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Robert Nozick

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102-611: Robert Nozick ( / ˈ n oʊ z ɪ k / ; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University , and was president of the American Philosophical Association . He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls ' A Theory of Justice (1971), in which Nozick proposes his minimal state as

204-750: 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. 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

306-567: A personal property right, but this is defended in terms of moral capacities and self-respect, rather than an appeal to a natural right of self-ownership (this distinguishes Rawls's account from the classical liberalism of John Locke and the libertarianism of Robert Nozick ). Rawls argues that a second principle of equality would be agreed upon to guarantee liberties that represent meaningful options for all in society and ensure distributive justice. For example, formal guarantees of political voice and freedom of assembly are of little real worth to

408-432: A thought experiment called the " original position ", in which people deliberately select what kind of society they would choose to live in if they did not know which social position they would personally occupy. In his later work Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls turned to the question of how political power could be made legitimate given reasonable disagreement about the nature of the good life. Rawls received both

510-433: A " veil of ignorance ": each lacks knowledge, for example, of their gender, race, age, intelligence, wealth, skills, education and religion. The only thing that a given member knows about themselves is that they are in possession of the basic capacities necessary to fully and willfully participate in an enduring system of mutual cooperation; each knows they can be a member of the society. Rawls posits two basic capacities that

612-476: A "bat-like horror of the limelight," did not become a public intellectual despite his fame. He instead remained committed mainly to his academic and family life. In 1995, he had the first of several strokes, severely impeding his ability to continue to work. He was nevertheless able to complete The Law of Peoples , the most complete statement of his views on international justice and published in 2001 shortly before his death Justice as Fairness: A Restatement ,

714-440: A child's development. This is because reasons based upon the interpretation of sacred text are non-public (their force as reasons relies upon faith commitments that can be reasonably rejected), whereas reasons that rely upon the value of providing children with environments in which they may develop optimally are public reasons—their status as reasons draws upon no deep, controversial conception of human flourishing. Rawls held that

816-419: A contribution to "ideal theory," the determination of "principles that characterize a well-ordered society under favorable circumstances." In Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls turned towards the question of political legitimacy in the context of intractable philosophical, religious, and moral disagreement amongst citizens regarding the human good. Such disagreement, he insisted, was reasonable—the result of

918-401: A controversial conception of human flourishing, it is unclear how a liberal state ordered according to it could possibly be legitimate. The intuition animating this seemingly new concern is actually no different from the guiding idea of A Theory of Justice , namely that the fundamental charter of a society must rely only on principles, arguments and reasons that cannot be reasonably rejected by

1020-427: A distribution of goods is just when brought about by free exchange 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),

1122-512: A doctoral dissertation titled A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge: Considered with Reference to Judgments on the Moral Worth of Character . His PhD included a year of study at Cornell. Rawls taught at Princeton until 1952 when he received a Fulbright Fellowship to Christ Church at Oxford University , where he was influenced by the liberal political theorist and historian Isaiah Berlin and

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1224-595: A libertarian in a broad sense, right up to his final days, even as his views became somewhat less 'hardcore'". Nozick was sometimes admired for the exploratory style of his philosophizing, often content to raise tantalizing philosophical possibilities and then leave judgment to the reader. In his review of The Nature of Rationality , Anthony Gottlieb praised this style, noting its place in Nozick's approach to writing philosophy: "From Mr. Nozick you always expect fireworks, even if some of them go off in their box...Start pondering

1326-437: 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 individual] 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. He rejected

1428-404: A political account of justice and just institutions. Relational approaches to the question of justice, by contrast, seek to examine the connections between individuals and focuses on their relations in societies, with respect to how these relationships are established and configured. Rawls further argued that these principles were to be 'lexically ordered' to award priority to basic liberties over

1530-414: A profound influence on theories of distributive justice both in theory and in practice, the generally anti- meritocratic sentiment of Rawls's thinking has not been widely accepted by the political left. He consistently held the view that naturally developed skills and endowments could not be neatly distinguished from inherited ones, and that neither could be used to justify moral desert . Instead, he held

1632-426: A range of critical responses contesting the universalist basis of Rawls' original position . While these criticisms, which emphasize the cultural and social roots of normative political principles, are typically described as communitarian critiques of Rawlsian liberalism, none of their authors identified with philosophical communitarianism . In his later works, Rawls attempted to reconcile his theory of justice with

