In response, philosophers Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl have argued that Nozick misstated Rand's case.

* Robert Nozick: Criticized Rawls, and argued for libertarianism, by appeal to a hypothetical history of the state and of property.

Most controversially, Nozick argued that a consistent upholding of the non-aggression principle would allow and regard as valid consensual or non-coercive enslavement contracts between adults.

Nozick argued that a minimalist state of property rights and basic law enforcement would develop out of a state of nature without violating anyone's rights or using force.

That some people's " natural assets " were unearned is irrelevant to the equation, according to Nozick, and he argued that people are nevertheless entitled to enjoy these assets and other things freely given by others.

A well-known critique of free-market anarchism is by Robert Nozick, who argued that a competitive legal system would evolve toward a monopoly government – even without violating individuals rights in the process.

Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia argued that a night watchman state provides a framework that allows for any political system that respects fundamental individual rights.

Due to certain counterexamples that could otherwise be raised against these counterfactual conditions, Nozick specified that:

If Y didn't exist, then " fair lady " would have married X ; but Y exists, so she marries Y. Nozick asks: Does suitor X have a legitimate complaint against Y on the basis of unfairness since Y didn't earn his good looks or intelligence?

In opposition to A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, and in debate with Michael Walzer, Nozick argues in favor of a minimal state, " limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on.

Nozick argues that anarcho-capitalism would inevitably transform into a minarchist state, even without violating any of its own non-aggression principles, through the eventual emergence of a single locally dominant private defense and judicial agency that it is in everyone's interests to align with, because other agencies are unable to effectively compete against the advantages of the agency with majority coverage.

Nozick supports the side-constraint view against classical utilitarianism and the idea that only felt experience matters by introducing the famous Experience Machine thought experiment.

An argument similar to D ' Souza's was raised by Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, who wrote that the only way to achieve equality of opportunity was " directly worsening the situations of those more favored with opportunity, or by improving the situation of those less well-favored.

Nozick presses " the major objection " to theories that bestow and enforce positive rights to various things such as equality of opportunity, life, and so on.

" Holdings to which .. people are entitled may not be seized, even to provide equality of opportunity for others " ( Nozick 1974: 235 ).

According to Stephen Metcalf, Nozick expresses serious misgivings about capitalist libertarianism, going so far as to reject much of the foundations of the theory on the grounds that personal freedom can sometimes only be fully actualized via a collectivist politics and that wealth is at times justly redistributed via taxation to protect the freedom of the many from the potential tyranny of an overly selfish and powerful few.

" Nozick on Knowledge ," Collected Papers Vol.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick argues that, while the original position may be the just starting point, any inequalities derived from that distribution by means of free exchange are equally just, and that any re-distributive tax is an infringement on people's liberty.

On the other hand, some epistemologists, including Robert Nozick, have denied closure principles on the basis of reliabilist accounts of knowledge.

"</ ref > Although compatibilism, the view that determinism and free will are not logically incompatible, is the most popular position on free will amongst professional philosophers, metaphysical libertarianism is discussed, though not necessarily endorsed, by several philosophers, such as Peter van Inwagen, Robert Kane, Robert Nozick, Carl Ginet, Hugh McCann, Harry Frankfurt, Alfred Mele, Roderick Chisholm, Daniel Dennett, Timothy O ' Connor, Derk Pereboom and Galen Strawson.

" When a state takes on more responsibilities than these, Nozick argues, rights will be violated.

A discussion of pre-emptive attack leads Nozick to a principle that excludes prohibiting actions not wrong in themselves, even if those actions make more likely the commission of wrongs later on.

Nozick analogizes taxation with forced labor, asking the reader to imagine a man who works longer to gain income to buy a movie ticket and a man who spends his extra time on leisure ( for instance, watching the sunset ).

" Perhaps there is no difference in principle ," Nozick concludes, and notes that the argument could be extended to taxation on other sources besides labor.

Nozick attacks John Rawls's Difference Principle on the ground that the well-off could threaten a lack of social cooperation to the worse-off, just as Rawls implies that the worse-off will be assisted by the well-off for the sake of social cooperation.

Furthermore, Rawls's idea regarding morally arbitrary natural endowments comes under fire ; Nozick argues that natural advantages that the well-off enjoy do not violate anyone's rights and therefore have a right to them, on top of which is the fact that Rawls's own proposal that inequalities be geared toward assisting the worse-off is in itself morally arbitrary.

Murray Rothbard, a libertarian but unlike Nozick an anarcho-capitalist, criticizes Anarchy, State, and Utopia in his essay " Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State " on the basis that:

# Therefore Nozick, on his own grounds, should become an anarchist and then wait for the Nozickian invisible hand to operate afterward ; and

In Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, Rawls notes that Nozick assumes that just transactions are " justice preserving " in much the same way that logical operations are " truth preserving ".

Leff stated that Nozick built his entire book on the bald assertion that " individuals have rights which may not be violated by other individuals ", for which no justification is offered.

" Nozick cites Patterns of Discovery from pp. 119 – 120, quoting " Though the X ( color, heat, and so on ) of an object can be explained in terms of its being composed of parts of certain X-quality ( colors in certain array, average heat of parts, and so on ), the whole realm of X cannot be explained or understood in this manner.

Nozick instead argues that people who have or produce certain things have rights over them: " on an entitlement view, and distribution are not .. separate questions .. things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them " ( Nozick 1974: 160 ).

He is author of Elements of Justice ( Cambridge, 2006 ), Rational Choice and Moral Agency ( Princeton, 1995 ), co-author of Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility ( Cambridge, a “ For & Against ” book with Robert Goodin ) and editor of a volume on Robert Nozick in the Cambridge University Press " Contemporary Philosophy in Focus " series.

Nozick suggests that there is no grounds for complaint.

Nozick believes that unjustly taking someone's holdings violates their rights.

** Natural rights theories, such that of John Locke or Robert Nozick, which hold that human beings have absolute, natural rights.

" Nozick suggested, as a critique of Rawls and utilitarianism, that the sacrosanctity of life made property rights non-negotiable, such that an individual's personal liberty made state policies of redistribution illegitimate.

As a resolution of this apparent paradox and in defiance of Hohfeld, Robert Nozick asserted that there are no positive civil rights, only rights to property and the right of autonomy.

However, the rights that Nozick takes to be fundamental and the basis for regarding them to be such are different from the equal basic liberties included in justice as fairness and Rawls conjectures that they are thus not inalienable.

Moreover, they assert that what really matters for assigning ownership is whether or not property was acquired or exchanged legally ( see Robert Nozick ), which is known as the historical entitlement theory, whereas Marxists assert that there are no property rights in the means of production.

No one has a right to something whose realization requires certain uses of things and activities that other people have rights and entitlements over " ( Nozick 1974: 238 ).

The Steiner-Vallentyne school of left-libertarianism takes a distinctive position regarding the issue that Robert Nozick calls the “ original acquisition of holdings .” That is the question of how property rights came about in the first place, and how property was originally acquired.