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Robert Nozick (; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, "Robert Nozick, 1938–2002". Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, November 2002: 76(2). and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarianism answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971), in which Nozick proposes his minimal state as the only justifiable form of government. His later work Philosophical Explanations (1981) advanced notable epistemological claims, namely his counterfactual theory of knowledge. It won Phi Beta Kappa society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award the following year.
Nozick's other work involved ethics, decision theory, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His final work before his death, Invariances (2001), introduced his theory of evolutionary cosmology, by which he argues invariances, and hence objectivity itself, emerged through evolution across possible worlds. Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, Vol. 1, edited by John R. Shook, Thoemmes Press, 2005, p. 1838
Nozick attended the public schools in Brooklyn. He was then educated at Columbia University (A.B. 1959, summa cum laude), where he studied with Sidney Morgenbesser; Princeton University (PhD 1963) under Carl Hempel; and at Oxford University as a Fulbright Scholar (1963–1964).
At one point, Nozick joined the Young People's Socialist League, and at Columbia University he founded the local chapter of the Student League for Industrial Democracy. He began to move away from socialist ideals when exposed to Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, claiming he "was pulled into libertarianism reluctantly" when he found himself unable to form satisfactory responses to libertarian arguments. Nozick was initiated into the Alpha-Tau chapter of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity while at Columbia in 1956.
After receiving his undergraduate degree in 1959, he married Barbara Fierer. They had two children, Emily and David. The Nozicks eventually divorced; Nozick later married the poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg.
Nozick died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with stomach cancer.For biographies, memorials, and obituaries see:
He was interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Nozick believed that a distribution of goods is just when brought about by Free market among consenting adults, trading from a baseline position where the principles of entitlement theory are upheld. In one example, Nozick uses the example of basketball player Wilt Chamberlain to show that even when large inequalities subsequently emerge from the processes of free transfer (i.e. paying extra money just to watch Wilt Chamberlain play), the resulting distributions are just so long as all consenting parties have freely consented to such exchanges.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia is often contrasted to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in popular academic discourse, as it challenged the partial conclusion of Rawls's difference principle, that "social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to be of greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society".
Nozick's philosophy also claims to heritage from John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and seeks to ground Locke's state of nature, but breaks distinctly with Locke on the question of self-ownership by attempting to secularize his doctrine of natural law without accepting it.Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York, NY: Basic Books. Chapter 1. p. 9: Only when some divergence between our conception and Locke's is relevant to political philosophy, to our argument about the state, will it be mentioned. The completely accurate statement of the moral background, including the precise statement of the moral cheory and its underlying basis, would require a full-scale presentation and is a task for another time. (A lifetime?) That task is so crucial, the gap left without its accomplishment so yawning, that it is only a minor comfort to note that we here are following the respectable tradition of Locke, who does not provide anything remotely resembling a satisfactory explanation of the status and basis of the law of nature in his Second Treatise. Instead, Nozick appealed to the second formulation of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative: that people should be treated as an end in themselves, not merely as a means to an end. Nozick terms this the 'separateness of persons', saying that "there is no social entity...there are only individual people", and that we ought to "respect and take account of the fact that each is a separate person".
Most controversially, Nozick argued that consistent application of libertarian self-ownership would allow for consensual, non-coercive enslavement contracts between adults.Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York, NY: Basic Books. Chapter 10. p. 331. He rejected the notion of inalienable rights advanced by Locke and most contemporary capitalist-oriented libertarian academics, writing in Anarchy, State, and Utopia that the typical notion of a "free system" would allow individuals to voluntarily enter into non-coercive slave contracts. A summary of the political philosophy of Robert Nozick by R. N. Johnson Jonathan Wolff (October 25, 2007). "Robert Nozick, Libertarianism, And Utopia" Nozick on Newcomb's Problem and Prisoners' Dilemma by S. L. Hurley
Anarchy, State, and Utopia received a National Book Award in the category of Philosophy and Religion in the year following its original publication. "National Book Awards – 1975 National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 8, 2012. .
Most famously, Nozick introduced the experience machine in an attempt to show that ethical hedonism is not truly what individuals desire, nor what we ought to desire:
Nozick claims that life in an experience machine would have no value, and provides several explanations as to why this might be, including (but not limited to): the want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them; the want to actually become a certain sort of person; and that plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality.
Another thought experiment Nozick proposes is the utility monster, designed to show that average utilitarianism could lead to a situation where the needs of the vast majority were sacrificed for one individual. In his exploration of deontological ethics and animal rights, Nozick coins the phrase "utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people", wherein the separateness of individual humans is acknowledged but the only moral metric assigned to animals is that of maximizing pleasure:
Before introducing the utility monster, Nozick raises a hypothetical scenario where someone might, "by some strange causal connection", kill 10,000 unowned cows painlessly by snapping their fingers, asking whether it would be morally wrong to do so. On the calculus of pleasure that "utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people" uses, assuming the death of these cows could be used to provide pleasure for humans in some way, then the (painless) deaths of the cows would be morally permissible as it has no negative impact upon the utilitarian equation.
