Category: Robert Nozik

Is It Fantasy That a Happy Life is All About Pleasant Experiences?

7/11/2016

A guest post by Winton Bates of Freedom and Flourishing:

It seems to me that the view that a happy life is just about pleasant experiences is a fantasy. I’m not saying that it is not desirable to have a life full of pleasant experiences, just that a happy life involves more than that.

In his famous thought experiment, Robert Nozick asked readers to imagine an experience machine that would give them any experience they desired. They would be able to select experiences from a large library and the machine would be pre-programmed to give them those experiences while they spent the rest of their lives floating in a tank (Anarchy, State and Utopia, 1971, pp 42-44).

Would you choose to spend the rest of your life hooked up to such a machine?

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Why We Desperately Need Rights-Based Ethics

3/4/2014

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Natural rights based morality is the core position on which I base some of my commentary here at Common Sense Ethics. It is important to clarify exactly what natural rights are, and what types of actions they compel us to refrain from morally speaking.

The classical concept of natural rights is more or less synonymous with the concept of human rights or moral rights. Rights are essentially claims against others to be treated in certain ways.Natural rights differ from conventional rights, which are rights created by people in a social, legal or political context.

Normative ethics, also called moral theory, is broad field of philosophical study about how we should live or behave. Natural Rights based ethics represents a cohesive and common sense normative position which upholds a necessary respect for human dignity.

We have natural or moral rights by virtue of being human. For this reason, natural rights are sometimes referred to as inalienable or absolute. Human beings have dignity, and thus we all have the inherent right not to be killed, raped, coerced, or stolen from.

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What Everyone Needs to Know About Violence and Self-Defense

11/30/2013

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In my experience, many people do not have a well thought out position regarding interpersonal violence and self defense. The prevalent attitude seems to vary between two extremes; a naive type of pacifism on one hand, or a let's get em’ type of aggression on the other. Both positions are unreasonable in different ways.

This post provides a deeper examination of the ethics of violence and self defense.
I explain why neither pro-aggression positions or naive pacifist positions on the ethics of violence are ideal, and I posit a third approach, non-aggression, which I argue is the most ethical. When properly understood, non-aggression and forceful self-defense are not morally incompatible.

A corollary is that Most Westerners who believe in extreme pacifism when it comes to individual self defense do so naively. Very few people, even some thinkers credited with advocating for extreme pacifism for political purposes, actually believe in it on an individual level. A careful study reveals that Thoreau, and Martin Luther King, and at least one Buddhist sect, advocate individual self-defensive force as moral, necessary and courageous. Even Ghandi, who is not typically a reasonable pacifist, has moments where he admits to the necessity of self defense for individuals, particularly for those who aren't spiritually committed to self-immolation as he is.

This makes sense, of course, because the need for self defense will persist until everyone in the world non-aggressive. Therefore, the most pragmatic and ethical position is one of conscious non-initiation of violence, which at the same time does not preclude forceful self-defense if necessary.

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