Robert Nozick

6 Key excerpts on "Robert Nozick"

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  Freedom

  Contemporary Liberal Perspectives

  • Katrin Flikschuh(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  3 Robert Nozick: Freedom as a Property Right I. Introduction

  Robert Nozick’s influential book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (hereafter ASU) is a modern statement and defence of libertarianism – a free-market-based approach to liberal society and state often associated with aspects of John Locke’s political thought. Libertarians defend the idea of what Nozick calls the ‘minimal state’ – better known historically as the ‘nightwatchman state’. Proponents of a night-watchman state favour minimal governmental interference with individuals’ activities, especially their economic activities. They generally regard legitimate government functions as restricted to upholding the rule of law internally and defending the state’s sovereignty externally. Most libertarians are suspicious of state-enforced social welfare policies that involve the redistribution of resources from the better-off to the worse-off: they prefer to let the mechanism of the market determine allocation of resources. Their ‘hands-off’ approach to government reflects libertarians’ generally sympathetic stance towards negative freedom as non-interference with a person’s actions.

  Nozick himself is best known for his provocative claim that ‘taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor’.1 Modern liberal governments typically finance distributive schemes through taxation – primarily by means of income taxation. Income tax is deducted from salaries and wages at source, without asking individual wage earners’ consent. According to Nozick, such non-voluntary taxation amounts to partial enslavement. To ‘enslave’ wage-earners in this way is to treat them as mere things, not as persons. Treating persons as mere things is equivalent to violating their liberty rights – and violating persons’ liberty rights is never

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  Jurisprudence

  From The Greeks To Post-Modernity

  • Wayne Morrison(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge-Cavendish

    (Publisher)

  Libertarians share a profound distaste for all theories which promote any idea of a social good which legitimates centralised social administration – even if this is the rather individualist conception of classical utilitarianism – and the aim is to abolish all governmental interference with the lives and ‘rights’ of the citizen. Libertarianism largely founds itself upon a reading of the classical social contract theorist John Locke, who is seen as holding a central thesis that in a state of nature mankind is possessed of inviolable individual rights and has supreme right to take possession of any goods which others do not own. Once seized of these goods, they become their property. The role of government is to protect those rights – particularly the rights to life and property – and social administration is only legitimated insofar as it reinforces and protects those rights and is never legitimated in overriding them. Society is conceived only as the space wherein individuals pursue their own projects, free from interference and respecting the rights of others. The political jurisprudence of Robert Nozick, characterised by his book Anarchy State and Utopia (1974), is the best known of the libertarian theories of justice. 20 Nozick begins from the dual premise that all persons are naturally individuals possessed of right, 21 and that all governments, and all social organisations, need justification: the fundamental question of political philosophy, one that precedes questions about how the state should be organised, is whether there should be any state at all. Why not have anarchy? (1974: 4) To begin with this basic premise sounds strange to the European reader, but in the American context it represents an understandable, if extreme, beginning

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  Central Works of Philosophy v5

  Twentieth Century: Quine and After

  • John Shand(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Robert Nozick Anarchy, State, and Utopia Peter Vallentyne Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), along with John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), radically changed the landscape in analytic political philosophy. For much of the preceding half-century, under the influence of logical positivism’s heavy emphasis on empirical verifiability, much of moral philosophy was taken up with metaethics (e.g. the semantics of moral discourse), with little attention given to normative moral theories. Moreover, to the extent that normative theories were considered, utilitarianism was the centre of attention. This all changed with the publication of Rawls’s articulation and defence of liberal egalitarianism and Nozick’s libertarian challenge to the legitimacy of anything more than the night-watchman state. At the core of Nozick’s book are two arguments. One is that a night-watchman state (which protects only against violence, theft, fraud and breach of contract) could be legitimate, even without the consent of all those to be governed. The other is that nothing more extensive than the night-watchman state is legitimate, except with the consent of all. The argument is complex, and Nozick often inserts long – and very interesting – digressions. Below I shall focus only on his core argument. I shall thus not address his discussions of Rawls’s theory of justice (ch. 7, § 2) and other arguments attempting to justify more than the night-watchman state (ch. 8), nor his discussion of utopias (ch. 10). The anarchist challenge Nozick attempts to rebut anarchism, which comes in several shapes and forms. The strongest version says that it is impossible for any state to be legitimate. Almost everyone finds this view implausible because a state seems perfectly legitimate when, for example, it efficiently and fairly promotes individual wellbeing and all those governed by it have given, under fair conditions, their free and informed consent to it

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  Justice

  • Louis P. Pojman(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 The Libertarian Theory of Justice: Robert Nozick

  It is very clear, that God, as King David says, Psalm. 115:16, “has given the earth to the children of men,” given it to mankind in common…. Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labor something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.