1734-415: A reasonably rejectable (Kantian) conception of human flourishing as the free development of autonomous moral agency. The core of Political Liberalism is its insistence that in order to retain its legitimacy, the liberal state must commit itself to the "ideal of public reason ." This roughly means that citizens in their public capacity must engage one another only in terms of reasons whose status as reasons

1836-590: A response to criticisms of A Theory of Justice . Rawls died from heart failure at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts , on November 24, 2002, at age 81. He was buried at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife, four children, and four grandchildren. Rawls published three main books. The first, A Theory of Justice , focused on distributive justice and attempted to reconcile

1938-545: A sentence and you will find yourself led away prematurely by a parenthetical question; think about the question and you will be dragged into a discursive footnote...Yet it is worth the effort – certainly for regular readers of philosophy, and often for others." 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

2040-492: A thought experiment he called the " original position ." The intuition motivating its employment is this: the enterprise of political philosophy will be greatly benefited by a specification of the correct standpoint a person should take in their thinking about justice. When we think about what it would mean for a just state of affairs to obtain between persons, we eliminate certain features (such as hair or eye color, height, race, etc.) and fixate upon others. Rawls's original position

2142-440: A two-part second principle comprising Fair Equality of Opportunity and the famous (and controversial ) difference principle . This second principle ensures that those with comparable talents and motivation face roughly similar life chances and that inequalities in society work to the benefit of the least advantaged. Rawls held that these principles of justice apply to the "basic structure" of fundamental social institutions (such as

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2244-595: 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 . Nozick pronounced some misgivings about libertarianism – specifically his own work Anarchy, State and Utopia – in his later publications. Some later editions of The Examined Life advertise this fact explicitly in

2346-554: Is achieved by mutually adjusting one's general principles and one's considered judgements on particular cases, to bring the two into line with one another. Rawls derives two principles of justice from the original position. The first of these is the Liberty Principle, which establishes equal basic liberties for all citizens. 'Basic' liberty entails the (familiar in the liberal tradition) freedoms of conscience, association and expression as well as democratic rights; Rawls also includes

2448-637: Is disconcerting to be known primarily for an early work". Scholars and journalists have since debated what Nozick's true political position was before the end of his life. Writing for Slate , 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

2550-598: Is frequently cited by the courts of law in the United States and Canada and referred to by practicing politicians in the United States and the United Kingdom. In a 2008 national survey of political theorists, based on 1,086 responses from professors at accredited, four-year colleges and universities in the United States, Rawls was voted first on the list of "Scholars Who Have Had the Greatest Impact on Political Theory in

2652-428: Is meant to encode all of our intuitions about which features are relevant, and which irrelevant, for the purposes of deliberating well about justice. The original position is Rawls's hypothetical scenario in which a group of persons is set the task of reaching an agreement about the kind of political and economic structure they want for a society, which they will then occupy. Each individual, however, deliberates behind

2754-496: Is permissible humans to maximise 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". In Philosophical Explanations (1981), Nozick provided novel accounts of knowledge , free will , personal identity , the nature of value , and the meaning of life. He also put forward an epistemological system which attempted to deal with both

2856-693: Is seen at home reading Anarchy, State, and Utopia , by Robert Nozick. Dani Rodrik uses Bo Rothstein 's view to point out that the TV show runners take a position in the debate by how they showed the eyewitness reacting to finding out the man they pointed out as the culprit of the crime he saw was actually the local mafia boss, immediately after the book appears on screen. In the comedy series A.P. Bio , season 2 episode 3, "Wednesday Morning, 8AM," Jack invokes Nozick's entitlement theory in an effort to reclaim his massage chair from Lynette. Jack says that he has realized that Lynette, in previously refusing his claim to

2958-454: Is shared between them. Political reasoning, then, is to proceed purely in terms of "public reasons." For example: a Supreme Court justice deliberating on whether or not the denial to homosexuals of the ability to marry constitutes a violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause may not advert to his religious convictions on the matter, but he may take into account the argument that a same-sex household provides sub-optimal conditions for

