Nozick further claims this condition addresses a case of the sort described by D. M. Armstrong: A father believes his son innocent of committing a particular crime, both because of faith in his son and ( now ) because he has seen presented in the courtroom a conclusive demonstration of his son's innocence.

Nozick believes that philosophers are really more modest than that and aware of their works ' weaknesses.

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

Like Locke, Nozick believes in self-ownership and thus is a libertarian.

* Robert Nozick suggests knowledge must consist of justified true belief that is " truth-tracking "— belief held in such a way that if it turned out to be false it would not have been held, and vice versa ;

Nozick suggested a " truth tracking " theory of knowledge, in which the x was said to know P if x's belief in P tracked the truth of P through the relevant modal scenarios.

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.

Responsiveness is defined for empirical knowledge by a reformulation of Robert Nozick ’ s tracking conditions — for example: if p were false, then S wouldn ’ t believe p — using conditional probability instead of counterfactuals.

Thus, entitlement theory would imply " a distribution is just if everyone is entitled to the holdings they possess under the distribution " ( Nozick 1974: 151 ).

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 ).

Nozick created the thought experiment of the " utility monster " to show that average utilitarianism could lead to a situation where the needs of the vast majority were sacrificed for one individual.

Robert Nozick suggested a clarification of " justification " which he believed eliminates the problem: the justification has to be such that were the justification false, the knowledge would be false.

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.

Previous holders of the chair were Robert Nozick, a philosopher, and Edward O. Wilson, the biologist, who is currently Pellegrino University Research Professor ( an emeritus professor ).

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.

However Nozick argues that D2 is just.

Thus Nozick argues that what the Wilt Chamberlain example shows is that no patterned principle of just distribution will be compatible with liberty.

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.

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 ".

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.

However, the original discussion by Nozick says only that the Predictor's predictions are " almost certainly " correct, and also specifies that " what you actually decide to do is not part of the explanation of why he made the prediction he made ".

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.

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

Unusually for a law professor without a graduate degree in philosophy, he has published significant work in moral and political theory only indirectly related to the law ; Right and Wrong, for instance is an impressive general statement of a Kantian position in ethics with affinities with the work of Thomas Nagel, John Rawls, and Robert Nozick.

Philosophers in moral theory and rhetoric had taken defeasibility largely for granted when American epistemologists rediscovered Wittgenstein's thinking on the subject: John Ladd, Roderick Chisholm, Roderick Firth, Ernest Sosa, Robert Nozick, and John L. Pollock all began writing with new conviction about how appearance as red was only a defeasible reason for believing something to be red.

However, it was first analyzed and was published in a philosophy paper spread to the philosophical community by Robert Nozick in 1969, and appeared in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column in 1974.

What, Nozick asks, is the difference between seizing the second man's leisure ( which would be forced labor ) and seizing the first man's goods?

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.

" Nozick gave an argument of two suitors competing to marry one " fair lady ": X was plain ; Y was better looking and more intelligent.

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

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.

" As the most powerful applier of principles which it grants everyone the right to apply correctly ," Nozick concludes, the dominant protection agency " enforces its will, which, from the inside, it thinks is correct.

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.

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?

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.

Nozick asks why the well-off would be obliged, due to their inequality and for the sake of social cooperation, to assist the worse-off and not have the worse-off accept the inequality and benefit the well-off.

Nozick appealed to the Kantian idea that people should be treated as ends ( what he termed ' separateness of persons '), not merely as a means to some other end.

Nozick thus challenged the partial conclusion of John Rawls's Second Principle of Justice of his A Theory of Justice, that " social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to be of greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society.

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

Nozick suggests that citizens opposed to wealth redistribution that funds programs they object to should be able to opt out by supporting alternative government approved charities with an added 5 % surcharge.

Nozick says no, then asks whether we have reasons not to plug into the machine and concludes that since it does not seem to be rational to plug in, ethical hedonism must be false.

Nozick, in Philosophical Explanations, advocated that, when considering the Gettier problem, the least counter-intuitive assumption we give up should be epistemic closure.

Robert Nozick made the point that what happens in society can not always be reduced to competitions for a coveted position ; in 1974, Nozick wrote that " life is not a race in which we all compete for a prize which someone has established " and that there is " no unified race " and there is not some one person " judging swiftness.

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

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

Nor does Nozick provide any means or theory whereby abuses of appropriation — acquisition of property when there is not enough and as good in common for others — should be corrected.

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.

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.