most important and influential political philosophers, along with
John Rawls, in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. His first and
most celebrated book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), produced,
along with his Harvard colleague John Rawls' A Theory of Justice
(1971), the revival of the discipline of social and political
philosophy within the analytic school. Rawls' influential book is a
systematic defense of egalitarian liberalism, but Nozick's Anarchy,
State, and Utopia is a compelling defense of free-market
libertarianism.
Unlike Rawls, Nozick neglected political philosophy for the rest of
his philosophical career. He moved on to address other philosophical
questions and made significant contributions to other areas of
philosophical inquiry. In epistemology, Nozick developed an
externalist analysis of knowledge in terms of counterfactual
conditions that provides a response to radical skepticism. In
metaphysics, he proposed a "closest continuer" theory of personal
identity.
His final work, Invariances (2001), offers a theory of objective
reality. His other significant contributions to analytic philosophy
notwithstanding, Nozick's defense of libertarianism remains his most
notable intellectual mark on philosophical inquiry.
1. Life
Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1938, and he taught at
Harvard University until his death in January 2002. He was a thinker
of the prodigious sort who gains a reputation for brilliance within
his chosen field while still in graduate school, in his case at the
Princeton of the early 1960's, where he wrote his dissertation on
decision theory under the supervision of Carl Hempel. He was also,
like so many young intellectuals of that period, drawn initially to
the politics of the New Left and to the socialism that was its
philosophical inspiration. But encountering the works of such
defenders of capitalism as F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray
Rothbard, and Ayn Rand eventually led him to renounce those views, and
to shift his philosophical focus away from the technical issues then
dominating analytic philosophy and toward political theory. The result
was his first and most famous book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974),
an ingenious defense of libertarianism that immediately took on
canonical status as the major right-wing philosophical counterpoint to
his Harvard colleague John Rawls's influential defense of
social-democratic liberalism, A Theory of Justice (1971). Like Rawls's
book, Nozick's generated lively debate and an enormous secondary
literature. But where Rawls made the development of his theory of
justice and its defense against critics his life's work, Nozick took
little interest either in responding to critics of Anarchy, State, and
Utopia in particular or in continuing to do systematic work in
political philosophy in general. Instead, he moved on to produce
groundbreaking work in several other areas of philosophical inquiry,
particularly in epistemology and metaphysics. His development of an
externalist theory of knowledge and his "closest continuer" account of
personal identity have been particularly influential. It remains to be
seen what impact on philosophy will be made by the general theory of
objective truth developed in his last book, Invariances (2001),
published shortly before his untimely death from stomach cancer. In
any case, it seems clear, judging from the disproportionate amount of
attention that it has received relative to the rest of his writings,
that it is his early work in political theory that will stand as his
most significant and lasting contribution.
2. Anarchy, State, and Utopia and Libertarianism
Anarchy, State, and Utopia is, together with Rawls's A Theory of
Justice, generally regarded as one of the two great classics of
twentieth-century analytic political philosophy. Indeed, these two
works essentially revived the discipline of political philosophy
within the analytic school, whose practitioners had, until Rawls and
Nozick came along, largely neglected it. Nozick's book also revived
interest in the notion of rights as being central to political theory,
and it did so in the service of another idea that had been long
neglected within academic political thought, namely libertarianism.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy holding that the role of the
state in society ought to be severely limited, confined essentially to
police protection, national defense, and the administration of courts
of law, with all other tasks commonly performed by modern governments
– education, social insurance, welfare, and so forth – taken over by
religious bodies, charities, and other private institutions operating
in a free market. Many libertarians appeal, in defending their
position, to economic and sociological considerations – the benefits
of market competition, the inherent mechanisms inclining state
bureaucracies toward incompetence and inefficiency, the poor record of
governmental attempts to deal with specific problems like poverty and
pollution, and so forth. Nozick endorses such arguments, but his main
defense of libertarianism is a moral one, his view being that whatever
its practical benefits, the strongest reason to advocate a libertarian
society is simply that such advocacy follows from a serious respect
for individual rights.
