 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Robert Nozick |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Belknap Press of Harvard University Press |
Publication date | 2001 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 416 |
| ISBN | 0-674-00631-3 |
Invariances is a 2001 book by American philosopher Robert Nozick, his last book before his death in 2002.
In the introduction, Nozick assumes "orthodox quantum mechanics" and draws inferences from it about indeterminism and nonlocality. He deprecates Bohm's formulation and ignores other no-collapse theories.
The book is divided into sections, each comprising several chapters, bearing the following titles.
Nozick holds that relativism about truth is a coherent position, and he explores the possibility that it is true. A set of truths T contains relative truths if the members of T are true and there is a factor F which can vary such that the truth value of the members of T varies. The truth or falsity of the members of T is a function of F (as well as of meaning, reference, and the way the world is). For instance, variation in gender (F) might affect the truth value of statements (T) not "explicitly about" gender.
Nozick argues that the timelessness of truth is a contentful empirical claim that might turn out to be false. A deflationary tack towards putative philosophical necessities such as this timelessness of truth, attempting to convert them into empirical issues, is a salient feature of the book. He takes the topic of truth to be the topic of what "determinately holds" ("A timeless truth that floats free of determinateness is a nonscience fiction") and appeals to quantum mechanics to show that there are problems about timeless truth as understood through determinateness. For instance, he claims QM "on the usual interpretation" undermines the idea that an event E's being determinate at an earlier time implies that it's determinate at all later times that E occurred at the earlier time. Truth is relative to space and time. He dubs his view "the Copenhagen Interpretation of Truth".
Nozick identifies three strands to the notion of an objective fact/truth.
More fundamental than these three is invariance: An objective fact is invariant under various transformations. For instance, space-time 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 is skeptical about the extent and status of necessary truth. He maintains that there are no interesting metaphysical necessities, and even logical and mathematical truths are not ontological necessities. The apparent necessity of various statements is a product of various modes of representation.
Towards identifying the function of consciousness, Nozick distinguishes seven increasing gradations of awareness that correlate with and explain graduated capacity to fit behavior to aspects of situations.
Nozick's last book, Invariances, pursues a theme begun in The Nature of Rationality that he calls the genealogy of ethics, in contrast to a justificatory account. It identifies coordination of activity for mutual benefit as the evolutionary source and function of ethics. He focuses on a time frame that starts with our hunter-gatherer ancestors, though he reckons a genealogy could go down the nonexistent evolutionary ladder indefinitely (to the cooperation of genes on the chromosome, etc.). He contrasts his genealogical project with David Gauthier's justificatory account in several respects. One of these is that Nozick does not take cooperation to mutual advantage to be the whole of ethics; rather, he includes other layers as well. He sketched these in The Examined Life as a four-layer structure. Its fundamental layer is the Ethic of Respect, essentially the deontological ethic of individual rights defended in Anarchy, State, and Utopia as well as in Invariances, where it becomes the functional "core" of ethics. Evolution has selected us to abhor doing certain things to others and to abhor having those things done to ourselves, and this abhorrence gets systematized in groups of mutual benefit by moral codes that protect individual rights and duties.
An Ethic of Responsiveness builds on the fundamental layer, allowing some rights restrictions in accordance with a principle of "minimum mutilation" to the rights being restricted, in order to respond adequately to some higher value. A school tax would be an example, restricting property rights but not outrageously, in order to respond to the worthy value of an educated citizenry. The next layer in this subsumption architecture is the Ethic of Care, ranging over affective dispositions and correlative rights/duties ranging from equal concern and respect for other human beings to love for members of one's family. This layer too is built in accordance with the principle of minimum mutilation, pursuing its higher goals with as little damage as possible to Respect and Responsiveness. The final layer is the Ethic of Light, the ethic of saints and heroes which builds upon the others by one's becoming a selfless vehicle of goodness. Nozick leaves as an open empirical question whether moral progress with regard to the abolition of slavery, women's rights, the civil rights movement, and gay rights has been propelled by the perception of mutual benefit or the higher layers of ethics. He is against the coercive enforceability of the higher moral goals; their attainment should be left to "individual choice and development". This fits with his attempt to remain true to his libertarian roots, but his new commitment to democracy implies a more or less considerable democratic exploration of higher goals. In The Examined Life he celebrates the "zigzag" of democratic politics through the values coercively enforced by different elected parties. Assuming that participating in a democratic decision procedure engages one's individual choice and development even when voting in the minority, perhaps because participating expresses one's belonging to a social union or we, the four-layer structure demands a very flexible libertarianism.
