Introduction

After Anarchy, State, and Utopia Nozick's ethical and political views underwent both development and modification, leading him away from his original libertarianism. Philosophical Explanations, his next work, is an immense sprawl of a book, covering three main areas (metaphysics, epistemology and value) in six chapters, of which the main one relevant here is Chapter 5, “Foundations of Ethics”, itself divided into six substantial sections.

We saw in Chapter 1 how Nozick's approach to philosophy changed from trying to secure conviction by proof to explaining how something is possible, and Philosophical Explanations, as its title suggests, follows this line explicitly. On ethics he says that, although he hopes his view “contains much that is actually true and illuminating about ethics, the project is to sketch what an objective ethics might look like, to understand how there (so much as) could be such a thing” (PE: 400), and he ends Chapter 5 by saying: “We opened this chapter with the question of how ethics is even possible. I have sketched one possible answer …. I would not have pursued this way in such detail if I did not think it largely right, yet … it can yield an understanding of how ethics is possible even if the explanation it provides is incorrect” (PE: 570; cf. also PE: 498, 512, 559). We might wonder how an incorrect explanation of how something is possible could produce understanding, since for all it tells us the thing might really be impossible.