Position
Entitlement Theory
A distribution is just when holdings arise through just acquisition and voluntary transfer, not when they fit a preferred pattern.
Classification
- Position level
- specific
- Domains
- Political Philosophy
Overview
Nozick's argument is that justice in holdings is historical: what matters is how a distribution came about, not what shape it has. If people acquired what they hold justly and transferred it by consent, the resulting distribution is just however unequal it looks, and no independent pattern — equality, need, desert — has standing to override it.
The Wilt Chamberlain case is the engine of the argument. Begin from whatever distribution you consider just, let a large number of people each freely pay a small sum to watch one man play, and the pattern is gone. Since every step was voluntary, restoring the pattern would mean interfering continuously with what people do with holdings that were, by hypothesis, already justly theirs.
Position on
Incompatible positions
- Rawls's Difference Principle
Question scope: Distributive Justice
- Utilitarian Distribution
Question scope: Distributive Justice
References
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, chapter 7
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), ch. 7 §II, which argues against Rawls that no patterned principle can be maintained without violating the just transfers that produced a holding
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), ch. 7 §I, which rejects end-state principles, of which maximizing aggregate welfare is one, in favour of a purely historical criterion