Quotes from Robert Nozick

Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Why are philosophers intent on forcing others to believe things? Is that a nice way to behave towards someone?

It is, from another angle, an attack on requiring proof in philosophy. And it's also the case, I guess, that my temperament is to like interesting, new, bold ideas, and to try and generate them.

The trouble with government regulation of the market is that it prohibits capitalistic acts between consenting adults.

From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.

The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.

It's the level that allows us each to live our own chosen lives. But I notice not everyone agrees with the primary importance of that level, and I try to account for how they don't.

Whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process... is entitled to it. The situation is not one of something's getting made, and there being an open question of who is to get it. Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlement over them.

There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past.

What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.

The fact that we don't keep repeating tests in the same arena is not because the probability of the hypothesis showing its falsity in other arenas goes up after it has passed tests in one arena.

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.