Entitlement theory of justice
Topic: Equality and Social Justice · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
This theory comes from Robert Nozick (1974), a critic of Rawls. It says a person's holdings, meaning what they own, are just if they were acquired fairly and transferred fairly, for example by sale or gift. Past wrongs should be corrected. If these conditions are met, the state has no right to take wealth away to make people more equal. So taxing people to redistribute wealth beyond what a minimal state needs is unjust. A minimal state is one that only protects life, liberty and property.
Example
In Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example, many fans freely pay a little each to watch a famous basketball player. He becomes rich. Since every payment was voluntary, Nozick says his wealth is just, and taxing it away to share it out would be unfair.
Don't confuse with
- Rawls' difference principle: Rawls judges a distribution by whether it helps the worst-off. Nozick judges it only by how the holdings came about.
Related concepts
- Distributive justice
- Redistribution of resources
- Rawls' theory of justice
- Veil of ignorance
- Difference principle