a. Self-Ownership, Individual Rights, and the Minimal State
Nozick takes his position to follow from a basic moral principle
associated with Immanuel Kant and enshrined in Kant's second
formulation of his famous Categorical Imperative: "Act so that you
treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another,
always as an end and never as a means only." The idea here is that a
human being, as a rational agent endowed with self-awareness, free
will, and the possibility of formulating a plan of life, has an
inherent dignity and cannot properly be treated as a mere thing, or
used against his will as an instrument or resource in the way an
inanimate object might be. In line with this, Nozick also describes
individual human beings as self-owners (though it isn't clear whether
he regards this as a restatement of Kant's principle, a consequence of
it, or an entirely independent idea). The thesis of self-ownership, a
notion that goes back in political philosophy at least to John Locke,
is just the claim that individuals own themselves – their bodies,
talents and abilities, labor, and by extension the fruits or products
of their exercise of their talents, abilities and labor. They have all
the prerogatives with respect to themselves that a slaveholder claims
with respect to his slaves. But the thesis of self-ownership would in
fact rule out slavery as illegitimate, since each individual, as a
self-owner, cannot properly be owned by anyone else. (Indeed, many
libertarians would argue that unless one accepts the thesis of
self-ownership, one has no way of explaining why slavery is evil.
After all, it cannot be merely because slaveholders often treat their
slaves badly, since a kind-hearted slaveholder would still be a
slaveholder, and thus morally blameworthy, for that. The reason
slavery is immoral must be because it involves a kind of stealing –
the stealing of a person from himself.) But if individuals are
inviolable ends-in-themselves (as Kant describes them) and
self-owners, it follows, Nozick says, that they have certain rights,
in particular (and here again following Locke) rights to their lives,
liberty, and the fruits of their labor. To own something, after all,
just is to have a right to it, or, more accurately, to possess the
bundle of rights – rights to possess something, to dispose of it, to
determine what may be done with it, etc. – that constitute ownership;
and thus to own oneself is to have such rights to the various elements
that make up one's self. These rights function, Nozick says, as
side-constraints on the actions of others; they set limits on how
others may, morally speaking, treat a person. So, for example, since
you own yourself, and thus have a right to yourself, others are
constrained morally not to kill or maim you (since this would involve
destroying or damaging your property), or to kidnap you or forcibly
remove one of your bodily organs for transplantation in someone else
(since this would involve stealing your property). They are also
constrained not to force you against your will to work for another's
purposes, even if those purposes are good ones. For if you own
yourself, it follows that you have a right to determine whether and
how you will use your self-owned body and its powers, e.g. either to
work or to refrain from working. So far this all might seem fairly
uncontroversial. But what follows from it, in Nozick's view, is the
surprising and radical conclusion that taxation, of the redistributive
sort in which modern states engage in order to fund the various
programs of the bureaucratic welfare state, is morally illegitimate.
It amounts to a kind of forced labor, for the state so structures the
tax system that any time you labor at all, a certain amount of your
labor time – the amount that produces the wealth taken away from you
forcibly via taxation – is time you involuntarily work, in effect, for
the state. Indeed, such taxation amounts to partial slavery, for in
giving every citizen an entitlement to certain benefits (welfare,
social security, or whatever), the state in effect gives them an
entitlement, a right, to a part of the proceeds of your labor, which
produces the taxes that fund the benefits; every citizen, that is,
becomes in such a system a partial owner of you (since they have a
partial property right in part of you, i.e. in your labor). But this
is flatly inconsistent with the principle of self-ownership. The
various programs of the modern liberal welfare state are thus immoral,
not only because they are inefficient and incompetently administered,
but because they make slaves of the citizens of such a state. Indeed,
the only sort of state that can be morally justified is what Nozick
calls a minimal state or "night-watchman" state, a government which
protects individuals, via police and military forces, from force,
fraud, and theft, and administers courts of law, but does nothing
else. In particular, such a state cannot regulate what citizens eat,
drink, or smoke (since this would interfere with their right to use
their self-owned bodies as they see fit), cannot control what they
publish or read (since this would interfere with their right to use
the property they've acquired with their self-owned labor – e.g.
