Robert Nozick’s Political Philosophy (Stanford …

Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn in 1938 to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. He earned an undergraduate Philosophy degree from Columbia University in 1959 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1963. He taught for a couple of years at Princeton, Harvard, and Rockefeller Universities before moving permanently to Harvard in 1969. He became widely known through his 1974 book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which shocked the philosophical world with its robust and sophisticated defense of the minimal statethe state that restricts its activities to the protection of individual rights of life, liberty, property, and contract and eschews the use of state power to redistribute income, to make people moral, or to protect people from harming themselves. Nozick went on to publish important works that ranged over metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of science, and axiologyPhilosophical Explanations (1981), The Examined Life (1989), The Nature of Rationality (1993), Socratic Puzzles (1997), and Invariances (2001). Nozick's always lively, engaging, audacious, and philosophically ambitious writings revealed an amazing knowledge of advanced work in many disciplines including decision theory, economics, mathematics, physics, psychology, and religion. Robert Nozick died in 2002 from stomach cancer for which he was first treated in 1994.

As an undergraduate student at Columbia and at least in his early days as a graduate student at Princeton, Nozick endorsed socialism. At Columbia, he was a founder of what was to become the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. The major force in his conversion to libertarian views was his conversations at Princeton with his fellow philosophy graduate student, Bruce Goldberg. It was through Goldberg that Nozick met the economist Murray Rothbard who was the major champion of individualist anarchism in the later decades of the twentieth century (Raico 2002, Other Internet Resources). Nozick's encounter with Rothbard and Rothbard's rights-based critique of the state (Rothbard 1973 and 1978)including the minimal statelead Nozick to the project of formulating a rights-based libertarianism that would vindicate the minimal state. There is, however, an intriguing lacuna in this story. Goldberg himself and the economists whose writings are often said to have influenced Nozick's conversion to libertarianismF.A. Hayek and Milton Friedmanwere not at all friends of natural rights theory. So, we have no account of why the libertarianism that Nozick himself adopted came in the form of natural rights theory (and an associated doctrine of acquired property rights).

This account of the political philosophy of Robert Nozick is fundamentally an account of the rights-oriented libertarian doctrine that Nozick presents in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. That doctrine is the Nozickean doctrine.[2] Nozick never attempted to further develop the views that he expressed in ASU,[3] and he never responded to the extensive critical reaction to those views. Nozick did seem to repudiate at least some aspects of the ASU doctrine in The Examined Life and The Nature of Rationality (Nozick 1989: 286296). Nozick's real or apparent repudiation in these works turned on his doctrine of symbolic utility which cannot be examined here.[4] At later yet points in his life Nozick downplayed his apparent repudiation of political libertarianism.[5] In a 2001 interview, he said:

the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated. I think [Invariances] makes clear the extent to which I still am within the general framework of libertarianism, especially the ethics chapter and its section on the Core Principle of Ethics. (Sanchez 2001, Other Internet Resources)

According to that chapter, there are a number of layers of ethics. The first of these is the ethics of respect which consists of a set of negative rights. This layer and only this layer may be made mandatory in any society. All that any society should (coercively) demand is adherence to the ethics of respect (Nozick 2001: 282).

There are four main topics that most deserve discussion with respect to Anarchy, State, and Utopia. They are: (1) the underpinning (if any) and the character and robustness of the moral rights that constitute the basic normative framework for most of Anarchy, State, and Utopia; (2) the character and degree of success of Nozick's defense of the minimal state against the charge by the individualist anarchist that the state itself is intrinsically immoral (ASU 51); (3) Nozick's articulation and defense of his historical entitlement doctrine of justice in holdings and his associated critique of end-state and patterned doctrines of distributive justice, especially John Rawls' difference principle (as defended in A Theory of Justice); and (4) Nozick's argument that utopian aspirations provide a complementary route to the vindication of the minimal state. Our discussion of the first two topics focuses on Part I of ASU, entitled State-of-Nature Theory or How to Back into a State without Really Trying. Our investigation of the third topic, the historical entitlement doctrine of just holdings and competing conceptions of distributive justice, focuses on chapter 7, Distributive Justice of Part II of ASU, Beyond the Minimal State? Our discussion of the fourth topic, the utopian route to the minimal state, focuses on chapter 10, A Framework for Utopia, which is the whole of Part III of ASU, Utopia. Focusing on these four core topics leaves aside many of Nozick's rich and intriguing side discussions.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia opens with the famously bold claim that Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights) (ix).

These moral rights are understood as state of nature rights. That is, they are rights that precede and provide a basis for assessing and constraining not only the actions of individuals and groups but also the conduct of political and legal institutions. These rights also precede any social contract; they morally constrain the conduct of individuals, groups, and institutions even in the absence of any social contract. In Locke's language, these rights constitute a law of natureor an especially important part of a law of naturethat governs the pre-political and pre-contractual state of nature (Locke 1690: Second Treatise 6).

Moreover, to possess such a right is not merely to be in some condition the promotion or maintenance of which is socially expedient. Part of the message of that opening proclamation is that there are certain things that may not be done to individuals even if, by some standard, they are socially optimizing. The rights that individuals have are moral bulwarks against behavior that promotes even the most radiantor apparently radiantsocial end. In addition, these state of nature moral rights are taken to be negative. They specify types of conduct that may not be done to individuals rather than types of conduct that must be done for people.

Finally, since these rights are not granted by institutions, created by any contractual process, or accorded to individuals for the sake of advancing some optimal social outcome, if they have any foundation, that foundation must consist in some morally impressive fact about the nature of individuals qua individuals. Some morally impressive fact about the nature of individualse.g., that they each have ends or projects of their own to which they rationally devote themselvesmust provide others with reason to not treat them certain ways, e.g., as beings who ought to serve the ends of others. We shall see that Nozick advances a claim of this sort in his account of why agents should abide by moral side-constraints in their conduct toward others.

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Robert Nozick's Political Philosophy (Stanford ...