There are three reasons why this writer is unhappy. 1. Robert Nozick
died, 2. I miss him, 3. For the vagaries of the publishing world, the
contributions to the volume do not take into account Nozick’s Invariances,
one of the finest pieces in metaphysics in the last few decades.

The volume under review has a composite character. Said character is
mandatory given its subject. Nozick once quipped he never intended to spend
time writing the "son" of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. No
Hollywood sequels, no scholastic debates, but new ideas, to sum up his lesson.
The lesson is welcomed during a time when much philosophy tends to acquire its
solid status of debates within debates, Ptolemaic epicycles that add nothing
much.

Three distinct themes run through the text.

I. Nozick’s opus on his anarchic utopia is a masterpiece for all
its failings. The best test is to read it now and see it bears the weight of
time and criticisms. The first four essays here point to different aspects of
the debate. The most interesting, I surmise, is the view that Nozick retains a
special ambiguity. A minimal state is a state that can arise with no infringing
of rights, or so the proof is supposed to show. What remains unproven is
whether this is in itself a good thing. Nozick liked to present his case as
utopian, and maybe we should leave it at that. To my mind the 1974 book remains
the best case made for the plausibility of non-sentimental anarchism. Miller
and Sanders (pp. 11 and ff.) deal with general framework of ASU and with the
specific Lockean flavor that is given to the content of the rights individuals
have. L. Lomasky presents a nicely articulated rejection of Nozick’s rejection
of his utopian libertarian society. The gist is that the repudiation revolves
around a notion of symbolic value in actions, that we see no reason why i) it
should be a political level (as opposed to churches, groups, or single
ritualized acts performed by individuals) and ii) why everybody ought to like
it. Pettit in his "Non-consequentialism and Political Philosophy"
tackles a far more substantial criticism. Nozick assumes that individuals have
rights (and nobody and no-thing can do anything that infringes on those rights
without doing something immoral.) Quite directly Pettit points out that such
deontological views will be of no help in choosing ranking of rights or even in
judging why they are such a good things. It seems to me likely that,  short of metaphysics of rights, Pettit is
right. In assessing why a political entity (a state) is constrained to not
infringing on some rights, we are willy nilly bound to resort to
consequentialist considerations. I am not completely sure, though, that on the
metalevel that Pettit calls questions of justification to the limit (p. 103) we
are all consequentialists. Gaus (in the sixth essay) points to the weaknesses
of Nozick’s theory of symbolic actions. It was this theory that motivated his
own rejection of the libertarian philosophy of ASU. Consider for the sake of
the argument that a principled reason has a symbolic value to oneself and to
others in the sense of being a token of a commitment as well as an action itself,
viz. declaring that cheating at gambling is illegal we want to signal that we
are not cheating and that we expect others not to as well. The crux of the
argument on the symbolic utility of actions, to adopt the terminology here
deployed, is, given that it does exists, whether its proper place is in the
public (or political and legal sphere) or in the realm of voluntary action. For
what is worth it, this writer view sides with the old timers (symbolic value
ought to be like principled reasons for individuals that need not need any
support form the state.) How realistic and/or how utopian all of this can be
can be easily checked against one’s own intuitions about the
probity/morality/legality of prohibiting drugs. (I don’t call them illegal
substances because that is precisely the controversial point.)

II. In his Philosophical Explanations, Nozick stakes out an
epistemology that is not completely original (Dretske before him hit on the
same themes.) Facing the traditional conundrums of Gettier, Nozick opts for
knowledge claims that are beliefs, that are true, and that are not necessarily
justified. This is the truth-tracking feature (a counterfactual property as it
were.) The seventh essay, by Michael Williams, debates exactly this objective
notion of knowledge, positing instead that knowledge is constituted by
normative claims. Nozick opts for a notion of knowledge that is purely
objective, i.e. you may know that X without yourself having nay idea that you
know that X, and nobody else has any idea either. To make the contrast clearer,
knowledge here is seen as viral: you may be a symptom-less carrier. When
knowledge is seen as a normative notion something has to give: you have, if you
know that X, to be able to justify, rationalize, or otherwise tell me some
story on why it is so, and to some degree even whence it comes about. It is an
interesting open question, whether we do not in fact have both notions of
knowledge operative in our cognitive endowment. To say the very least, we do
not have a better grip of normative notions w.r.t. objective ones. It remains,
as it is observed in two essays in this volume, that the notion of knowledge
employed is what determines whether one takes seriously or not the venerable
and purely philosophical question of skepticism. In its general and strongest
form the skeptic demands that any real and possible, or merely conceivable
alternative that could be a defeater of a knowledge claim is shown not to hold.
To be very generous it is not very clear (I am inclined to think there is no
answer to the skeptic in the strong form) in which way Nozick’s notion of
subjunctive knowledge with its apparatus of possible worlds would help defeat
the skeptic.

