Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Nozick

Nozick smuggles a lot into the cool, biological packaging of “do better.” The line reads like a neutral observation about evolution, but its real work is political: it reframes cooperation as a competitive advantage rather than a moral demand. In other words, you don’t have to believe in altruism, solidarity, or lofty civic virtue to get to social order. Natural selection can do the persuading.

That’s a very Nozick move. As a libertarian philosopher best known for arguing that justice is about rights and voluntary exchange, he’s wary of coercive stories that treat society as one big moral project. By grounding cooperation in survival and reproduction, he offers an account of why people might reliably form agreements, respect certain norms, and build institutions without invoking a thick vision of the common good. Cooperation isn’t sanctified; it’s strategic. You can hear the subtext: if cooperation emerges because it benefits individuals, then forced “cooperation” via the state looks less like progress and more like category error.

The context matters, too. Late-20th-century philosophy was in constant dialogue with game theory, sociobiology, and the lingering aftershocks of mid-century collectivisms. Nozick’s sentence nods to that interdisciplinary zeitgeist while keeping his ideological distance. It concedes something communitarians want (humans flourish together) but on terms that protect his core commitment: individuals don’t owe society their autonomy just because cooperation is useful.