3060-404: Is simple: one does not know whether he himself would be a woman or a black person. This position is expressed in the difference principle , according to which, in a system of ignorance about one's status, one would strive to improve the position of the worst off, because he might find himself in that position. Rawls develops his original position by modeling it, in certain respects at least, after

3162-439: Is that his preferred emphasis on a society of peoples is separate from the more conventional and historical discussion of international politics as based on relationships between states. Rawls argued that the legitimacy of a liberal international order is contingent on tolerating decent peoples , which differ from liberal peoples , among other ways, in that they might have state religions and deny adherents of minority faiths

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3264-407: Is that similar accounts may be presented for many other comprehensive doctrines. This is Rawls's famous notion of an " overlapping consensus ." Such a consensus would necessarily exclude some doctrines, namely, those that are "unreasonable", and so one may wonder what Rawls has to say about such doctrines. An unreasonable comprehensive doctrine is unreasonable in the sense that it is incompatible with

3366-534: The Gettier problem and those posed by skepticism . This highly influential argument eschewed justification as a necessary requirement for knowledge. 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,

3468-616: The James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard. Rawls was, for a time, a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society . He was put forward for membership by Milton Friedman in 1968, and withdrew from the society three years later, just before his A Theory of Justice was published. Rawls rarely gave interviews and, having both a stutter (partially caused by the deaths of two of his brothers, who died through infections contracted from Rawls) and

3570-541: The Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999. The latter was presented by President Bill Clinton in recognition of how his works "revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate help the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one". Among contemporary political philosophers, Rawls

3672-488: The type of equality that fair societies ought to embody. In a 2008 national survey of political theorists, based on 1,086 responses from professors at accredited, four-year colleges and universities in the United States, Rawls was voted first on the list of "Scholars Who Have Had the Greatest Impact on Political Theory in the Past 20 Years". Charles Taylor , Alasdair Macintyre , Michael Sandel , and Michael Walzer produced

3774-460: The "four layers of ethics", which at its core maintains an explicitly libertarian underpinning. 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

3876-474: The "initial situations" of various social contract thinkers who came before him, including Thomas Hobbes , John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau . Each social contractarian constructs their initial situation somewhat differently, having in mind a unique political morality they intend the thought experiment to generate. Iain King has suggested the original position draws on Rawls's experiences in post-war Japan, where

3978-438: 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 theory]": 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

4080-540: The 20th century. In 1990, Will Kymlicka wrote in his introduction to the field that "it is generally accepted that the recent rebirth of normative political philosophy began with the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971". Rawls's theory of "justice as fairness" recommends equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur. Rawls's argument for these principles of social justice uses

4182-711: The Cross of Christ to no effect." Rawls graduated from Princeton in 1943 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude . Rawls enlisted in the U.S. Army in February 1943. During World War II , Rawls served as an infantryman in the Pacific, where he served a tour of duty in New Guinea and was awarded a Bronze Star ; and the Philippines , where he endured intensive trench warfare and witnessed traumatizing scenes of violence and bloodshed. It

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4284-522: The Past 20 Years". Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore , Maryland . He was the second of five sons born to William Lee Rawls, a prominent Baltimore attorney, and Anna Abell Stump Rawls. Tragedy struck Rawls at a young age: Two of his brothers died in childhood because they had contracted fatal illnesses from him. ... In 1928, the seven-year-old Rawls contracted diphtheria . His brother Bobby, younger by 20 months, visited him in his room and

4386-464: The US Army was challenged with designing new social and political authorities for the country, while "imagining away all that had gone before." In social justice processes, each person early on makes decisions about which features of persons to consider and which to ignore. Rawls's aspiration is to have created a thought experiment whereby a version of that process is carried to its completion, illuminating

4488-434: The application of The Law of Peoples, as it would be more legitimate towards all persons over whom political coercive power is exercised. According to Rawls however, nation states, unlike citizens, were self-sufficient in the cooperative enterprises that constitute domestic societies. Although Rawls recognized that aid should be given to governments which are unable to protect human rights for economic reasons, he claimed that

4590-700: 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 . In The Nature of Rationality , Nozick calls truth a primary good , explicitly appropriating Rawls' A Theory of Justice . 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 also broke away from libertarian principles in his own personal life, invoking rent control laws against Erich Segal – who

