Thinker · TH-0358
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick was an American philosopher who taught at Harvard for most of his career. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia answered Rawls with a…
Robert Nozick was an American philosopher who taught at Harvard for most of his career. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia answered Rawls with a libertarian entitlement theory of justice: holdings are just if they arise from just acquisition and just transfer, whatever overall pattern results. His Wilt Chamberlain example argues that any patterned principle of distribution can be upset by free exchanges. In epistemology he proposed a tracking account of knowledge that denies the closure of knowledge under known entailment.
Key ideas
- Justice in holdings is historical: what matters is how holdings came about, not their overall pattern.
- Liberty upsets patterns: free transfers will disrupt any favoured distribution unless constantly corrected.
- Only a minimal state, limited to protection and enforcing contracts, is justified.
- Knowing p requires that one's belief track the truth: one would not believe p if p were false.
Major works
- Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
- Philosophical Explanations (1981)
- The Examined Life (1989)
- Invariances (2001)
In the conversation
- Question Nozick gave up closure to beat the sceptic. Isn’t that too high a price?
- Debate I would plug into the experience machine, and most refusals are just status quo bias
- Question Can someone explain Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument and the strongest reply to it?
- Discussion Why does tax feel like theft to some of my clients and not to others?
- Debate Nobody deserves their talents, and that settles more about pay than people admit