Monthly Archives: October 2012

Almost from the moment that Anarchy, State, and Utopia was published, its critics, particularly the individual anarchists, have attacked Nozick’s proffered moral justification for the coercion employed by (even) the minimal state, i.e. one devoted almost exclusively to the protection of its citizens from foreign and domestic predators.  From the anarchist perspective, the fatal flaw in the minimal state is that it forces unwilling parties to forgo the enforcement of their own rights, and to entrust this function to a central authority. For the reasons set forth in Chapter 4 of my Nozick’s Libertarian Project (“NLP”), I concur with these objections.

In this same chapter I offer an alternative defense of the minimal state, based on what I call the “libertarian principle of fairness” (NLP, 96), i.e. “that if the benefits and burdens of cooperating with the state in a program necessary to secure our rational agency are fairly distributed, then all rational agents are morally obligated to participate.”  Most basically, with respect to those functions of the state that establish the preconditions for the exercise of our moral agency, it is simply unfair for some members of a community to reap the benefits of the efforts of others while refusing to contribute themselves. I apply this principle to the coercive funding of national defense here: http://naturalrightslibertarian.com/2011/02/can-the-minimal-state-be-justified/.

In his essay titled “Nozickian Arguments for the More-Than-Minimal State” in the recently published The Cambridge Companion to Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” Bader and Meadowcroft eds. (“CCN”), Eric Mack (a respected and widely-published libertarian philosopher) takes on this same subject. This post will analyze Professor Mack’s strategy, and will compare it in certain respects to my own humble efforts. Continue Reading »