printing presses and paper – as they wish), cannot administer
mandatory social insurance schemes or public education (since this
would interfere with citizens' rights to use the fruits of their labor
as they desire, in that some citizens might decide that they would
rather put their money into private education and private retirement
plans), and cannot regulate economic life in general via minimum wage
and rent control laws and the like (since such actions are not only
economically suspect – tending to produce bad unintended consequences
like unemployment and housing shortages – but violate citizens' rights
to charge whatever they want to for the use of their own property).
b. Refuting the Anarchist
It might be thought that given Nozick's premises, no state at all,
minimal or otherwise, could be justified, that full-blown anarchism is
what really follows from the notion of self-ownership. For the
activities of even a minimal state would need to be funded via
taxation. Wouldn't this taxation also amount to forced labor and
partial slavery? Nozick thinks not. Indeed, in his view it turns out
that even if an anarchistic society existed, not only could a minimal
state nevertheless arise out of it in a way that violates no one's
self-ownership rights, in fact such a state would, morally speaking,
have to come into existence. Suppose there is a certain geographical
area in which no state exists, and everyone must protect his own
rights to life, liberty, and property, without relying on a government
and its police and military to do so. Given that doing so would be
costly, difficult, and time-consuming, people would, Nozick says,
inevitably band together to form voluntary protection associations,
agreeing to take turns standing watch over each others' property, to
decide collectively how to punish rights-violators, and so forth.
Eventually some members of this anarchistic community would decide to
go into the protection business full-time, instituting a private firm
that would offer protection services to members of the community in
exchange for a fee. Other members of the community might start
competing firms, and a free market would develop in protection
services. Inevitably, Nozick argues, this process will (via a kind of
"invisible hand" mechanism of the sort discussed by economists) give
rise to either a single dominant firm or a dominant confederation of
firms. For most people will surely judge that where protection of
their lives and property is concerned, nothing short of the biggest
and most powerful provider of such protection will do, so that they
will flock to whatever firm is perceived as such; and the "snowball"
effect this will create will ensure that that firm ends up with an
overwhelming share of the market. Even if multiple large firms come
into being, however, they are likely to form a kind of single dominant
association of firms. For there will be occasions when the clients of
different firms come into conflict with one another, one client
accusing the other of violating his rights, the other insisting on his
innocence. Firms could go to war over the claims of their respective
clients, but this would be costly, especially if (as is likely) such
conflicts between clients became frequent. More feasible would be an
agreement between firms to abide by certain common rules for
adjudicating disputes between clients and to go along with the
decisions of arbitrators retained by the firms to interpret these
rules – to institute, that is, a common quasi-legal system of sorts.
With the advent of such a dominant protection agency (or confederation
of agencies) – an organization comprised essentially of analogues of
police and military forces and courts of law – our anarchistic society
will obviously have gone a long way toward evolving a state, though
strictly speaking, this agency is still a private firm rather than a
government. How will the dominant protection agency deal with
independents – those (relatively few) individuals who retain no
protection firm and insist on defending their rights themselves – who
attempt to mete out justice to those of its clients they accuse of
rights violations? Will it allow them to try and punish its clients as
they see fit? Nozick argues that the dominant agency will not allow
this and, morally speaking, must not. For the agency was hired to
protect its clients' rights, and that includes a right not to be
arrested, tried, or punished unjustly or, where one really is guilty
of a rights violation, to be punished more harshly than one deserves.
