Nozick on the RPF

Bio

Robert Nozick grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and went to public school there.
His first brush with philosophy was at about the age of 15, through a
paperback version of Plato’s Republic which he used to carry around with
him. “I had read only some of it, and understood less,” he later wrote in
The Examined Life, “but I was excited by it and knew it was something
wonderful.”

Nozick graduated from Columbia College in 1959, and went on to
Princeton to receive his M.A. in 1961, and his Ph.D. in 1963. He then
taught at Princeton and Rockefeller University before coming to Harvard
as a full professor in 1969.

Nozick wrote his first and most famous book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia,
in 1974, largely in response to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. According
to his obituary in the Harvard Gazette, the book “transformed him from a
young philosophy professor known only within his profession to the
reluctant theoretician of a national political movement.” (Libertarianism.)

Nozick, among the leading figures in contemporary Anglo-American
philosophy, made significant contributions to almost every major area of
philosophy. In Philosophical Explanations (1981), Nozick provides novel
accounts of knowledge, free will, and the nature of value. The Examined
Life (1989), pitched to a broader public, explores love, death, faith, and the
meaning of life. The Nature of Rationality (1995) presents a theory of
practical reason that attempts to embellish notoriously spartan classical
decision theory. Socratic Puzzles (1997) is a collection of papers that
range from Ayn Rand and Austrian economics to animal rights, while his
last production, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (2001)
explores the nature of truth, and applies insights from physics and biology
to questions of objectivity in such areas as the nature of necessity and
moral value.

Nozick was notable for his curious, exploratory style and methodological
ecumenism. Often content to raise tantalizing philosophical possibilities
and then leave judgment to the reader, Nozick was also notable for
inventively drawing from literature outside of philosophy (e.g., economics,
physics, evolutionary biology) to infuse his work with freshness and
relevance.

He died on January 23 at the age of 63 after an 8-year bout with stomach
cancer. He had been critiquing the work of colleagues up to a week
before his death, and had been planning on teaching another course in
the spring.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia
With Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick almost single-handedly made
libertarian political philosophy respectable within mainstream academia.
The book challenges Rawls’ arguments in A Theory of Justice that
conclude that inequalities must at least make the worst off better off in
order to be morally justified.

For Nozick, it is the state, and not the individual, which must provide
justification for its existence. He begins by acknowledging that in Locke’s
“state of nature,” all men are in “a perfect state of freedom to order their
actions, and dispose of their possessions, and persons as they think fit,
within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending
upon the will of any other man” (Locke, Second Treatise, sec. 4; Nozick, p.
10). The only reason for the state to come into being is to provide
protection for men’s freedoms from those who would usurp them. To a
large degree, then, Nozick argues for a minimal, night-watchman state.
This in itself is nothing new.

But Nozick also argues that any distribution of goods is just, so long as
the distribution was brought about by free exchanges by consenting
adults, even if large inequalities emerge from the process. Nozick
appealed to the Kantian idea that people should be treated as rational
beings, not merely as a means. For example, forced redistribution of
income treated people as if they were sources of money (means).

Equally importantly, Nozick felt that any theory of justice which argued for
some kind of governmental interference in order to guarantee equality of
distribution (or redistribution to the poor) led to a logical contradiction.
Take any starting point you want as an original position, and set everyone
at the same share of goods and resources. We can call this initial
distribution (D1) just, because it is equal and fair. But then, says Nozick,
“If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2,
transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for
if not to do something with?), isn’t D2 also just?” (p. 161). To force a
redistribution of wealth at this point would violate the justice of the
situation of D2. Those who had sacrificed leisure time, for example, in
order to work hard and save would be unjustly robbed of their work.

The problem with justice systems which called for redistribution of wealth,
Nozick argued, was that they used “current time-slice principles” which
did not take just historical exchanges into account (p. 153). It should not
be assumed that Nozick was naive enough to believe that every exchange
in history could be justified; he merely argued that if an initial exchange
was just, then its resulting condition was also just. Thus, the proper
function of a just state, for Nozick, was simply to ensure that all
exchanges were just (hence, the night-watchman), rather than
redistributing wealth on a mistaken scheme that the poor should always
be advantaged, which really robbed the hardworking and talented of their
fair share.

(Excerpts taken and built upon from the Wikipedia article on Nozick. Also consulted
was the Harvad Gazette obituary.)

Works

Online

"Decisions of Principle, Principles of Decision," from the Tanner Lectures
series

"Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers' Brief " (joint amicus brief to the
Supreme Court on assisted suicide, with Thomson, Dworkin, Nozick,
Scanlon, and Nagel)

Hardcopy
NOTE: As Nozick's' work is not yet in the public domain, there is little available
online. The following sources are links to Amazon.com.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Philosophical Explanations

The Examined Life