4692-525: 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

4794-418: The blurb, saying Nozick "refutes his earlier claims of libertarianism" in one of the book's essays, "The Zigzag of Politics". In the introduction of The Examined Life , Nozick says his earlier works on political philosophy "now [seem] seriously inadequate", and later repeats this claim in the first chapter of The Nature of Rationality . In these works, Nozick also praised political ideals which ran contrary to

4896-532: The capacity to develop a sense of justice and a generally effective desire to abide by it. Knowing only these two features of themselves, the group will deliberate in order to design a social structure, during which each person will seek their maximal advantage. The idea is that proposals that we would ordinarily think of as unjust—such as that black people or women should not be allowed to hold public office—will not be proposed, in this, Rawls's original position, because it would be irrational to propose them. The reason

4998-543: The chair, was essentially quoting from Murphy and Nagel's The Myth of Ownership . But Jack, as he is fond of doing, points out that he holds a PhD in philosophy, "which is why I also know about Robert Nozick's rebuttal to Murphy and Nagel. Not sure if you're familiar with a little book called What's Mine is Mine ." Nozick of course authored no "little book" with this title; Jack's quip would appear to allude to chapters 7 and 8 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia . Harvard University Professor At Harvard University ,

5100-402: The citizens whose lives will be limited by its social, legal, and political circumscriptions. In other words, the legitimacy of a law is contingent upon its justification being impossible to reasonably reject. This old insight took on a new shape, however, when Rawls realized that its application must extend to the deep justification of Justice as Fairness itself, which he had presented in terms of

5202-491: The competing claims of the values of freedom and equality. The second, Political Liberalism , addressed the question of how citizens divided by intractable religious and philosophical disagreements could come to endorse a constitutional democratic regime. The third, The Law of Peoples , focused on the issue of global justice. A Theory of Justice , published in 1971, aimed to resolve the seemingly competing claims of freedom and equality. The shape Rawls's resolution took, however,

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5304-580: 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 says animal rights activists are often considered "cranks" and appears to go back on

5406-456: The correct standpoint a person should take in their thinking about justice. If he has succeeded, then the original position thought experiment may function as a full specification of the moral standpoint we should attempt to achieve when deliberating about social justice. In setting out his theory, Rawls described his method as one of " reflective equilibrium ," a concept which has since been used in other areas of philosophy. Reflective equilibrium

5508-476: The death of his father, reappraises the experience machine, and proposes "the matrix of reality" as a means of understanding how individuals might better connect with reality in their own lives. 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

5610-462: The desperately poor and marginalized in society. Demanding that everyone have exactly the same effective opportunities in life would almost certainly offend the very liberties that are supposedly being equalized. Nonetheless, we would want to ensure at least the "fair worth" of our liberties: wherever one ends up in society, one wants life to be worth living, with enough effective freedom to pursue personal goals. Thus, participants would be moved to affirm

5712-592: The duty of civility. This is simply another way of saying that an unreasonable doctrine is incompatible with the fundamental political values a liberal theory of justice is designed to safeguard—freedom, equality and fairness. So one answer to the question of what Rawls has to say about such doctrines is—nothing. For one thing, the liberal state cannot justify itself to individuals (such as religious fundamentalists) who hold to such doctrines, because any such justification would—as has been noted—proceed in terms of controversial moral or religious commitments that are excluded from

5814-510: The duty of civility—the duty of citizens to offer one another reasons that are mutually understood as reasons—applies within what he called the "public political forum." This forum extends from the upper reaches of government—for example the supreme legislative and judicial bodies of the society—all the way down to the deliberations of a citizen deciding for whom to vote in state legislatures or how to vote in public referendums. Campaigning politicians should also, he believed, refrain from pandering to

5916-650: The exacting, academic tone of Rawls's writing and his reclusive personality, his philosophical work has exerted an enormous impact on not only contemporary moral and political philosophy but also public political discourse. During the student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 , copies of "A Theory of Justice" were brandished by protesters in the face of government officials. Despite being approximately 600 pages long, over 300,000 copies of that book have been sold, stimulating critical responses from utilitarian , feminist , conservative, libertarian , Catholic , communitarian , Marxist and Green scholars. Although having

