Robert Nozick Quotes

And although it might be best of all to be Socrates satisfied, having both happiness and depth, we would give up some happiness in order to gain the depth.

There is room for words on subjects other than last words.

Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth.

Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).

Once a person exists, not everything compatible with his overall existence being a net plus can be done, even by those who created him. An existing person has claims, even against those whose purpose in creating him was to violate those claims.

Maximising the average utility allows a person to kill everyone else if that would make him ecstatic, and so happier than average.

If someone picks up a third party and throws him at you down at the bottom of a deep well...may you use your ray gun to disintegrate the falling body before it crushes and kills you?

With some justice, I think, I could claim that it is all right as a beginning to leave a principle in a somewhat fuzzy state; the primary question is whether something like it will do. This claim, however, would meet a frosty reception from those many proponents of another principle scrutinized in the next chapter, if they knew how much harder I shall be on their principle than I am here on mine. Fortunately, they don't know that yet.

When I was fifteen or sixteen I carried around in the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's 'Republic', front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful. How much I wanted an older person to notice me carrying it and be impressed, to pat me on the shoulder and say... I didn't know what exactly. from: 'The Examined Life, Philosophical Meditations

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you. 1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master’s whims. He is often cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on. 2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time. 3. The master has a group of slave, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on. 4. The master allows the slave four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own. 5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking. 6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what use to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on. 7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into discussion of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers. 8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselve3s to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master may also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.) 9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome. The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of the slave?

If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with?), isn't D2 also just? If the people were entitled to dispose of the resources to which they were entitled (under D1), didn't this include their being entitled to give it to, or exchange it with, Wilt Chamberlain? Can anyone else complain on grounds of justice? Each other person already has his legitimate share under D1. Under D1, there is nothing that anyone has that anyone else has a claim of justice against. After someone transfers something to Wilt Chamberlain, third parties still have their legitimate shares; their shares are not changed. By what process could such a transfer among two persons give rise to a legitimate claim of distributive justice on a portion of what was transferred, by a third party who had no claim of justice on any holding of the others before the transfer?

Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls' theory or explain why not.

Perhaps philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain: if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies.

There are few books that set out what a mature person can believe - someone fully grown up, I mean. Aristotle's 'Ethics', Marcus Aurelius's 'Meditations', Montaigne's 'Essays', and the essays of Samuel Johnson come to mind. Even with these, we do not simply accept everything that is said. The author's voice is never our own, exactly; the author's life is never our own. It would be disconcerting, anyway, to find that another person holds precisely our views, responds with our particular sensibility, and thinks the same things important. Still, we gain from these books, weighing and pondering ourselves in their light. These books - and also some less evidently grown-up ones, Thoreau's 'Walden' and Nietzsche's writings, for example - invite or urge us to think along with them, branching in our own directions. We are not identical with the books we read, but neither would we be the same without them.

un Estado mínimo, limitado a las estrechas funciones de protección contra la violencia, el robo y el fraude, de cumplimiento de contratos, etcétera, se justifica; que cualquier Estado más extenso violaría el derecho de las personas de no ser obligadas a hacer ciertas cosas y, por tanto, no se justifica; que el Estado mínimo es inspirador, asi como correcto.

We are reluctant to believe that all of what we are gets erased in death; we seam to ourselves deeper than the mere stoppage of life can reach. Yet the writings on "survival" and the evidence for it seem jejune. Perhaps whatever continues is unable to communicate with us, or has more important things to do, or things we'll find out soon enough anyway—how much energy, after all, do we devote to signaling to fetuses that there is a realm to follow?

Rand, Nozick, and their more modern incarnations are dangerously wrong. Not only does the common good exist, but it is essential for a society to function. Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn’t even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.

The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual rights with the dignity this constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows us, individually or with whom we choose, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more. Or less.

If one machine can be used to make X (and nothing else) and another can be used to make Y, and each uses the same raw materials in the same amounts to make a unit of its product, and X is more valuable than Y, then the first machine is more valuable than the second, even if each machine contains the same raw materials and took the same amount of time to make. The first machine, having a more valuable final product, will command a higher price than the second. This may give rise to the illusion that its products are more valuable because it is more valuable. But this gets things backwards. It is more valuable because its products are.