  (John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1789, Section 27)

  Classical Liberalism and Justice: Rights and the Justification of Property

  Justice, according to John Rawls, is the dominant concept of economically advanced societies like ours where contract and private property are key characteristics. Justice is not a dominant concept in primitive societies, where duties of generosity and reciprocity reign. In many cultures, taking your neighbor’s boat or weapon when you need it is not considered stealing, since the idea of property is not well defined. Societies concerned with social justice are generally relatively stable, economically advanced communities, where private property is a dominant institution. In primitive societies, the concept of justice is related more closely to partiality and relationships than it is in our more impersonal society. For example, in a primitive society it would be wrong not to give an important job to a close relative, if one were a candidate, whereas in ours one would be charged with the crime of nepotism.

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  Theories of Distributive Justice

  Who Gets What and Why

  • Jeppe Platz(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4

  Libertarianism/Nozick

  1 Introduction

  As with other theories of distributive justice, libertarianism can be understood both as answers to questions about how we should design the political institutions of society, and as the principles which should guide us when we think about such questions of institutional design. In contemporary public discourse, we usually think of libertarianism in terms of the first of these; we think of libertarianism as the family of views which holds that few areas of life should be governed by state-enforced laws. However, for our purposes it is more interesting to focus on the matter of principles – on the question of why libertarians believe in limited government. At this level, the libertarian position is best understood in terms of the simple and powerful principle of liberty, which says that all persons ought to be at liberty to decide what to do for themselves, so long as their actions don’t violate the equal liberty of others.

  It is easy to see how the libertarian principle can support the libertarian view of institutions, for by the libertarian principle the state should not interfere with people’s lives, except to secure that their activities are mutually consistent in terms of liberty. The state has a role in protecting its members from violence, thefts, deceit, and so on, but should not engage in paternalist government (requiring seatbelt use, prohibiting drug use, enforcing a particular view of marriage, etc.), or pursue redistributive policies, since such exercises of state power unjustifiably limit the liberty of some members of society (unjustifiably, insofar as these uses of state power are not required to secure the mutually consistent exercise of liberty of all).

  The libertarian principle is both simple and powerful. Its power is perhaps easiest to see by noting the relation between liberty and authority. The libertarian principle can be stated as a principle about the limits of authority; no person has authority to coerce another person, unless, that is, that other person is violating someone’s rights. This anti-authoritarian sentiment makes powerful, intuitive sense to many people. What gives me the right to tell you what to do, if your actions don’t harm anyone (but yourself)? Just as I cannot take your car without your permission, so I cannot force you to paint it purple, take it for a drive, or to wear a seatbelt when you decide to take it for a drive – I do not have the authority to coerce you to act as I think you should. Of course, if you sell the car to me, or if we make a contract that you give me a ride to the train station, or if you agree to wear your seatbelt in exchange for my promise to wear my bike helmet, then such contracts create

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  This Is Philosophy

  An Introduction

  • Steven D. Hales(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy , eds. R. E. Goodin, P. Pettit and T. Pogge. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell). An excellent overview of the modern case for contractarianism and its problems.
• Hobbes, Thomas (1651), Leviathan27 . Hobbes’s classic contractarian escape from the dreaded state of nature into the arms of an all-powerful master.
• Locke, John (1690), Two Treatises of Government28 . Locke rejects the divine right of kings and embraces a state grounded in the consent of the governed. An influential text on the French and American revolutions.
• Nozick, Robert (1974), Anarchy, State, and Utopia. (New York: Basic Books). One of the two most important and influential 20th-century works of political philosophy. Nozick gives the best defense of libertarianism and the minimal state.
• Poundstone, William (1992), Prisoners’ Dilemma29 . (New York: Doubleday). A very readable and entertaining discussion of the history of game theory, the discovery of the prisoner’s dilemma, and the nuclear arms race. Full of great examples and personalities.
• Rawls, John (1971), A Theory of Justice. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). One of the two most important and influential 20th-century works of political philosophy. In it Rawls defends justice as fairness, contractarianism, and the liberal state.
• Wolff, Robert Paul (1998), In Defense of Anarchism. (Berkeley: University of California Press). A short, pithy defense of philosophical anarchism on the basis of personal autonomy.
• Yudkowsky, Eliezer (2017), Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck30 . (Berkeley: Machine Intelligence Research Institute). An accessible and brief book on coordination problems and how societies get trapped in imperfect, but stable, arrangements.

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