LIBERALISM AND THE LIMITS OF JUSTICE

The notion of possession leads naturally to claims of desert and entitlement. The argument over what people possess, and on what terms, has a direct bearing on the question of what people deserve or are entitled to as a matter of justice. It is to the issues of desert and entitlement that we now turn, to consider the second strand of Nozick’s critique of justice as fairness. Rawls rejects the principles of natural liberty and liberal equality on the grounds that they reward assets and attributes which, being arbitrary from a moral point of view, people cannot properly be said to deserve, and adopts the difference principle on the grounds that it nullifies this arbitrariness. Nozick attacks this line of…