6018-443: The exclusion of concern with justifying liberal values to those not already committed—or at least open—to them. Rawls's concern is with whether or not the idea of political legitimacy fleshed out in terms of the duty of civility and mutual justification can serve as a viable form of public discourse in the face of the religious and moral pluralism of modern democratic society, not with justifying this conception of political legitimacy in

6120-541: The first place. Rawls also modified the principles of justice as follows (with the first principle having priority over the second, and the first half of the second having priority over the latter half): These principles are subtly modified from the principles in Theory . The first principle now reads "equal claim" instead of "equal right", and he also replaces the phrase "system of basic liberties" with "a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties". The two parts of

6222-472: The free exercise of human rationality under the conditions of open enquiry and free conscience that the liberal state is designed to safeguard. The question of legitimacy in the face of reasonable disagreement was urgent for Rawls because his own justification of Justice as Fairness relied upon a Kantian conception of the human good that can be reasonably rejected. If the political conception offered in A Theory of Justice can only be shown to be good by invoking

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6324-475: The grounds that a world state does not exist and would not be stable. This notion has been challenged, as a comprehensive system of global governance has arisen, amongst others in the form of the Bretton Woods system , that serves to distribute primary social goods between human beings. It has thus been argued that a cosmopolitan application of the theory of justice as fairness is the more reasonable alternative to

6426-492: 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. In the 23rd episode of HBO's show The Sopranos , an eyewitness to one of Tony Soprano's crimes

6528-444: The individuals would know themselves to possess. First, individuals know that they have the capacity to form, pursue and revise a conception of the good, or life plan. Exactly what sort of conception of the good this is, however, the individual does not yet know. It may be, for example, religious or secular, but at the start, the individual in the original position does not know which. Second, each individual understands themselves to have

6630-607: The inside." Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's experiences? 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):

6732-613: The introduction of A Theory of Justice , see Nozick implicitly join Rawls's attempts to discredit utilitarianism . Nozick's case differs somewhat in that it mainly targets hedonism and relies on a variety of thought experiments, although both works draw from Kantian principles. 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: There are also substantial puzzles when we ask what matters other than how people's experiences feel "from

6834-455: The judiciary, the economic structure and the political constitution), a qualification that has been the source of some controversy and constructive debate (see the work of Gerald Cohen ). Rawls's theory of justice stakes out the task of equalizing the distribution of primary social goods to those least advantaged in society and thus may be seen as a largely political answer to the question of justice, with matters of morality somewhat conflated into

6936-523: The knowledge that they will be bailed out by those nations who had spent responsibly. Rawls's discussion of "non-ideal" theory, on the other hand, included a condemnation of bombing civilians and of the American bombing of German and Japanese cities in World War II , as well as discussions of immigration and nuclear proliferation. He also detailed here the ideal of the statesman, a political leader who looks to

7038-494: The leading contemporary figures in moral and political philosophy, including Sibyl A. Schwarzenbach , Thomas Nagel , Allan Gibbard , Onora O'Neill , Adrian Piper , Arnold Davidson , Elizabeth S. Anderson , Christine Korsgaard , Susan Neiman , Claudia Card , Rainer Forst , Thomas Pogge , T. M. Scanlon , Barbara Herman , Joshua Cohen , Thomas E. Hill Jr. , Gurcharan Das , Andreas Teuber , Henry S. Richardson , Nancy Sherman , Samuel Freeman and Paul Weithman . He held

7140-464: The least-advantaged members of society". Nozick's philosophy also claims a heritage from John Locke 's Second Treatise on Government and seeks to ground itself upon a natural law doctrine, but breaks distinctly with Locke on issues of self-ownership by attempting to secularize its claims. Nozick also appealed to the second formulation of Immanuel Kant 's categorical imperative : that people should be treated as an end in themselves, not merely as

7242-466: The legal theorist H. L. A. Hart . After returning to the United States, he served first as an assistant and then associate professor at Cornell University . In the fall of 1953 Rawls became an assistant professor at Cornell University , joining his mentor Norman Malcolm in the Philosophy Department. Three years later Rawls received tenure at Cornell . During the 1959–60 academic year, Rawls

7344-458: The liberal values one way, a reasonable Muslim another, and a reasonable secular citizen yet another way. One may illustrate Rawls's idea using a Venn diagram: the public political values will be the shared space upon which overlap numerous reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Rawls's account of stability presented in A Theory of Justice is a detailed portrait of the compatibility of one—Kantian—comprehensive doctrine with justice as fairness. His hope

