
Nozick was correct to point out that resources are not manna the fell magically from heaven where:
If things fell from heaven like manna, and no one had any special entitlement to any portion of it…
Resources have moral histories that count. Individuals who hold resources through the scattered efforts and transactions of innumerable individuals themselves and these individual efforts and separate transactions give them a moral claim over what they have created, created, acquired and exchanged:
In the non-manna-from-heaven world in which things have to be made or produced or transformed by people, there is no separate process of distribution for a theory of distributions to be a theory of…
According to Nozick there are three sets of rules of justice, defining:
- how things not previously possessed by anyone may be acquired;
- how possession may be transferred from one person to another; and
- what must be done to rectify injustices arising from violations of (1) and (2).
A distribution is just if it has arisen in accordance with these three sets of rules. What matters is the moral history of who has what.We cannot escape that because resources do not fall’s manner from heaven.
These resources came from somewhere and from whence they came they have a moral claim over them. That claim must be treated seriously.
There are individual exchanges, in which the parties do not usually care about desert or handicaps, but simply about what they get in exchange:
No centralized process judges people’s use of the opportunities they had; that is not what the process of social cooperation and exchange are for‘
When people freely to use their property as they choose, any income and wealth distribution advocated by socialist and egalitarian liberal will be undone. Attempts to enforce a particular distributional pattern or structure over time will necessarily involve forbidding individuals from using the fruits of their talents, abilities, and labour as they see fit. As Nozick puts it:
the socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults
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