NOZICKS ENTITLEMENT THEORY AND ITS CRITICS
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
The pursuit of justice is a virtuous task indeed, but it begs a preliminary question of what is the nature of justice. In his significant treatise Anarchy, State and Utopia, Nozick equates justice with the concept of self-ownership. As such he pays further credence to Kant's categorical imperative of using human beings only as an ends (as opposed to means to an end). He extrapolates this concept to conclude that 'a minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified', for it places limits on people's self-determination, and hence their right to self-ownership.
Nozick's entitlement theory is an ingenious response to claims that a more extensive state is justified to achieve the goal of distributive justice. But for Nozick distributive justice is a misnomer. It conjures a mirage of pre-existing goods and resources being distributed by a central authority that is tasked with preserving some version of a 'just' society. This bears no resemblance to the real world, where wealth creation and distribution results from plethora of private decisions and actions made by individuals scattered within a market environment.
Nozick sees distributive justice systems as a threat to our innate individual right to participate in that web of free association. And in affirming people's choice and property (which he construes as an extension of themselves), he goes on describe a theory of justice in holdings that looks to acquisition alone, rather than the final distributive outcome...