7446-417: The more equality-oriented demands of the second principle. This has also been a topic of much debate among moral and political philosophers. Finally, Rawls took his approach as applying in the first instance to what he called a "well-ordered society ... designed to advance the good of its members and effectively regulated by a public conception of justice." In this respect, he understood justice as fairness as

7548-405: The next generation and promotes international harmony, even in the face of significant domestic pressure to act otherwise. Rawls also controversially claimed that violations of human rights can legitimize military intervention in the violating states, though he also expressed the hope that such societies could be induced to reform peacefully by the good example of liberal and decent peoples. Despite

7650-447: The non-public religious or moral convictions of their constituencies. The ideal of public reason secures the dominance of the public political values—freedom, equality, and fairness—that serve as the foundation of the liberal state. But what about the justification of these values? Since any such justification would necessarily draw upon deep (religious or moral) metaphysical commitments which would be reasonably rejectable, Rawls held that

7752-497: 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 . Anarchy, State, and Utopia received a National Book Award in the category of Philosophy and Religion in the year following its original publication. Early sections of Anarchy, State, and Utopia , akin to

7854-676: The only justifiable form of government. His later work Philosophical Explanations (1981) advanced notable epistemological claims, namely his counterfactual theory of knowledge. It won the 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 . Nozick

7956-411: 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 maximising pleasure: [Utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people] says: (1) maximize the total happiness of all living beings; (2) place stringent side constraints on what one may do to human beings. Before introducing

8058-541: The poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg . Nozick died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with stomach cancer . He was interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts . Nozick's first book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), argues that only a minimal state limited to the functions of protection against "force, fraud, theft, and administering courts of law" can be justified, as any more extensive state would violate people's individual rights. Nozick believed that

8160-572: The possibility that its normative foundations may not be universally applicable. The late philosopher G. A. Cohen , along with political scientist Jon Elster , and John Roemer , used Rawls's writings extensively to inaugurate the Analytical Marxism movement in the 1980s. In the later part of Rawls's career, he engaged with the scholarly work of Jürgen Habermas (see Habermas-Rawls debate ). Habermas's reading of Rawls led to an appreciation of Rawls's work and other analytical philosophers by

8262-473: The principle of deductive closure. The Examined Life (1989), aimed towards a more general audience, explores themes of love, the impact of death, questions of faith, the nature of reality, and the meaning of life. The book takes its name from the quote by Socrates , that "the unexamined life is not worth living". In it, Nozick attempts to find meaning in everyday experiences, and considers how we might come to feel "more real". In this pursuit, Nozick discusses

8364-508: The public political forum. But, more importantly, the goal of the Rawlsian project is primarily to determine whether or not the liberal conception of political legitimacy is internally coherent, and this project is carried out by the specification of what sorts of reasons persons committed to liberal values are permitted to use in their dialogue, deliberations and arguments with one another about political matters. The Rawlsian project has this goal to

8466-452: The public political values may only be justified privately by individual citizens. The public liberal political conception and its attendant values may and will be affirmed publicly (in judicial opinions and presidential addresses, for example) but its deep justifications will not. The task of justification falls to what Rawls called the "reasonable comprehensive doctrines" and the citizens who subscribe to them. A reasonable Catholic will justify

8568-430: The purpose for this aid is not to achieve an eventual state of global equality, but rather only to ensure that these societies could maintain liberal or decent political institutions. He argued, among other things, that continuing to give aid indefinitely would see nations with industrious populations subsidize those with idle populations and would create a moral hazard problem where governments could spend irresponsibly in

8670-414: 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

8772-501: The right to hold positions of power within the state and might organize political participation via consultation hierarchies rather than elections. However, no well-ordered peoples may violate human rights or behave in an externally aggressive manner. Peoples that fail to meet the criteria of "liberal" or "decent" peoples are referred to as 'outlaw states', 'societies burdened by unfavorable conditions' or 'benevolent absolutisms', depending on their particular failings. Such peoples do not have

