Robert Nozick: Personal

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

Robert Nozick book Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Preface, p. ix
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
Context: Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?

Personality

“A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.”

Robert Nozick book Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Source: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 151
Context: 1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.
2. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding.
3. No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications of 1 and 2.

Justice , Personality

“What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus.”

Robert Nozick book Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Source: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Ch. 1 : Why State of Nature Theory?; Political Philosophy, p. 6
Context: Some anarchists have claimed not merely that we would be better off without a state, but that any state necessarily violates people's moral rights and hence is intrinsically immoral. Our starting point then, though nonpolitical, is by intention far from nonmoral. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus.

Personality

“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 that constitute the membership of both houses of Congress?”

Robert Nozick

Source: (1974), Ch. 2 : The State of Nature; Protective Associations, p. 14

People , Search , Housing , Personality

“Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited, to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified, but any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right.”

Robert Nozick

Preface, p. ix
(1974)

Fraud , Personality

“It goes without saying that any persons may attempt to unite kindred spirits, but, whatever their hopes and longings, none have the right to impose their vision of unity upon the rest.”

Robert Nozick

Source: (1974), Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework as Utopian Common Ground, p. 325

Hope , Personality