Nozick responds forcefully to the contemporary debate on justice raised by the Rawlsian welfarist–egalitarian concept of justice. He argues and advocates entitlement-based justice and rejects Rawls’s distribution criteria. Entitlement theory of justice is grounded in inviolable natural rights theory, which provides a strong basis for liberalism. It treats abilities, merits, skills and talents of individual members of society as if they own them and are inherent in individual persons. By rejecting the criteria of needs of human beings, Nozick advocates the libertarian approach, which treats entitlements or rights based on abilities, merits, skills and talents as the only basis for distribution of resources and rewards. For Nozick, inequality in initial conditions or differential opportunities arises out of different abilities, merits, talents and skills. To mitigate them or to artificially remove them by external intervention amounts to distortion. This, in short, means that ‘self-regulated’ market mechanism of distribution should not be disturbed by state intervention in the name of justice, welfare or redistribution. Morally, a libertarian would argue: this amounts to deciding distribution by introducing external criteria of what is good or just and not what has prevailed in a self-regulated process. He criticizes taxation as a means of income redistribution because this amounts to using abilities, talents, skills and merits of some in society to provide welfare and income transfer to others. A connected issue is related to the nature of the state Nozick supports. He advocates a very thin or minimalist state which means a state which instead of being a welfare or distributionist state, on the contrary should perform very minimal functions suchas ‘protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contract and so on’ and such other common services. This way, he also counters the justification for taxation.
Rawls, however, feels that people have skills, abilities and merits by virtue of socially and naturally acquired advantages. As such, these skills, abilities, merits, etc. should be treated as common assets.44 Rawls argues that these common assets should be distributed based on just principle. For example, it can argued that ‘doctors’ activities are only relevant and socially meaningful in the context of their relationship with their patients and their needs’; teachers are relevant in relationship with their students and their needs and so on. Is it not required then that these skills and activities based on them should be based upon fulfilling these needs irrespective of purchasing power’. Nozick feels that doctors are entitled to a reward of their skills because they are the owners of these skills. He criticizes Rawls’s idea of justice as patterned conception of justice because it imposes a pattern of justice, which is not ‘natural’ but interventionist and imposed.
Nozick put forwards a conception of justice and state that is very narrow and rooted in market philosophy. It assumes that inalienable rights, talents, skills, abilities and merits are possessions of individuals and they have no linkages with the social and economic order. It completely ignores the fact that some groups in society are already privileged, which means they are already ahead compared to many as far as initial conditions and opportunities are concerned. While Rawls would say that distribution of rewards and resources based on these socially and naturally acquired criteria is, in fact, violative of justice, primarily it does not consider the implication as in an original position. Nozick takes the existing inequality as the basis for distribution. He is neither concerned with initial condition differential nor with the outcome. What Nozick advocates (entitlement theory of justice) appears to be a justification for the existing inequality in a class society, market distribution and private property rights.
However, it would be interesting to examine what would be Nozick’s position if the criteria of acquisition, transfer and rectification of wealth is applied in such situations when people earn their wealth through acts of corruption, swindling and even employing child labour and bonded labour. Nozick advocates a theory of market and individualist acquisition and is not able to take into account what would be the solution for those who are physically and mentally unable to compete in the market of abilities, skills and merit. In this, Nozick comes very close to social Darwinism.
We have analysed and explored the minds of some of the thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Bentham, Laski, Barker, Ambedkar, Rawls, Chapman and Nozick on how they treat the subject of justice. Leading perspectives such as Liberal, Legalistic-Juristic, Marxian, Egalitarian and Libertarian have also revealed the variety of treatment that the subject of justice offers.
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