Examine the entitlement theory of justice. (2022, 15 Marks)
Robert Nozick‘s entitlement theory, set out in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), is the libertarian reply to John Rawls. Justice depends on how holdings came about, not on the pattern they form; if people hold what they hold by just means, the state has no title to redistribute it.
The theory
- Foundations: “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).” Rights are side constraints, grounded in self-ownership: owning oneself, one owns one’s powers and what one justly makes with them.
- Three principles: justice in acquisition (taking what is unowned), justice in transfer (voluntary exchange and gift), and rectification of violations of the first two. Whatever arises by just steps from a just start is just.
- Lockean proviso: acquisition must not worsen others’ position; seizing the only water hole in a desert and charging what one likes violates it.
- Historical and unpatterned: rules such as the difference principle judge a snapshot. Nozick’s formula is “From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.”
- Wilt Chamberlain: from any just distribution, fans freely paying to watch Chamberlain make him rich. Liberty upsets patterns, so inequality from free transfer is not unjust.
- Consequences: only a minimal state is legitimate, and “taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.” Like Friedrich A. Hayek, Nozick distrusts social justice as a state project.
Examining the theory
- Rectification cuts both ways. Nozick accepts that history is full of unjust acquisition but gives no rule for how far back to go. Colonial dispossession and caste exclusion demand redress, and he even allowed patterned principles as rough rules of thumb for rectification, which could license more redistribution than Rawls.
- Initial acquisition is the weak point. G. A. Cohen (Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, 1995) showed the proviso’s baseline is arbitrary; Thomas Nagel (“Libertarianism without Foundations”, 1975) found no argument for the rights themselves.
- Bias to the propertied. The theory treats the fortunate as owing nothing to the society that made their gains possible, and every property system limits the non-owner’s liberty too.
- Amartya Sen showed that famines can occur with no property right violated, which an outcome-blind theory cannot condemn.
- In The Examined Life (1989) Nozick called his earlier view “seriously inadequate”, though he later said he had not abandoned libertarianism altogether.
Indian anchor
- The 44th Amendment (1978) moved property out of Part III to Article 300A, a choice against strict entitlement.
- Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra (5 November 2024) held that not every private resource is a “material resource of the community” under Article 39(b), rejecting V. R. Krishna Iyer J’s expansive reading.
- The Forest Rights Act, 2006, undoing a “historical injustice” to forest dwellers, is rectification in redistributive form.
Conclusion
The entitlement theory is a powerful critique of end-state justice, rightly stressing individual rights and history. As a theory it fails: its own rectification principle cannot be met without the redistribution it condemns.