How Persuasive Is Nozick's Account of How a Minimal State Could Emerge from a Suitably Specified State of Nature Without Violating Anyone's Rights?

How persuasive is Nozick's account of how a minimal state could emerge from a suitably specified state of nature without violating anyone's rights?

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia Nozick gives extreme importance to self-ownership. It is from here that the rights and then the minimal state originate from. As individuals own themselves, they cannot be treated as means and must be seen as ends, in Kantian fashion (Chia, 2010). Individuals are inviolable like Kant describes them and self-owners therefore; Nozick states that we have absolute rights to life, liberty and rights to property. These rights function as side constraints on the action of others in the sense they set limits on how others may speak and treat a person. Nozick’s key notion is that except for purposes of punishment or self-defence the only things others can do to an individual are those which he agrees to (Wollf, 1991). Things done without consent of an individual are illegitimate and are violating his rights. This does not mean however that our rights will always be respected. So how do we protect ourselves against those who may violate our rights? (Wollf, pg10)

Instead Nozick endorses minimal state also known as the ‘nightwatchman state’ and argues that a “minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts” (Nozick, 1974, ix) is the state that is morally justified as well as right and that a more extensive state will violate one’s rights. Nozick’s argument progress from the two conditions that he gives for the state: (1) it prohibits private enforcement of rights, and (2) it enforces the rights of everyone within its territory (Nozick, 1974, pg. 23-5). For the state to emerge from a Lockean state of nature without violating people rights, Nozick develops a scenario where a minimal state arises without breaching moral side-constraints (Meyers, 1981).

According to Nozick, the minimal state emerges from the state of nature through...