Feser on Nozick.

• Author: Mack, Eric
• Position: "On Nozick" - Book Review

Edward Feser's On Nozick (Toronto: Wadsworth, 2004) is an excellent and pleasing brief introduction to the political thought of Robert Nozick as that thought is embodied in Nozick's now classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). The book has three main virtues. First, it provides an accurate and sometimes insightful introductory account of the philosophical contentions of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Second, it places these contentions in the broader context of philosophical defenses of libertarian conclusions and in the context of complementary empirical support for these conclusions. Third, unlike almost all discussions of Nozick's views, it is animated by a strong, but not uncritical, sympathy for Nozick's enterprise, and that sympathy generates some of Feser's most insightful points about Nozick as well as some nice responses to well-known criticisms of the doctrine of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Because of these virtues, I strongly recommend this short work not merely as an introduction to Nozick's political philosophy, but also and more generally as an introduction to rights-oriented libertarian theory.

Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Before describing in more detail some of the valuable contents of On Nozick and then going on (of course) to register various criticisms, I want to recall the general structure and purposes of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick's book begins with a strong pronouncement about the existence of individual moral rights and about the apparent implications of these rights. "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do" (p. ix). Nozick's overall contention is that these rights are indeed strong enough to rule out any more-than-minimal state--that is, any state that goes beyond the protection of life, liberty, and property, but these rights do allow and in some sense even legitimate the minimal state. The first and longest part of Anarchy, State, and Utopia--titled "State-of-Nature Theory, or How to Back into a State Without Really Trying"--is devoted to this latter claim. Nozick's goal here is refute the individualist anarchist's contention that rights that are strong enough to rule out the more-than-minimal state are also strong enough to rule out the minimal state. In the course of defending the minimal state against the individualist anarchist's critique, Nozick explores questions about the character and purpose of state-of-nature theory, the place of rights and the "moral side-constraints" that are correlative to rights within morality, the stringency of rights, the moral status of actions that risk violations of rights and of actions that suppress such risky activities, the place (if any) of procedural rights within state-of-nature theory, and the conditions necessary for an institution to count as a state.

Having established to his satisfaction that the minimal state is legitimate, Nozick proceeds in part 2--titled "Beyond the Minimal State?"--to argue that no state more extensive that the minimal state is justified. Here Nozick's main target is the view that a correct theory of distributive justice requires a state that redistributes wealth and income among individuals; the main example of this target is the view of distributive justice advanced in John Rawls's book A Theory of Justice (1971), according to which distributive justice requires that the income of those in the lowest income group be raised as much as possible. Nozick rejects all conceptions of distributive justice that call for a more-than-minimal state. In place of all such conceptions, he defends his historical entitlement conception of justice in holdings, according to which a holding is just if and only if it arises from voluntary and nonaggressive acts of initial acquisition or transfer or from just compensation for unjust transfers. Having established to his satisfaction that no more-than-minimal state is justified, Nozick goes on in part 3, rifled "Utopia," to contend that the minimal state is inspiring not because it is utopia, but rather because it is the framework in which all individuals are free to pursue their own visions of utopia.

Feser's Account

I turn now to some of the nice points in Feser's account of Nozick's doctrine and its intellectual context. In his chapter 1, Feser does a good job of describing how, throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century and under the influence of logical positivism and linguistic analysis, philosophy retreated from normative theorizing and how Rawls's Theory of Justice played a central role in reversing that retreat. Feser correctly notes that Anarchy, State, and Utopia strongly reinforced philosophy's return to normative theorizing. Unfortunately, it is pushing things a great deal for Feser to say that, along with Rawls's tome, Nozick's work is "one of the two most influential books in [political philosophy] of the 20th century" (p. 3).

In chapter 2, Feser does a good job of providing the reader with a basic picture of the spectrum of libertarian views. He emphasizes that libertarianism per se is simply a doctrine about the centrality of individual liberty (or rights) in the assessment of individual and group action. It is not per se a comprehensive moral doctrine, nor does it announce the general moral priority of individual liberty (or rights) over all other values or principles. He does a nice job of distinguishing between the more empirical and pragmatic arguments for libertarian conclusions and the more philosophical and principled arguments for...