Of course, its clients might really be guilty; but the point is, so
long as the dominant agency doesn't itself know that they are, it
cannot allow them to be punished. The dominant agency must,
accordingly, generally prohibit independents from defending their own
rights against its clients; it must take upon itself the exclusive
right to decide which of its clients is worthy of punishment, and what
sort of punishment that ought to be. In doing so, however, it has
taken on one of the defining features of a state, namely, a monopoly
on the legitimate use of force. It has become what Nozick calls an
"ultra-minimal state." In doing so, however, the dominant agency seems
to have jeopardized the rights of independents – for though it has
(rightly) prohibited those independents from exacting justice on its
own clients, lest they inflict unjust punishments, it has thereby also
left them unable to defend their own rights. To avoid committing an
injustice against independents, then, the dominant agency or
ultra-minimal state must compensate them for this – it must, that is,
defend their rights for them by providing them the very protection
services it affords its own clients. It can, Nozick says, legitimately
charge them for this protection, but only the amount that they would
have spent anyway in defending themselves. The end result of this
process, though, is that the ultra-minimal state has taken on another
feature of a state, namely the provision of protection to everyone
within its borders. Moreover, in charging everyone for this protection
it engages, in effect, in a kind of taxation (though this taxation –
and only this taxation – does not violate self-ownership rights,
because the original clients of the agency pay voluntarily, while the
later, formerly independent, clients are charged only an amount they
would have spent anyway for protection). The ultra-minimal state has
thus become a full-fledged minimal state. A minimal state would thus
inevitably arise out of an originally anarchic society, given both
practical circumstances and the moral requirements – concerning the
prohibition of potentially rights-violating self-defense and
compensation for this prohibition – binding on any agency acting to
enforce the rights of others. And it would do so in a way that
violates no one's rights of self-ownership. So the anarchist can have
no principled objection to it. Nozick's conception of the origins of
the state is reminiscent of the social contract tradition in political
thought represented by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and, in contemporary
thought, Rawls. For insofar as the state arises out of a process that
begins with the voluntary retention by individuals of the services of
an agency that will inevitably take on the features of a state, it can
be seen to be the result of a kind of contract. The details of the
state-originating process in Nozick's account are very different from
those of other social contract accounts, however; and, most
importantly, for Nozick, unlike other social contract theorists,
individual rights do not result from, but exist prior to, any social
contract, and put severe constraints on the shape such a contract can
take. Furthermore, the parties to the contract in Nozick's conception
are to be imagined very much on the model of human beings as we know
them in "real life," rather than along the lines of the highly
abstractly conceived rational agents deliberating behind a "veil of
ignorance" in Rawls's "original position" thought experiment.
c. Distributive Justice
Most critics of the libertarian minimal state don't complain that it
allows for too much government; they say that it allows for far too
little. In particular, they claim that a more-than-minimal state is
necessary in order to fulfill the requirements of distributive
justice. The state, it is held (by, for instance, Rawls and his
followers), simply must engage in redistributive taxation in order to
ensure that a fair distribution of wealth and income obtains in the
society it governs. Nozick's answer to this objection constitutes his
"entitlement theory" of justice. Talk about "distributive justice" is
inherently misleading, Nozick argues, in that it seems to imply that
there is some central authority who "distributes" to individuals
shares of wealth and income that pre-exist the distribution, as if
they had appeared like "manna from heaven." Of course this is not
really the way such shares come into existence, or come to be
"distributed," at all; in fact they come to be, and come to be held by
the individuals who hold them, only through the scattered efforts and
transactions of these innumerable individuals themselves, and these
individuals' efforts and transactions give them a moral claim over
these shares. Talk about the "distribution of wealth" covers this up,
and unjustifiably biases most discussions of distributive justice in a
socialist or egalitarian liberal direction. A more adequate theory of
justice would in Nozick's view enumerate three principles of justice
in holdings. The first would be a principle of justice in acquisition,
that is, the appropriation of natural resources that no one has ever
owned before. The best-known such principle, some version of which
Nozick seems to endorse, is the one enshrined in Locke's theory of
property, according to which a person (being a self-owner) owns his
labor, and by "mixing his labor" with a previously unowned part of the
natural world (e.g. by whittling a stick found in a forest into a
spear) thereby comes to own it. The second principle would be a
principle of justice in transfer, governing the manner in which one
might justly come to own something previously owned by another. Here
Nozick endorses the principle that a transfer of holdings is just if
and only if it is voluntary, a principle that would seem to follow
from respect for a person's right to use the fruits of the exercise of
his self-owned talents, abilities, and labor as he sees fit. The final
principle would be a principle of justice in rectification, governing
the proper means of setting right past injustices in acquisition and
transfer. Anyone who got what he has in a manner consistent with these
three principles would, Nozick says, accordingly be entitled to it –
for, his having abided by these principles, no one has any grounds for
complaint against him. This gives us Nozick's entitlement theory of
distributive justice: a distribution of wealth obtaining in a society
as a whole is a just distribution if everyone in that society is
entitled to what he has, i.e. has gotten his holdings in accordance
with the principles of acquisition, transfer, and rectification. And
it is therefore just however equal or unequal it happens to be, and
indeed however "fair" or "unfair" it might seem intuitively to be.