8874-417: The right to mutual respect and toleration possessed by liberal and decent peoples. Rawls's views on global distributive justice as they were expressed in this work surprised many of his fellow egalitarian liberals. For example, Charles Beitz had previously written a study that argued for the application of Rawls's Difference Principles globally. Rawls denied that his principles should be so applied, partly on

8976-484: The second principle are also switched, so that the difference principle becomes the latter of the three. Although there were passing comments on international affairs in A Theory of Justice , it was not until late in his career that Rawls formulated a comprehensive theory of international politics with the publication of The Law of Peoples . He claimed there that "well-ordered" peoples could be either "liberal" or "decent". Rawls's basic distinction in international politics

9078-478: The title of University Professor is the institution's most distinguished professorial post, and is conferred upon a select group of 25 tenured faculty members whose scholarship and other professional work have achieved exceptional distinction and influence. Established in 1935, this position enables scholars to work across disciplines and at any of Harvard's schools. The number of University Professors has increased over time, made possible by new endowed gifts to

9180-414: The university. In 2006, there were 21 University Professors. As of 2022 , the total has risen to 25 University Professors. John Rawls John Bordley Rawls ( / r ɔː l z / ; February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral , legal and political philosopher in the modern liberal tradition . Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of

9282-424: The utility monster, Nozick raises a hypothetical scenario where someone might, "by some strange causal connection", kill 10,000 unowned cows to die 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

9384-474: The vegetarian position he previously maintained in Anarchy, State and Utopia . 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

9486-438: The view that individuals could "legitimately expect" entitlements to the earning of income or development of abilities based on institutional arrangements. This aspect of Rawls's work has been instrumental in the development of such ideas as luck egalitarianism and unconditional basic income , which have themselves been criticized. The strictly egalitarian quality of Rawls's second principle of justice has called into question

9588-502: 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

9690-454: Was "demoted back to a private ." Disenchanted, he left the military in January 1946. In early 1946, Rawls returned to Princeton to pursue a doctorate in moral philosophy. He married Margaret Warfield Fox, a Brown University graduate, in 1949. They had four children: Anne Warfield , Robert Lee, Alexander Emory, and Elizabeth Fox. Rawls received his PhD from Princeton in 1950 after completing

9792-426: Was a visiting professor at Harvard, and he was appointed in 1960 as a professor in the humanities division at MIT. Two years later, he returned to Harvard as a professor of philosophy, and he remained there until reaching mandatory retirement age in 1991. In 1962, he achieved a tenured position at MIT . That same year, he moved to Harvard University , where he taught for almost forty years and where he trained some of

9894-641: Was accepted into The Ivy Club and the American Whig-Cliosophic Society . At Princeton, Rawls was influenced by Norman Malcolm , Ludwig Wittgenstein 's student. During his last two years at Princeton, he "became deeply concerned with theology and its doctrines." He considered attending a seminary to study for the Episcopal priesthood and wrote an "intensely religious senior thesis ( BI) ." In his 181-page long thesis titled "Meaning of Sin and Faith," Rawls attacked Pelagianism because it "would render

9996-410: 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

10098-569: Was born in Brooklyn to a family of Jewish descent. His mother was born Sophie Cohen, and his father was a Jew from a Russian shtetl who had been born with the name Cohen and who ran a small business. 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

10200-609: Was fatally infected. The next winter, Rawls contracted pneumonia . Another younger brother, Tommy, caught the illness from him and died. Rawls's biographer Thomas Pogge calls the loss of the brothers the "most important events in John's childhood." Rawls graduated in Baltimore before enrolling in the Kent School , an Episcopalian preparatory school in Connecticut . Upon graduation in 1939, Rawls attended Princeton University , where he

10302-492: Was not that of a balancing act that compromised or weakened the moral claim of one value compared with the other. Rather, his intent was to show that notions of freedom and equality could be integrated into a seamless unity he called justice as fairness . By attempting to enhance the perspective which his readers should take when thinking about justice, Rawls hoped to show the supposed conflict between freedom and equality to be illusory. Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) includes

10404-459: Was there that he lost his Christian faith and became an atheist. Following the surrender of Japan, Rawls became part of General MacArthur 's occupying army and was promoted to sergeant. But he became disillusioned with the military when he saw the aftermath of the atomic blast in Hiroshima . Rawls then disobeyed an order to discipline a fellow soldier, "believing no punishment was justified," and

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