prior probability

Chapter 1 of Nozick’s classic work “Anarchy, State, and Utopia“ poses the following “what if” thought experiment: What if we lived in a state of nature, in a world in which there were no actual states or governments? This hypothetical first-order inquiry, in turn, raises a methodological second-order question: Why does Nozick himself begin his book with such an abstract, theoretical query?

Nozick provides two reasons for his second-order query. First: because the choice between the state and anarchy is the most fundamental question of political philosophy. And second: because Nozick wants to explain how a state or government could in theory arise in conditions of anarchy. The key words here are “in theory”, for Nozick readily admits that it doesn’t matter to him how the first states or governments really arose. What matters, according to Nozick, is not whether a particular explanation of the state is true or not. (Indeed, Nozick himself, pp. 7-8, describes three ways an explanation could go wrong.) Rather, what matters is whether an explanation “illuminates” the existence of states and governments.

Alas, Nozick doesn’t explain how a “defective” or incorrect explanation could provide any meaningful “illumination.” Worse yet, Nozick makes totally unwarranted assumptions about the state of nature. Instead of assuming a Hobbesian war of all-against-all, he assumes an idyllic Lockean state of nature, one in which “people generally satisfy moral constraints and generally act as they ought” (p. 5). Yet, there is a method to this methodological madness! In the eloquent words of Robert Nozick (id.), “If one could show that [a theoretical] state would be superior to even this most favored situation of [peaceful] anarchy …, or would arise by a process involving no morally impermissible steps, or would be an improvement if it [a state] arose, this would … justify the state[!]” (Note: it appears that Nozick is not searching for a Humean or consequentialist justification; instead, he is looking for a non-instrumentalist or Kantian justification of the existence of states and governments.)

Credit: Kayla Ferguson

We interrupt our year-end review of Anarchy, State, and Utopia to share this story with our loyal followers: “When someone asked mathematician Richard Bellman how to tell the difference between an excercise and a research problem, he replied if you can solve it, it’s an exercise, otherwise it’s a research problem.” (Hat tip: @mathematicsprof, via Twitter.) Bonus material: Check out the TEDx video by Quique Bassat below on “Why research is cool.”

Before we jump into Chapter 1 of “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”, we want to return to Nozick’s preface one last time. The preface not only summarizes the main conclusions and methods of his book; it also calls out the intellectual dishonesty of most philosophical work. According to Nozick, when philosophers consider the great questions of philosophy, many pretend that their writings are the absolute final word on their subjects. But in reality, philosophers know that their works are full of “bulges” or unanswered questions, so (in Nozick’s words) the creation of a philosophical essay or book often “feels like pushing and shoving things to fit into some fixed perimeter of specified shape.” Worse yet, the bulges are masked or the cause of the bulge is thrown far away so that no one will notice. Nozick then conjures up a photographic metaphor to explain this form of philosophical dishonesty: “Quickly, you find an angle from which everything appears to fit perfectly and take a snapshot, at a fast shutter speed before something else bulges out too noticeably.” After a trip to the darkroom for touching up: “All that remains is to publish the photograph as a representation of exactly how things are, and to note how nothing fits properly into any other shape.” Nozick, by contrast, promises not to hide the bulges or weaknesses of his work. What a refreshing dose of candor!

Nozick’s preface sets forth his main conclusion: only a “minimal state”–i.e. a collective “limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on”–is consistent with the principle of individual rights. Nozick further concludes that a collective may not use coercion to promote distributive justice (reduction of income inequality) without violating individual rights, and he also tells us that he arrived at these libertarian conclusions “with reluctance.” Be that as it may, these conclusions raise a new set of difficult (and perhaps unanswerable) questions. At what point, for example, does a state stop being “minimal”, and further, what rights do people have? Yet, as we mentioned in our previous post, Nozick’s makes no attempt (so far) to identify what these sacrosanct individual rights consist of. By all accounts, it looks like Nozick is against coercion and that respect for individual rights must entail the total absence of coercion, unless coercion is necessary to counteract prior acts of coercion. So, we are going to need a theory of coercion/consent and a method for distinguishing between justified acts of coercion from unjustified ones. We will thus jump into Chapter 1 of Nozick’s tome in our next post.

Let’s begin our review of Robert Nozick’s book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick opens his preface with this famous sentence: “Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).” This Kantian premise is an attractive and appealing one, but at a minimum, Nozick will at some point have to explain to us (1) what these rights are and (2) why violations of such rights are wrong (and if there are any exceptions to these two general rules). Otherwise, Nozick’s opening gambit is simply a sophisticated case of circular reasoning or question begging. After all, why do we have rights and who gave them to us? We will review the rest of Nozick’s thought-provoking preface in our next post.

Image credit: Christina Mendoza, via Pinterest

… A page by page, chapter by chapter review of Nozick’s classic work Anarchy, State, and Utopia. (Here is a PDF of Nozick’s book for your reference.) Fasten your seat belts, this project will take up the rest of November and all of December.

We haven’t forgotten our family, friends, and fellow citizens in the beautiful Island of Puerto Rico.

Missing from this infographic: What is the average (median) sentence imposed on the 83 convicted war criminals?

Remember the Y2K Problem? Looks like we can add “the lack of net neutrality” to the list of terrible worries that were overblown or never materialized. Back in 2006, for example, our libertarian friend and colleague Tyler Cowen supported the policy of net neutrality: “Without neutrality, Comcast and Verizon would use differential pricing schemes to extract more revenue and thus diminish some forms of Net output, including Google, Amazon, ebay, and possibly blogs.” (See here, for a full list of Prof Cowen’s reasons in support of net neutrality.) Today (2017), however, after examining some evidence, Prof Cowen has now concluded that net neutrality is no longer a necessary evil: “we’re at the point where we’ll do just fine without it.” For our part, our position is that antitrust law, not telecommunications law, should be used to police Internet markets.

Source: @nationaljournal