Standard theories of distributive justice, Nozick says, are either
ahistorical "end-state" or "end-result" theories, requiring that the
distribution of wealth in a society have a certain structure, e.g. an
egalitarian structure (regardless of how the distribution came about
or how people got what they have); or they are historical theories
requiring that the distribution fit a certain pattern reflecting such
historical circumstances as who worked the hardest or who deserves the
most. The entitlement theory of justice is historical yet unpatterned:
The justice of a distribution is indeed determined by certain
historical circumstances (contrary to end-state theories), but it has
nothing to do with fitting any pattern guaranteeing that those who
worked the hardest or are most deserving have the most shares. What
matters is only that people get what they have in a manner consistent
with the three principles of justice in holdings, and this is fully
compatible with some people having much more than others, unlucky hard
workers having less than lazier but luckier ones, morally repulsive
individuals having higher incomes than saints, and so forth. Nozick
illustrates and defends the entitlement theory in a famous
thought-experiment involving the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain.
Imagine a society in which the distribution of wealth fits a
particular structure or pattern favored by a non-entitlement
conception of justice – suppose, to keep things simple, that it is an
equal distribution, and call it D1. Nozick's opponent must of course
grant that this distribution is just, since Nozick has allowed the
opponent himself to determine it. Now suppose that among the members
of this society is Wilt Chamberlain, and that he has as a condition of
his contract with his team that he will play only if each person
coming to see the game puts twenty-five cents into a special box at
the gate of the sports arena, the contents of which will go to him.
Suppose further that over the course of the season, one million fans
decide to pay the twenty-five cents to watch him play. The result will
be a new distribution, D2, in which Chamberlain now has $250,000, much
more than anyone else – a distribution which thereby breaks the
original pattern established in D1. Now, is D2 just? Is Chamberlain
entitled to his money? The answer to these questions, Nozick says, is
clearly "Yes." For everyone in D1 was, by hypothesis, entitled to what
he had; there is no injustice in the starting point that led up to D2.
Moreover, everyone who gave up twenty-five cents in the transition
from D1 to D2 did so voluntarily, and thus has no grounds for
complaint; and those who did not want to pay to see Chamberlain play
still have their twenty-five cents, so they have no grounds for
complaint either. But then no one has any grounds for a complaint of
injustice; and thus there is no injustice. What this shows, in
Nozick's view, is that all non-entitlement theories of justice are
false. For all such theories claim that it is a necessary condition
for a distribution's being just that it have a certain structure or
fit a certain pattern; but the Wilt Chamberlain example (which can be
reformulated so that D1 is, instead of an egalitarian distribution, a
distribution according to hard work, desert, or whatever) shows that a
distribution (such as D2) can be just even if it doesn't have a
particular structure or pattern. Moreover, the example shows that
"liberty upsets patterns," that allowing individuals freely to use
their holdings as they choose will inevitably destroy any distribution
advocated by non-entitlement theories, whether they be socialist,
egalitarian liberal, or some other theory of distribution. And the
corollary of this is that patterns destroy liberty, that attempts to
enforce a particular distributional pattern or structure over time
will necessarily involve intolerable levels of coercion, forbidding
individuals from using the fruits of their talents, abilities, and
labor as they see fit. As Nozick puts it, "the socialist society would
have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults." This is not
merely a regrettable side-effect of the quest to attain a just
distribution of wealth; it is a positive injustice, for it violates
the principle of self-ownership. Distributive justice, properly
understood, thus does not require a redistribution of wealth; indeed,
it forbids such a redistribution. Accordingly, the minimal state, far
from being inconsistent with the demands of distributive justice, is
in fact the only sure means of securing those demands.
