View source for The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations/position

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[[Category:Robert Nozick]]
[[Category:Anarchy, State, and Utopia]]
[[Category:The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations]]
[[Category:Libertarian Admissions]]
[[Category:Democracy]]
[[Category:Institutions]]
{{Quote
| text = We want our individual lives to express our conceptions of reality (and of responsiveness to that); so too we want the institutions demarcating our lives together to express and saliently symbolize our desired mutual relations. Democratic institutions and the liberties coordinate with them are not simply effective means toward controlling the powers of government and directing these toward matters of joint concern; they themselves express and symbolize, in a pointed and official way, our equal human dignity, our autonomy and powers of self-direction. We vote, although we are cognizant of the minuscule probability that our own actual vote will have some decisive effect on the outcome, in part as an expression and symbolic affirmation of our status as autonomous and self-governing beings whose considered judgments or even opinions have to be given weight equal to those of others. That symbolism is important to us. Within the operation of democratic institutions, too, we want expressions of the values that concern us and bind us together. <b>The libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate</b>, in part because it did not fully knit the humane considerations and joint cooperative activities it left room for more closely into its fabric. It neglected the symbolic importance of an official political concern with issues or problems, as a way of marking their importance or urgency, and hence of expressing, intensifying, channeling, encouraging, and validating our private actions and concerns toward them. Joint goals that the government ignores completely -- it is different with private or family goals -- tend to appear unworthy of our joint attention and hence to receive little. <b>There are some things we choose to do together through government in solemn marking of our human solidarity</b>, served by the fact that we do them together in this official fashion and often also by the content of the action itself.
| cite = [[Robert Nozick]], "{{Link |The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations}}", pp. 286-287. [Bolding added.]
}}