about the content or scope of their rights?
• How much compensation must be paid to persons who are prevented from exercising their rights?

Nozick’s answer to the first two questions is the dominant protection association. Once a protection agency becomes the dominant one in a territory, it (the agency) will monopolize the right to punish and will settle disputes about the scope of one’s rights. Nozick, however, glosses over the possibility of conflict among protection associations in adjoining territories. With respect to the compensation question, although Nozick considers the two extremes of “no compensation” and “full compensation”, he falls back onto his principle of compensation: it is morally required that compensation be made for any disadvantages imposed on others. (See, for example, the paragraph on the bottom page 143.) Alas, Nozick does not specify how such “disadvantages” are to be measured or monetized.

We are now done with Part I of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. We are attending a conference in Athens, Georgia this weekend, so we will jump into Part II of ASU next week.

Unwittingly, Nozick contradicts himself and refutes his own theory of the state in the fourth subsection of Chapter 6 (pp. 133-137)! Recall Nozick’s previous claims from Chapter 5 of  Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In case your memory needs some refreshing, we will break down his main claims here:

• That a territory’s dominant protection association will eventually become a state or state-like entity;
• That the dominant protection agency in each territory will prohibit non-clients from enforcing their rights in their dealings with the clients of the protection agency;
• That the dominant protection agency will compensate these non-clients for this violation of their rights;
• That this compensation will be in the form of in kind protection services;
• That this process from protection agency to state will occur without anyone’s natural rights being violated, since non-clients will receive compensation.

Now, however, in the fourth subsection of Chapter 6, Nozick will not only contradict himself; he will also end up self-refuting his own theory of the state! How? By acknowledging — in an extended digression on the problem of double jeopardy — that sometimes victims of harms do not wish to be compensated for such harms, either in money or in kind, and by openly conceding as follows (p. 137): “As the person to whom [an] enforceable obligation is owed, the victim seems the appropriate party to determine precisely how [his natural rights are] to be enforced.” If these propostions are true, then why don’t they apply to non-clients of the state/dominant protection agency? For my part, I won’t gloat, as I’ve already leveled these same criticisms many times against Nozick’s unrealistic and speculative theory of the state in previous blog posts, such as this one on 1/5/18. In any case, stay tuned — I will conclude my review of Chapter 6 of ASU in my next post …

Nozick poses two additional questions in the third subsection of Chapter 6 (pp. 130-133). First, he asks whether individuals in a state of nature might agree with each other or unilaterally decide to refrain from creating or joining a protection agency, or in Nozick’s words (p. 130, emphasis in original): “… might not everyone choose to stay out, in order to avoid the [inevitable loss of freedom] at the end of the process.” (In other words, why isn’t option D (from our 1/9/18 blog post) the most likely equilibrium in the state of nature.) According to Nozick, such a possibility is not a stable equilibrium, since the state of nature is like a Prisoner’s Dilemma (p. 131): “each individual will realize that it is in his own individual interest to join a protection association (the more so as some others join) …” Really? If I join a protection agency, what guarantee do I have (especially in the state of nature) that my protection agency won’t turn around and violate my rights! (Roughly, this is the situation we have today with most civil governments.)

The other intriguing question Nozick raises is this: what would John Locke have to say about Nozick’s theory of dominant protection agencies? After all, as Nozick himself notes (p. 132), the process of creating and joining a private protection agency, an association that later becomes the dominant one in a given territory, “looks nothing like unanimous joint agreement to create a government or state,” i.e. looks nothing like a Lockean social compact. For his part, Nozick decides to define “social compact” (or social contract) so broadly as to include any ephemeral micro pattern of behavior, so long as the pattern is the result of voluntary actions, such as “the particular traffic pattern on a state’s highways on a given day” or “the set of customers of a given grocery store on a given day and the particular purchases they make” (p. 132). Again, really? Is Nozick simply saying that the tacit consent of each individual to drive on x highway or to shop at y grocery store at z time of day is a sufficient condition for the existence of a social contract to respect other people’s rights? Aside from appearing to look clever, what is gained by such feats of sophistic reasoning? Why not just reject Locke’s social contract theory and be done with it?