d. Utopia
The minimal state might seem, even to those sympathetic to the
arguments for it, to make for a rather austere vision of political
life. But Nozick insists that we ought to see it as "inspiring, as
well as right." Indeed, the minimal state constitutes in his view a
kind of utopia. For, among all models of political order, it alone
makes possible the attempt to realize every person's and group's
vision of the good society. It is often thought that libertarianism
entails that everyone must live according to a laissez faire
capitalist ethos, but this is not so; it requires only that, whatever
ethos one is committed to, one not impose it by force on anyone else
without his consent. If some individuals or groups want to live
according to socialist or egalitarian principles, they are free to do
so as far as Nozick is concerned; indeed, they may even establish a
community, of whatever size, within the boundaries of the minimal
state, and require that everyone who comes to live within it must
agree to have a portion of his wealth redistributed. All they are
forbidden from doing is forcing people to join or contribute to the
establishment of such a community who do not want to do so. The
minimal state thus constitutes a "framework for utopia" – an
overarching system within the boundaries of which any number of
social, moral, and religious utopian visions may be realized. It
thereby provides a way for people even of radically opposed points of
view – socialists and capitalists, liberals and conservatives,
atheists and religious believers, whether Jews, Christians, Muslims,
Buddhists, Hindus – to make a go of implementing their conceptions of
how life ought to be lived, within their own communities, while living
side by side in peace. This gives us, in Nozick's view, a further
reason to endorse it.
3. Epistemology
Nozick's most influential contributions to philosophy outside of
political theory have been in epistemology and the metaphysics of
personal identity. In the case of the former, he is best known for his
version of an "externalist" theory of knowledge, developed in his
second book, Philosophical Explanations (1981). Traditional theories
of knowledge hold that a knower S knows a proposition p if and only if
S believes p, p is true, and S is justified in believing p. The third
condition has always been the most problematic: the logical
possibility of skeptical scenarios in which the would-be knower is the
hapless victim of an omnipotent, omniscient, and deceiving Cartesian
demon, or a brain in a vat hooked up by mad scientists to a virtual
reality supercomputer feeding it non-stop hallucinations, threaten to
make the justification of almost any belief impossible. Examples of
the sort made famous by Edmund Gettier – wherein S has a justified
true belief (say, a belief that it is now 5:00, based on S's glance at
a nearby clock) that nevertheless does not plausibly amount to
knowledge (say, because the clock is broken, and just by chance
happens to be displaying the correct time) – also cast doubt on the
adequacy of the traditional analysis of knowledge, whatever one says
about the threat of skepticism. These supposed inadequacies in the
traditional view of knowledge are often said by its critics to stem
from its "internalism" – the assumption that the factors that warrant
S's claim to knowledge must be factors of which S is aware: factors
internal to the set of his consciously held beliefs. But these
inadequacies can, it is argued, be remedied by adopting an externalist
perspective instead, on which the factors that warrant S's belief, and
make it genuine knowledge rather than mere belief, may well be factors
of which S is entirely unaware, and which are external to his
conscious cognitive processes. One such factor (emphasized by
"reliabilist" versions of externalism) might be a belief's having been
produced by a reliable belief-producing mechanism: a mechanism of the
existence and operations of which S might be utterly ignorant.
Nozick's unique contribution to the externalist approach is to suggest
that the conditions that make S's true belief that p count as
knowledge are the counterfactuals: (a) that were p not true S would
not believe it (the "variation" condition), and (b) that were p still
true in somewhat different circumstances, S would still believe it and
would not believe that not-p (the "adherence" condition). A belief
that fulfills these conditions is one that, in Nozick's expression,
"tracks the truth." (S's belief that it is 5:00 in the example above
would fail to meet these conditions, and thus fails to track the
truth: had it in fact been 4:55 when S looked at the broken clock, he
would still have believed that it is 5:00; and had the clock been
stopped at 4:55 instead, S would not believe that it is 5:00, and
indeed would believe that it is not 5:00.) Nozick applies this
analysis to answering skepticism as follows. We ought to concede to
the skeptic that S cannot know that he is not in fact a brain in a
vat, for his belief that he isn't is not one that tracks the truth
(since the variation condition can't be met – if it were not true that
S is not a brain in a vat, S would still believe he isn't). But though
this might appear to give away the store to skepticism, in fact it
does not. For what the skeptic claims to threaten are everyday beliefs
such as, e.g., S's belief that he is driving in his car – for
obviously, if S is actually a brain in a vat, he isn't really driving
in his car. Nozick argues that S can indeed know that he is driving
and know that if he is driving then he isn't a brain in a vat, even
though he cannot know that he isn't a brain in a vat. For it may well
be that S's belief that he is driving tracks the truth (it might, for
instance, be produced by a reliable belief-forming process) even if
his belief that he isn't a brain in a vat doesn't; and if so, then it
is at least possible, contra the skeptic, to know, for example, that
one is driving in one's car. In taking this position, Nozick famously,
and controversially, denies what is known among epistemologists as the
"closure principle," the principle that if S knows that p and that p
entails q, then S knows that q.
