I concluded my previous post by stating without qualification that Nozick “totally demolished” Rawls’s difference principle, i.e. Rawls’s claim that social and economic inequalities are only just if they work to the advantage of the least-advantaged members of society. In truth, I undersold Nozick: Nozick demolished not just Rawls but all egalitarian theories of distributive justice. How did Nozick accomplish this feat? By launching an intellectually-lethal pincer attack against equality-based theories of distributive justice in Chapter 7 of his book-length reply to Rawls, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU). On one flank is Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain Argument; on other the flank is Nozick’s notion of non-negotiable Side Constraints.

By way of background, both flanks of this powerful pincer are grounded in Nozick’s distinction between (a) so-called distributive justice, which are based on patterns or end-states, and (b) what Nozick himself calls “justice in holdings”. As Nozick points out, theories of distributive justice, like Rawls’s difference principle, focus on patterns or end-states in which “all that needs to be looked at, in judging the justice of a distribution, is who ends up with what.” (ASU, p. 154) Nozick’s “justice in holdings”, by contrast, is not a matter of patterns or end-states; it is a purely historical question, or more simply put, “whether a distribution is just depends upon how it came about.” (ASU, p. 153) For Nozick, a given distribution of goods will be just so long as the initial acquisition of goods and their subsequent transfer are themselves just, even if people end up with shares of different or unequal sizes.

With this fundamental distinction in mind, let’s return to Nozick’s pincer attack. On one flank, Nozick shows how all theories of distributive justice share the same flaw: they erroneously assume that a large-enough economic pie of goodies already exists to give away, but in reality, the ingredients of the pie first have to be assembled and the pie then has to be baked before it can be sliced up and shared with others. As such, the problem with Rawls’s difference principle — and with other “patterned” or end-state approaches to justice, for that matter, such as “distribute according to moral merit” or “distribute according to usefulness to society” — is that Rawls and his fellow progressives focus exclusively on the question of distribution (who gets what?), while neglecting the equally-important question of production (who makes what?).

But the main problem with Rawls’s difference principle and with other such patterned or end-state theories of justice is that Rawls and company have nothing to say about just deserts. According to Nozick, “Most persons do not accept current time-slice [i.e. end-state] principles as constituting the whole story about distributive shares. They think it relevant in assessing the justice of a situation to consider not only the distribution it embodies, but also how that distribution came about.” (ASU, p. 154, emphasis added) But for Nozick, history (and maybe even public opinion!) matters: “The situation is not one of something’s getting made, and there being an open question of who is to get it.” (ASU, p. 160, emphasis in original) In the real world — that is, beyond the erudite pages of scholarly tomes like Rawls’s Theory of Justice — “Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them.” (Ibid.)

Enter Wilt Chamberlain. (To be continued …)