Nozick later explicitly raises the example of utility monsters to "embarrass utilitarian": since humans benefit from the mass sacrifice and consumption of animals, and also possess the ability to kill them painlessly (i.e., without any negative effect on the utilitarian calculation of net pleasure), it is permissible to humans to maximize their consumption of meat so long as they derive pleasure from it. Nozick takes issue with this as it makes animals "too subordinate" to humans, counter to his view that animals ought to "count for something".
Nozick gives four conditions for S's knowing that P (S=Subject / P=Proposition):
Nozick's third and fourth conditions are counterfactuals. He called this the "tracking theory" of knowledge. Nozick believed the counterfactual conditionals bring out an important aspect of our intuitive grasp of knowledge: For any given fact, the believer's method (M) must reliably track the truth despite varying relevant conditions. In this way, Nozick's theory is similar to reliabilism. Due to certain counterexamples that could otherwise be raised against these counterfactual conditions, Nozick specified that:
A major feature of Nozick's theory of knowledge is his rejection of the principle of deductive closure. This principle states that if S knows X and S knows that X implies Y, then S knows Y. Nozick's truth tracking conditions do not allow for the principle of deductive closure.
The Nature of Rationality (1993) presents a theory of practical reason that attempts to embellish classical decision theory. In this work, Nozick grapples with Newcomb's problem and the Prisoner's Dilemma, and introduces the concept of symbolic utility to explain how actions might symbolize certain ideas, rather than being carried out to maximize expected utility in the future.
Socratic Puzzles (1997) is a collection of Nozick's previous papers alongside some new essays. While the discussions are quite disparate, the essays generally draw from Nozick's previous interests in both politics and philosophy. Notably, this includes Nozick's 1983 review of The Case for Animal Rights by Tom Regan, where he says animal rights activists are often considered "cranks" and appears to go back on the vegetarian position he previously maintained in Anarchy, State and Utopia.Nozick, Robert (1989). Socratic Puzzles, pp. 280–285. Harvard University Press.
Nozick's final work, Invariances (2001), applies insights from physics and biology to questions of objectivity in such areas as the nature of necessity and moral value. Nozick introduces his theory of truth, in which he leans towards a deflationary theory of truth, but argues that objectivity arises through being invariant under various transformations. For example, space-time is a significant objective fact because an interval involving both temporal and spatial separation is invariant, whereas no simpler interval involving only temporal or only spatial separation is invariant under Lorentz transformations. Nozick argues that invariances, and hence objectivity itself, emerged through a theory of evolutionary cosmology across possible worlds. Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, Vol. 1, edited by John R. Shook, A&C Black, 2005, p. 1838
In these works, Nozick also praised political ideals which ran contrary to the arguments canvassed in Anarchy, State and Utopia. In The Examined Life, Nozick proposes wealth redistribution via an inheritance tax and upholds the value of liberal democracy.Nozick, Robert (1989). The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, pp. 28–32. Simon & Schuster. In The Nature of Rationality, Nozick calls truth a primary goods, explicitly appropriating Rawls' A Theory of Justice.Nozick, Robert (1989). The Nature of Rationality, p. 68. Princeton University Press. In the same work, however, Nozick implies that minimum wage laws are unjust, and later denigrates Marxism before vindicating capitalism, making reference to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.Nozick, Robert (1989). The Nature of Rationality, p. 27, 130–131. Princeton University Press.
Nozick also broke away from libertarian principles in his own personal life, invoking rent control laws against Erich Segal – who was at one point Nozick's landlord – and winning over $30,000 in a settlement. Nozick later claimed to regret doing this, saying he was moved by "intense irritation" with Segal and his legal representatives at the time, and was quoted in an interview saying "sometimes you have to do what you have to do".
Some of Nozick's later works seem to endorse libertarian principles. In Invariances, Nozick advances the "four layers of ethics", which at its core maintains an explicitly libertarian underpinning.Nozick, Robert (2001). Invariances, pp. 280–282. Harvard University Press In Socratic Puzzles, Nozick republished some of his old essays with a libertarian grounding, such as "Coercion" and "On The Randian Argument", alongside new essays such as "On Austrian Methodology" and "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?". However, Nozick does allude to some continued reservations about libertarianism in its introduction, saying that "it is disconcerting to be known primarily for an early work".Nozick, Robert (1989). Socratic Puzzles, p. 17. Harvard University Press.
Scholars and journalists have since debated what Nozick's true political position was before the end of his life. Writing for Slate magazine, Stephen Metcalf notes one of Nozick's core claims in The Examined Life, that actions done through government serve as markers of "our human solidarity". Metcalf then postulates that Nozick felt this was threatened by neoliberal politics. Libertarian journalist Julian Sanchez, who interviewed Nozick shortly before his death, claims that Nozick "always thought of himself as a libertarian in a broad sense, right up to his final days, even as his views became somewhat less 'hardcore'".Julian Sanchez, "Nozick, Libertarianism, and Thought Experiments" .
Jason Brennan has related this point to Nozick's "surprising amount of humility, at least in his writings". Brennan makes a point of showing how this enabled Nozick to reach surprising conclusions while also drawing attention to one of Nozick's more famous quotes which also made the headline of his obituary in The Economist, that "there is room for words on subjects other than last words".
Nozick was also notable for drawing from literature outside of philosophy, namely economics, physics, evolutionary biology, decision theory, anthropology, and computer science, amongst other disciplines.
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