The entitlement theory

Nozick's theory of distributive justice is very different from Rawls'. He calls his view of distributive justice an “entitlement theory” of justice.

1.      A person who acquires property in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.

2.      A person who acquires property in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding.

3.      A person who acquires property in accordance with the principle of rectification of holdings is entitled to that property.

4.      No one is entitled to property except by (repeated) applica­tions of 1, 2, and 3.

The principle of justice in acquisition tells you what entitles you to come to possess something that does not already belong to any­body else; the principle of justice in transfer tells you what enti­tles you to possess something that used to be owned by somebody else; and the principle of rectification of holdings tells you how you can become entitled to something because someone else got it from you in violation of justice in acquisition or transfer. Nozick's treatment of these principles is rather sketchy, but he does say enough to suggest a plausible line of objection.

We can begin by asking what consequences Nozick draws from the fact that an action would violate somebody's rights.

If that is so, and given his entitlement theory, he is committed to some fairly surprising claims about what anyone, let alone a government, can do. Thus, for example, suppose you are entitled to the drugs in your medicine cabinet—you got them justly from someone who was entitled to them—and they are the only drugs in town that can save a child with a serious biochemical disorder. You are out of town. If respect for property rights constitutes a side-con­straint on action, then it would be wrong for anyone, including a judge, to order that the drugs be taken and used to save the child without your consent. The child has no right to the drug, nor has the judge. In a minimal state the child would have to be allowed to die in order not to offend against property rights. It won't do to say that the child has a right to life, which we would be ignoring if we respected your property rights, as Nozick himself points out.

A right to life is not a right to whatever one needs to live; other people may have rights over these other things. At most, a right to life would be the right to strive for whatever one needs to live, provided that having it does not violate anyone else's rights.

(Along with, of course, the right not to be killed when you pose no threat to others.)

This objection to Nozick's view was raised by the American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson. It is a crucial objection because it undermines one of the most startling claims that Nozick makes in his book, which is that any taxation which is intended to even out inequalities in resources—any purely redistributive taxation—is morally indefensible.

Thomson points out also that Nozick is not entirely consistent in his application of the idea of rights as side-constraints. Thus she observes that when he is discussing the rights of animals, Nozick leaves open the possibility that we can “save 10,000 animals from excruciating suffering by inflicting some slight discomfort” on an innocent person. But if innocent people have a right not to have to endure discomfort against their will, and this right is a side-con­straint on our actions, then we ought never to consider saving these animals (provided not saving them does not infringe on their animal rights). If rights are side-constraints, then they cannot be violated to achieve otherwise desirable goals. This makes them, in effect, as Thomson says, infinitely stringent: that is, no moral consideration, however weighty (apart, perhaps, from another right) will justify overriding a person's rights to their property.

This wobbling in the degree of stringency of rights... makes it very unclear just how Nozick is to get from his starting point, which is that we have rights, to his thesis that a government which imposes taxes for the purpose of redistri­bution violates the rights of its citizens.... [For] surely it is plain as day that property rights are not infinitely stringent.

lang=EN-US style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height: 112%'>And if they are not infinitely stringent, Nozick has lost the basis of his claim that only the minimal state can be morally justified. For it is the infinite stringency of property rights that restricts the state's justifiable uses of taxation to the support of the limited tasks that Nozick allows.

This is only the beginning of a discussion of Nozick's work, which includes, not incidentally, some very interesting applications of game theory. But it does suggest that Nozick would need to offer more arguments before we should accept his claim that our funda­mental rights include rights to use our property that cannot be over­ridden by any other moral purpose. That is, perhaps, a good thing: if Nozick were right, every state in the present world would be in serious violation of its citizens' rights, just because it uses tax rev­enue to pay for education!

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