Прудон дал нам описание «неудобств», сопутствующих государству. «Когда вами ПРАВЯТ — это значит, что за вами наблюдают, проверяют, шпионят, вас направляют, преследуют по закону, пересчитывают, регулируют, регистрируют, внушают идеи, поучают, контролируют, обследуют, оценивают, хвалят, порицают и командуют создания, не имеющие нужных для этого прав, мудрости и достоинств. Когда вами ПРАВЯТ — это значит, что при каждой операции, при каждой сделке вас отмечают, регистрируют, пересчитывают, облагают налогом, штемпелюют, нумеруют, штрафуют, лицензируют, дают разрешение, указывают, предостерегают, запрещают, улучшают, исправляют, наказывают. Это значит под предлогом общественной пользы и во имя общих интересов подвергаться сборам, муштре, поборам, эксплуатации, монополии, вымогательствам, притеснениям, обману, изъятиям; а при малейшем сопротивлении, при первом слове протеста вас усмиряют, штрафуют, чернят, изнуряют, преследуют, жестоко обращаются, избивают, разоружают, связывают, душат, бросают в тюрьму, осуждают, выносят приговор, расстреливают, высылают, приносят в жертву, продают, предают и, в довершение ко всему, над вами глумятся, издеваются, превращают в посмешище, оскорбляют, бесчестят. Таково государство; такова его справедливость; таковы его моральные правила» (P. J. Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Beverly Robinson (London: FreedomPress, 1923), pp. 293—294, с некоторыми вставками из перевода Бенджамина Такера в его книге: Benjamin Tucker, Instead of a Book (New York, 1893), p. 26.

Можно ли представить себе человека, который в поиске мудрых и чутких людей, способных руководить им во имя его собственного блага, выбрал бы кого-нибудь из тех, кто составляет обе палаты Конгресса?

По-видимому, люди выбирают государственную судебную систему потому, что она гарантирует исполнение решения суда вопреки воле одной из сторон. Ибо государство не позволяет никому другому принуждать к исполнению решений альтернативной судебной системы. Поэтому всякий раз, когда стороны не могут договориться о порядке урегулирования конфликта или когда одна из сторон не верит, что другая подчинится решению посредничающей организации (когда другая сторона обязуется пожертвовать чем-то очень ценным для нее, какой силой можно принудить ее к выполнению этого обязательства в случае, если она не подчинится решению посредника? ), стороны, желающие удовлетворить свои претензии, будут иметь единственный разрешенный государственной системой правосудия способ разрешить свой спор, а именно обратиться к этой самой государственной системе. Для людей, отвергающих данную государственную систему, это может оказаться трудным и мучительным выбором.

в моральном плане ни одна жизнь не перевешивает другие так, чтобы можно было достичь увеличения суммарного общественного блага. Нет оправданий, позволяющих пожертвовать одним человеком ради других. Эта центральная идея — а именно, что есть разные люди, живущие каждый своей жизнью, и ни одним нельзя пожертвовать для других — не только лежит в основе существования жестких моральных ограничений, но и, по моему мнению, порождает либертарианское ограничение, которое запрещает агрессию против другого.

Is there really someone who, searching for a group of wise and sensitive persons to regulate him for his own good, would choose that group of people who constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?)

Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. If people force you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purposes your work is to serve apart from your decisions. This process whereby they take this decision from you makes them a part-owner of you; it gives them a property right in you

After hovering in the ethereal world of mathematics and geometry, economics was forced to crash-land and take its place in the real world of political debate. Do economists wish to pursue the Good Society in the spirit of the social contract tradition which started some time in ancient Greece, reasserted itself in Europe with J.-J.Rousseau and found its apotheosis in John Rawls? Or do they wish for a social contract which effectively rules the State out as anything other than a provider of order and security—a tradition which began with Thomas Hobbes and culminated in Robert Nozick’s theory? Or, indeed can economists think of something in between? Thus economics is back into the mire courtesy of Arrow’s third theorem, which dispels any hopes of a Rational Society springing from some form of advanced utility maximisation. Economics can no longer escape the political, philosophical debates which resonate across the humanities—from literature to sociology and from politics to moral philosophy. This is a good thing. At last, economics can become interesting again after a century of continuous pedantry.

as a young man I thought the ideal philosophical argument was one with the following property: someone who understood its premises and did not accept its conclusion would die.

the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection.