The Reply to Rawls

Rawls asked what principles you would choose for a society if you did not know who in it you would be. The veil of ignorance produces a strong case for arranging inequalities so that they benefit the worst off, and it is covered in Power & Society.

In 1974 Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and made an objection that changed the shape of the argument.

The objection is that Rawls is looking at the wrong thing. He examines distributions: who ends up with what, and how the shape of that compares to some standard. Nozick says justice is not about the shape. It is about how the shape came about.

If everybody acquired what they hold justly, and every transfer since was voluntary, then the resulting distribution is just, however unequal it looks. And if it is not just, that must be because somewhere in the history there was a theft, a fraud, or a coercion. Look at the history, not the photograph.

Then the example that everybody remembers.

Start from whatever distribution you consider perfectly fair. Design it yourself; Nozick does not care what it is. Now a million people each decide to pay a small amount to watch one man play basketball, because they would rather have the game than the coin.

He is now much richer than everybody else, and your distribution is gone.

Nobody was wronged. Every transfer was voluntary, each person preferred what they got to what they gave, and at no point did anybody do anything you could object to. So either the new distribution is just, or a distribution can become unjust through a series of steps none of which was unjust.

Liberty upsets patterns. That is the slogan and it does real work: any distribution you want to hold in place has to be held there, continuously, against what people freely choose to do with what they have. Maintaining a pattern is not a one-time act of justice but a permanent programme of interference.

From this Nozick argues for the minimal state: protection against force, theft and fraud, and the enforcement of contracts. Anything beyond that violates the rights the state was created to protect.

Now the weak point, and it is fatal enough that stating it plainly is more useful than either defending or attacking the whole position.

The entitlement theory has three parts: just acquisition, just transfer, and rectification of past injustice. The second is fine. The third exists because Nozick knew he needed it. The first is the problem.

Almost nothing anybody holds on earth has a clean history if you follow it back far enough. Land was taken. Wealth was built on labour that was not freely given. The chain of voluntary transfers, traced backwards, reaches an acquisition that nobody would call just, in essentially every case that matters.

Nozick is explicit that this means large-scale rectification would be required, and equally explicit that he does not know how to calculate it.

So the honest summary is this. His question, how did this holding arise, is genuinely missing from a purely distributive view and deserves an answer. His own starting point cannot be met by any actual society. And the real disagreement between these two positions is not about the principles at all.

It is about what to do when the historical record fails both of them.