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Philosophy

Robert NozickPretending an Autobiography

Only the minimal state is justified

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Index

Subjects of study pg. 3

Life as a student pg. 3

Career pg. 3

Works pg. 3

Anarchy, state and Utopia pg. 4

Why a watchman state? pg.4

Why not a lefty state? Pg. 4

Wilt Chamberlain argument Pg. 5

Bibliography pg. 6

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Subjects of Study

My life is full of philosophy and ideas. I am considering myself as a wide-ranging thinker since I

introduce myself in topics such as Epistemology, Problem of personal identity, decision theory and

politics and so further.

Student Life

My life began back in Nov. 16, 1938 in Brooklyn (N.Y.). I was anonly child and my parents where

Sophie Cohen Nozick and Max Nozick; my father was a Russian immigrant and businessman.

After attending public school in Brooklyn, I enrolled at Columbia College, where I earned a

bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1959. During High school and Collage I was a member of

student New Left and enthusiastic socialist, and at Collage I helped to found a campus branch of

the League for Industrial Democracy (precursor of the Students for a Democratic Society).

Two year after graduating to collage I earned a Master Degree on Philosophy from Princeton

University (1961). After then I teach at Princeton University (1962-65), and received a PHD also in

philosophy and from Princeton (1963). During graduate school I read works by libertarian thinkers

such asF.A. Hayekd and Ludwig von Mises. At the time of the PHD course I wrote my first formal

book that is a dissertation on decision theory under Carl Hempel (1963).

Career

After I had taught in Princeton by three years, I taught atHarvard University (196567), and

Rockefeller University (196769); in 1969, when I was 30 years old, I returned to Harvard as one of

the youngest full professors in the university's history. At Harvard for the remainder of my

teaching career, I was appointed Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy in 1985 andJoseph Pellegrino University Professor in 1998.

Works

In 1974, I published Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a closely argued and highly original defense of the

libertarian minimal state and a critique of the social-democratic liberalism of John Rawls

(Harvard colleague) book "A Theory of Justice" (1971).The effect was transcendental since

immediately the book was hailed by conservative intellectuals as a kind of philosophical manifesto

of the New Right.I was never comfortable with this association; the book ought to consider as "a

young man's book" with a subject Idid not properly returned.

After then I published works such as Philosophical Explanations1 (1981), The Examined Life (1989),

the Nature of Rationality (1993), and Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World(2001).

1The book includes a wider-ranging exploration of epistemology and metaphysics. Its mainly recognize for its

defense of a counterfactual account of knowledge, highlighting the idea of a knowing subject tracking thetruth, and notoriously challenging the deductive closure principle.

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Anarchy, State, and Utopia

The main purpose of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is to show thatonly the minimal state is morally

justified. By a minimal state I mean a state that functions essentially as a night watchman, with

powers limited to those necessary to protect citizens against violence, theft, and fraud. To argue

that the minimal sate is justified I seek to refute anarchism, modern forms of liberalism, socialismand other leftist ideologies, which contend that in addition to the power of a night watchman the

state should have the power to regulate the economy, redistribute wealth and provide social

services (education and health care).

The minimal state would rice spontaneously among people since the transaction would not violate

anyones right. The minimum state is the only system that would protect all human rights. For

natural rights I look toward John Lock (17th century English philosopher).I assume that everyone

possesses the natural rights to life, liberty, and property, including the right to claim as property

the fruits or products of one's labor and the right to dispose of one's property as one sees fit, but

in doing so one cannot violate the rights of anyone else.

Why a watchman state?

Everyone also has the natural right to punish those who violate or attempt to violate one's own

natural rights. Because defending one's natural rights in a state of nature would be difficult for

anyone to do on his own, individuals would band together to form protection associations, in

which members would work together to defend each other's rights and to punish rights violators.

