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Robert Nozick: Society
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Robert Nozick has taken a rather extraordinarily sensible approach to answering the question, "What is justice?" Many before him have suggested that justice is equality of economic outcome; others, that justice is whatever is best for society as a whole. Nozick argues for a theory founded on the principle that all human beings have absolute rights to their person and to the fruits of their labors. His view of the role of government, that the only reason a government might have the right to coerce its citizens is for the protection and defense of the state, fits well with his idea of absolute rights.
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Nozick illustrates and defends the entitlement theory in a famous thought-experiment involving the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain. Imagine a society in which the distribution of wealth fits a particular structure or pattern favored by a non-entitlement conception of justice - suppose, to keep things simple, that it is an equal distribution, and call it D1. Nozick's opponent must of course grant that this distribution is just, since Nozick has allowed the opponent himself to determine it. Now suppose that among the members of this society is Wilt Chamberlain, and that he has as a condition of his contract with his team that he will play only if each person coming to see the game puts twenty-five cents into a special box at the gate of the sports arena, the contents of which will go to him. Suppose further that over the course of the season, one million fans decide to pay the twenty-five cents to watch him play. The result will be a new distribution, D2, in which Chamberlain now has $250,000, much more than anyone else - a distribution which thereby breaks the original pattern established in D1. Now, is D2 just?
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Nozick formulated his position as a two-edged argument. Against anarchism - the position of a very small minority in American society - he argued that a minimal state, enforcing strictly limited laws, is not an undue infringement on personal rights. Against all advocates of a "welfare state" he argued that government has no right to do many of the things that most people today expect government to do.
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