The
philosopher Robert Nozick presents a libertarian statement of the theory of justice
that he calls the entitlement theory in the book Anarchy, State and
Utopia (1974). Nozick's principles of justice are historical principles that
take into account the process by which a distribution came about rather than
the nonhistorical or end-state principles (such as those in
utilitarianism and Rawls’s theory) that evaluate a distribution with regard to
certain structural features at a given time. In addition, Nozick's principles of justice are not patterned, inasmuch as
patterned principles evaluate a distribution according to the presence or
absence of that feature. Nozick contends that any particular pattern of distribution can be
maintained only by continuously interfering in people’s lives and hence
violating the right to liberty. This is the point of the argument about
Wilt Chamberlain.
The
entitlement theory states that "a distribution is just if everyone is
entitled to the holdings they possess." An expression of the
non-patterned entitlement theory in patterned form is, “From each as they
choose, to each as they are chosen.” People are entitled to their
holdings if the holdings were obtained by one of the following three
principles:
1.
The principle of just transfer.
2. The principle of just original acquisition.
3.
The principle of rectification.
The
original acquisition of a holding is just as long as it does not violate anyone
else’s rights. (Note the discussion in the text of the Lockean Proviso.) Transfers are just as long as they result
from purely voluntary exchanges, provided that all preceding transfers
were just reaching back to a just original acquisition. However, a
principle of rectification is necessary to correct injustices in transfers and
original acquisitions.
Justice and free markets according to Nozick
The
market system is just because it protects individual rights better than any
other economic system. The point of justice, for Nozick,
is to protect rights, not to promote human well-being or to achieve equality,
and a largely unregulated free market system, with only the absolute minimum of
government intervention, protects rights best. However, Nozick
fails to support his major assumption that liberty, understood as the
unhindered exercise of property rights, is a paramount value. In
addition, not all restrictions of liberty are due to interference by the
state; individuals are sometimes restricted by the choices of others. The
conditions for just original acquisitions and just transfers are often absent,
and most distributions have been affected at some point in time by forced
takings which have never been rectified in accord with the principle of
rectification.