Eventually, some of these associations would develop into private businesses offering protection

and punishment services for a fee. The great importance that individuals would attach to such

services would give the largest protection firms a natural competitive advantage, and eventually

only one firm, or a confederation of firms, would control all the protection and punishmentbusiness in the community. Because this firm (or confederation of firms) would have a monopoly

of force in the territory of the community and because it would protect the rights of everyone

living there, it would constitute a minimal state in the libertarian sense. And because the minimal

state would come about without violating anyone's natural rights, a state with at least its powers

is justified.

Why not a lefty state?

Against liberalism and ideologies farther left, because any state with more extensive powersthat

the minimum state would violate the natural rights of its citizens. Thus the state should not have

the power to control prices or to set a minimum wage, because doing so would violate the natural

right of citizens to dispose of their property, including their labour, as they see fit. For similar

reasons, the state should not have the power to establish public education or health care through

taxes imposed on citizens who may wish to spend their money on private services instead. Indeed,

according to Nozick, any mandatory taxation used to fund services or benefits other than those

constitutive of the minimal state is unjust, because such taxation amounts to a kind of forced

labour for the state by those who must pay the tax.

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Nozick's vision of legitimate state power thus contrasts markedly with that of Rawls and his

followers. Rawls argues that the state should have whatever powers are necessary to ensure that

those citizens who are least well-off are as well-off as they can be (though these powers must be

consistent with a variety of basic rights and freedoms). This viewpoint is derived from Rawls's

theory of justice, one principle of which is that an unequal distribution of wealth and income is

acceptable only if those at the bottom are better off than they would be under any otherdistribution.

Nozick's response to such arguments is to claim that they rest on a false conception of distributive

justice: they wrongly define a just distribution in terms of the pattern it exhibits at a given time

(e.g., an equal distribution or a distribution that is unequal to a certain extent) or in terms of the

historical circumstances surrounding its development (e.g., those who worked the hardest have

more) rather than in terms of the nature of the transactions through which the distribution came

about. For Nozick, any distribution of holdings, as he calls them, no matter how unequal, is just if

(and only if) it arises from a just distribution through legitimate means. One legitimate means is

the appropriation of something that is unowned in circumstances where the acquisition would notdisadvantage others. A second means is the voluntary transfer of ownership of holdings to

someone else. A third means is the rectification of past injustices in the acquisition or transfer of

holdings. According to Nozick, anyone who acquired what he has through these means is morally

entitled to it. Thus the entitlement theory of justice states that the distribution of holdings in a

society is just if (and only if) everyone in that society is entitled to what he has.

Wilt Chamberlain argument

I devised a simple but ingenious objection to show that theories of justice based on patterns or

historical circumstances are false; the argument in named as Wilt Chamberlain argument.

Assumethat the distribution of holdings in a given society is just according to some theory based

on patterns or historical circumstancese.g., the egalitarian theory, according to which only a

strictly equal distribution of holdings is just. In this society, Wilt Chamberlain is an excellent

basketball player, and many teams compete with each other to engage his services. Chamberlain

eventually agrees to play for a certain team on the condition that everyone who attends a game in

which he plays puts 25 cents in a special box at the gate, the contents of which will go to him.

During the season, one million fans attend the team's games, and so Chamberlain receives

$250,000. Now, however, the supposedly just distribution of holdings is upset, because

Chamberlain has $250,000 more than anyone else. Is the new distribution unjust? The strong

intuition that it is not unjust is accounted for by Nozick's entitlement theory (because Chamberlainacquired his holdings by legitimate means) but conflicts with the egalitarian theory. Nozick

contends that this argument generalizes to any theory based on patterns or historical

circumstances, because any distribution dictated by such a theory could be upset by ordinary and

unobjectionable transactions like the one involving Chamberlain. Nozick concludes that any

society that attempted to implement such a theory would have to intrude grossly on the liberty of

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its citizens in order to enforce the distribution it considers just. The socialist society, as he puts

it, would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.

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