Writing in the New York Review of Books , philosopher Colin McGinn gave Invariances a mostly negative review, praising "Nozick's clear expositions of such a broad range of scientific matters" but ultimately criticized the book for being "philosophically thin". [1]
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior". The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value; these fields comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology.
In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, and meaning of moral judgment. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.
Objectivism is a philosophical system developed by Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. She described it as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute".
Robert Nozick 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 books Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971), in which Nozick also presented his own theory of utopia as one in which people can freely choose the rules of the society they enter into, and Philosophical Explanations (1981), which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge. His 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.
In ethics and the social sciences, value theory involves various approaches that examine how, why, and to what degree humans value things and whether the object or subject of valuing is a person, idea, object, or anything else. Within philosophy, it is also known as ethics or axiology.
Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. There are many different forms of relativism, with a great deal of variation in scope and differing degrees of controversy among them. Moral relativism encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures. Epistemic relativism holds that there are no absolute principles regarding normative belief, justification, or rationality, and that there are only relative ones. Alethic relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture. Some forms of relativism also bear a resemblance to philosophical skepticism. Descriptive relativism seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the word truthfulness of views within a given framework.
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This Index of ethics articles puts articles relevant to well-known ethical debates and decisions in one place - including practical problems long known in philosophy, and the more abstract subjects in law, politics, and some professions and sciences. It lists also those core concepts essential to understanding ethics as applied in various religions, some movements derived from religions, and religions discussed as if they were a theory of ethics making no special claim to divine status.
Applied philosophy is a branch of philosophy that studies philosophical problems of practical concern. The topic covers a broad spectrum of issues in environment, medicine, science, engineering, policy, law, politics, economics and education. The term was popularised in 1982 by the founding of the Society for Applied Philosophy by Brenda Almond, and its subsequent journal publication Journal of Applied Philosophy edited by Elizabeth Brake. Methods of applied philosophy are similar to other philosophical methods including questioning, dialectic, critical discussion, rational argument, systematic presentation, thought experiments and logical argumentation.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a 1974 book by the American political philosopher Robert Nozick. It won the 1975 US National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion, has been translated into 11 languages, and was named one of the "100 most influential books since the war" (1945–1995) by the UK Times Literary Supplement.
Ethical intuitionism is a view or family of views in moral epistemology. It is foundationalism applied to moral knowledge, the thesis that some moral truths can be known non-inferentially. Such an epistemological view is by definition committed to the existence of knowledge of moral truths; therefore, ethical intuitionism implies cognitivism.
Moral nihilism is the meta-ethical view that nothing is morally right or morally wrong.
John Mitchell Finnis is an Australian legal philosopher and jurist specializing in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. He is an original interpreter of Aristotle and Aquinas, and counts Germain Grisez as a major influence and collaborator. He has made contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy.
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"Instrumental" and "value rationality" are terms scholars use to identify two ways individuals act in order to optimize their behavior. Instrumental rationality recognizes means that "work" efficiently to achieve ends. Value rationality recognizes ends that are "right," legitimate in themselves.
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Secular ethics is a branch of moral philosophy in which ethics is based solely on human faculties such as logic, empathy, reason or moral intuition, and not derived from belief in supernatural revelation or guidance—a source of ethics in many religions. Secular ethics refers to any ethical system that does not draw on the supernatural, and includes humanism, secularism and freethinking. A classical example of literature on secular ethics is the Kural text, authored by the ancient Indian philosopher Valluvar.
Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology is a 1970 book by Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod, interpreting the processes of evolution to show that life is only the result of natural processes by "pure chance". The basic tenet of this book is that systems in nature with molecular biology, such as enzymatic biofeedback loops, can be explained without having to invoke final causality.
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Matthew Henry Kramer is an American philosopher, currently Professor of Legal and Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He writes mainly in the areas of metaethics, normative ethics, legal philosophy, and political philosophy. He is a leading proponent of legal positivism. He has been Director of the Cambridge Forum for Legal and Political Philosophy since 2000. He has been teaching at Cambridge University and at Churchill College since 1994.