In a
recent post, I cited Nozick's parable, Tale of the Slave. Below is another rebuttal to Nozick's parable.
It took me more than 6 tries to get the following URL to work, so I will post the URL and the key points. I hope I do not violate the author's copyright by quoting the key part of it.
A Short Note on Nozick's "Tale of the Slave"J. Bradford Delong wrote:
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There are, of course, two things that make this argument of Nozick's deceptive and objectionable:
1) The (false) implicit claim that there is a sharp dividing line separating "slavery" from "freedom," and that differences within the classifications are unimportant.
2) The (false) implicit claim that there are only two choices: Nozick's minimal state on the one hand, and a pure majoritarian dictatorship on the other. You have to go a long way beyond Nozick's #9 to get to anything that approximates what we have in America today.
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One of the responders to this on DeLong's web page pointed out that DeLong's first point is akin to pointing out Sorites Paradox.
According to the October 2006 Wikipedia article,
Sorites Paradox -------Begin Wikipedia Quote-------
is a paradox that arises from reasoning with predicates which seem not to have a sharp cutoff, such as 'bald', 'tall', and the like.
For instance, it seems plausible that no heap of sand will stop being a heap just because one grain of sand is removed. This, however, leads to seemingly odd results.
1. One million grains of sand make a heap.
2. If some collection of grains of sand make a heap, then that collection minus one grain will still make a heap.
3. So, 999,999 grains of sand make a heap.
Repeated applications of premise 2 (each time starting with one less number of grains), will eventually allow us to arrive at the conclusion that 1 grain of sand makes a heap. On the face of it, there are three ways to avoid that conclusion. Object to the first premise (deny that one million grains makes a heap, or more generally, deny that there are heaps), object to the second premise (it is not true for all collections of grains that removing one grain cannot make the difference between it being a heap or not), or accept the conclusion (1 grain of sand can make a heap). Few, if any, reply by accepting the conclusion.
-------End Wikipedia Quote-------
I found this to be a persuasive argument that Nozick's "Tale of the Slave" is less than it appeared to me at first. I still think that there is validity to the notion that we are less free than we ought to be, and that a pure democracy without guarantees of rights is not desirable, and that being allowed to vote in a large-enough group is little different in terms of changing results than being disallowed to vote, probabilistically speaking.
David