III. In a series of contributions (viz. Socratic Puzzles and Examined
Life) Nozick started writing in a different notes and tones. His own life
is examined, in tones and style that irritated many academics. Here lies a
great deal of originality. In a way it is a return to a form of philosophy now
unpopular. I learn, e.g. from P. Hadot, that it was dominant in some areas of
the classic Mediterranean world.  At
least two of the essays here under review here (beginning with E. Millgram, p.
175 and ff.) deal with this intriguing possibility: philosophy is a form of
fashioning a certain character, in the sense in which a scene or a play has a
cast of characters. Millgram tries out one difficult line of thought. Nozick
might have wanted to see his work not a set of propositions (the kind of
standard materials for philosophical theories.) His building blocks are
proposed to a reader as thinking aids and not as the final truth-functionally
valuable objects. It is my estimate that this is probably a good assessment
only of Examined Life. In most other cases Nozick was as keen as any
other philosopher to try out the best view he could come up with, though
without any set goal of convincing others. The others ought to be aware of the
alternatives to be explored. Millgram even thinks that Nozick succeeds in
creating a "persona" that is not fascinating either to its author or
to the public. Nozick as anti-Nietzsche is probably not an unfair way of
characterizing the outcome.

The last piece (by the editor of the entire volume) appropriately balks
at drawing any conclusion. In all likelihood there is no one meaning of life.
There are senses in which we grow up. I am just afraid I grew up in ways that
are fairly distant from Schmidtz (see e.g., pp. 212 and ff. on the meaning of
life as a personal touch: I feel the most meaningful lives are those utterly devoid
of anything personal, but this would take a long time even to articulate.)

What is most interesting in Nozick’s work is that he is his best
critic. Several authors here and elsewhere still debate his own criticism of
his first book. His notion of symbolic meaning (introduced in several lectures
during the 90’s and dealt with analytically in his The Nature of Rationality)
affords him a specific criticism of his own views. Charity, even enforced
charity, or the prohibition of drugs, can be justified even on narrow grounds,
in terms of the symbolic contribution they make to the meaning of political
decision-making. In this volume the authors often oscillate between an almost
nostalgic appreciation of early Nozick and the earnest discussion of the novelty
of the idea.

It is indeed a pity that Nozick died. If there is one thing that
remains of his legacy is the quality of the discussion. One author here notes
that there is no "Nozick-ism" about, he left no school to follow, no
doctrine to endorse, no slogan to shout. Rather, he left a lesson of
intellectual integrity and immense analytical acumen. The simple testing ground
is the profundity and the novelty of his discussion of Newcombe’s paradox. I
assume for brevity’s sake readers are familiar with the paradox (if not there
are entire volumes devoted to it.) Though invented by a physicist, the paradox
points to a real difficulty in our notion of rationality, which has very little
to do with the intricacies of quantum mechanical reasoning. Nozick’s analysis, surprisingly
for a philosophical point, is borne out in several empirical studies on the
subject (for the cognoscenti: the actual relative weight of the sums placed in
the boxes has an effect on the kind of intuition that prevails as principle of
choice between the two boxes and the one and only one box options.)

With the regrets above indicated, I cannot but hope the reading of
these essays will push people to look again Nozick’s work, including the
treatise on objectivity that saw it to print after the author was killed by
cancer. It contains what is probably one of the finest analyses of what
necessity and contingency are. Some of the essays here are sternly critical of
their object, and rightly so. If someone was capable of enjoying controversy it
was Bob Nozick. To him, with humility and a plea to younger readers to read
him, this is dedicated.

© 2003 Adriano Palma

A. P. Palma,
Univ. Paris-X and Inst. J Nicod, Paris

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics