The Squirrel and the State

The Independent Review 14 (3):377-387 (2010)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Robert Nozick famously argued that acknowledging that individuals have certain fundamental natural or prepolitical rights to their lives and property does not preclude the legitimacy of the state, as the individualist anarchist would claim. The reason is that “a state would arise from anarchy. . . even though no one intended this or tried to bring it about, by a process which need not violate anyone’s rights”. Many doubts have been raised about some of the claims that Nozick needs to make to reach this conclusion. Doubts have also been raised about the normative relevance of that conclusion for the moral evaluation of states that did not arise in such a way. But even if all these doubts were unfounded, Nozick’s argument falls short of justifying what, according to the anarchist challenge, is in need of justification. This shortcoming is significant because it reminds us about the true nature of the problem that the state poses for any philosophical outlook grounded on a theory of natural, libertarian rights.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Whither anarchy? Has Robert Nozick justified the state?Randy Barnett - 1977 - Journal of Libertarian Studies 1 (1):15-21.
Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State.Murray Rothbard - 1977 - Journal of Libertarian Studies 1 (1):45-57.
Has Nozick Justified the State?Charles Sayward & Wayne Wasserman - 1981 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62 (4):411-415.
Toward a theory of empirical natural rights.John Hasnas - 2005 - Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (1):111-147.
Nozick and Locke: Filling the space of rights.Jeremy Waldron - 2005 - Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (1):81-110.
II. Nozick's entitlements.Onora O'Neill - 1976 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 19 (1-4):468-481.
Robert Nozick.David Schmidtz (ed.) - 2002 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-01-07

Downloads
34 (#405,012)

6 months
1 (#1,027,696)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?