4. Personal Identity
Nozick's contribution to the debate over personal identity is his
"closest continuer" theory, also presented in Philosophical
Explanations. Philosophical puzzles over personal identity arise from
various bizarre thought experiments that seem to present genuine
logical possibilities. For instance, there is Locke's famous example
of the prince and the cobbler, wherein the man who wakes up in the
cobbler's body one morning appears to have all the memories of the
prince, and none of the memories of the cobbler. So who is the man
actually in the cobbler's body, the prince or the cobbler himself? Or
we can imagine a person A stepping into a teleportation machine of the
sort described in science-fiction stories, and, due to some glitch in
the machine's operation, not one but two persons similar to A, call
them B and C, appearing in the spot where the machine was supposed to
send A. Which, if either, is the "real" A? Nozick's answer to such
questions is that it is the later person who "most closely continues"
the earlier one who is the one who is truly identical to the latter.
What counts as closeness in this context is not susceptible of a
simple, cut and dried answer. If we take psychological properties to
be of greater importance to personhood than bodily ones, the closest
continuer of the prince in Locke's example would be the man who wakes
up in the cobbler's body, even though he has none of the prince's
bodily traits (and indeed, even though the prince's body may still
exist, and especially if someone else – the cobbler, say -seems to be
in the prince's body now). If instead we take bodily properties to be
of greatest importance, then the closest continuer of the prince would
be the person in the prince's body, whatever memories, if any, that
person has. In any case, part of what counts as contributing to
closeness is, in Nozick's view, going to be determined by a person's
own self-conception, by what a person himself takes to be most
important to his identity. What about the case where two or more
individuals seem equally close continuers of an earlier person, as in
the transporter example? Here Nozick's view is that, in the latter
case, neither B nor C is identical to A – since there is no single
closest continuer – and thus A no longer exists; though had only one
person arrived in the spot to which the machine was supposed to send
A, A would have continued to exist. Personal identity thus depends in
part on factors extrinsic to the person himself.
5. Conclusion
Nozick made contributions to other areas of philosophy as well,
developing a complex theory of rationality in The Nature of
Rationality (1993) and meditating on the meaning of life in The
Examined Life (1989), though these works received nothing like the
attention garnered by Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But his work in
epistemology and metaphysics has been nearly as controversial as his
work in political philosophy, and has generated as large a literature.
Time will tell whether similar controversy will be generated by his
final work, Invariances, wherein he developed a theory of objective
reality on which the mark of the objectively real or true, whether in
science, metaphysics, or ethics, is "invariance under
transformations," a property of the sort exhibited by the
relationships between the numbers we use to measure the temperature,
relationships which remain constant or "invariant" whether we use the
Fahrenheit or centigrade scales, despite the various differences these
scales exhibit in other respects. In any event, it is almost certain
that it is Nozick's defense of libertarianism that will stand as his
most significant contribution to philosophy.
6. References and Further Reading
G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (New York:
Cambridge, University Press, 1995)
Edward Feser, On Nozick (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003)
Simon Hailwood, Exploring Nozick: Beyond Anarchy, State, and Utopia
(Sydney: Avebury, 1996)
A.R. Lacey, Robert Nozick (Acumen Publishing Ltd., 2001)
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974)
Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981)
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1989)
Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993)
Robert Nozick, Socratic Puzzles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
Robert Nozick, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001)
Jeffrey Paul, ed., Reading Nozick: Essays on Anarchy, State, and
Utopia (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991)
David Schmidtz, ed., Robert Nozick (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice, and the Minimal
State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991)
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