The second subsection of Chapter 6 (pp. 126-130) anticipates the worldwide controversy over President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ill-fated decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which in hindsight, turned out to be one of the worst and costliest decisions in history. Here, Nozick asks, when is a preemptive attack morally wrong, and when is such an attack morally justified?

Recall Nozick’s key question from our previous post: may I prevent others from joining a protection association in the state of nature if I know that their protection association will later prevent me from exercising my natural rights in the future? It turns out that this question and the preemptive war question are analytically the same! Nozick, however, draws an artificial and untenable distinction, invoking the “last clear chance” doctrine from tort law: if an act requires a subsequent decision to commit a wrong — i.e. if the original act itself is not morally wrong — then one may not prohibit that act. As a result (according to Nozick), since the act of creating or joining a protection agency is in itself not a wrongful act, one may not therefore prohibit others from doing so.

So, what about our ill-fated decision to invade Iraq? It turned out Bush (and Blair) lied to the world, that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). But who cares? People lie all the time, so let’s assume that Hussein did have such weapons. According to Nozick’s moral logic, whether the Iraq war was morally justified or not would depend on whether the acquisition of WMDs is itself a wrongful act or not. Given that the U.S. military and a growing number of other countries (including Pakistan, India, and North Korea) now have their own stockpiles of WMDs and the ability to launch those weapons across their borders, does the acquisition of such weapons, by itself, constitute a wrongful act? What would Nozick say about Bush and Blair’s preemptive war? Alas, Nozick died in 2002, but it’s worth pondering how he would have answered this question.

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 next chapter.” But as we have noted in so many of our previous posts, Nozick has left too many issues open and ends untied thus far, problems that he promises to tackle in Chapter 6. In addition, Nozick raises two excellent questions in the first subsection of Chapter 6 (pp. 120-125). First, Nozick asks what equilibrium is most likely to occur in a state of nature? To this end, he models the state of nature as a Prisoner’s Dilemma (see example below). According to Nozick, there are four possibilities in all:

Option A: You can join a protection association and allow your neighbors to join one.

Option B: You can join a protection association but prohibit your neighbors from joining one.

Option C: You can refuse to join a protection association but allow your neighbors to join one.

Option D: You can refuse to join a protection association and prohibit your neighbors from joining one.

Given these four possible moves, what course of action is most likely to occur? Nozick says “B” is the most likely outcome, but then he raises a second key question: if a private protection agency in the state of nature has a natural right to prohibit an independent from exercising his right of self-help against due-paying members of the agency (on the pretext that the guilt-finding procedures of independents are too risky), then, in anticipation of this sinister possibility (sinister from the independent’s point of view), why doesn’t the independent have the reciprocal right to preemptively prohibit his neighbors from joining a protection agency in the first place?

For our part, as we mentioned in a previous post, we are skeptical about Nozick’s premise that individuals (and, by extension, protection agencies on their behalf) have a natural right to prohibit others from exercising their rights of self-help. Nevertheless, assuming this premise were true, we would expect the existence of such a right to lead to a Hobbesian war of all against all, especially if Nozick is right about “B” being the equilibrium solution in the state of nature. We will delve deeper into Chapter 6 tomorrow!

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 “Further Considerations on the Argument for the State” and is divided into six separate subsections as follows:

• Stopping the Process (pp. 120-125)
• Preemptive Attack (pp. 126-130)
• Behavior in the Process (pp. 130-133)
• Legitimacy (pp. 133-137)
• The Right of All to Punish (pp. 137-142)
• Preventive Restraint (pp. 142-146)

Remember, Nozick is trying to explain how a state or civil government could emerge without violating anyone’s rights, a claim that we find hard to believe. We will begin our review of this important chapter later today …