LIBERALISM AND THE LIMITS OF JUSTICE

Abstract

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 reasoning by arguing first that arbitrariness does not undermine desert, and second that, even if it did, a version of natural liberty and not the difference principle would emerge as the preferred result Stated in terms of possession, Rawls’ objection to natural liberty and liberal equality is that under these principles, persons are allowed unfairly to benefit (or suffer) from natural and social endowments that do not properly belong to them, at least not in the strong, constitutive sense of belonging. To be sure, the various natural assets with which I am born may be said to ‘belong’ to me in the weak, contingent sense that they reside accidentally within me, but this sense of ownership or possession cannot establish that I have any special rights with respect to these assets or any privileged claim to the fruits of their exercise. In this attenuated sense of possession, I am not really the owner but merely the guardian or repository of the assorted assets and attributes located ‘here’. By failing to acknowledge the arbitrariness of fortune, the principles of natural liberty and liberal equality go wrong in assuming that ‘my’ assets belong to me in the strong, constitutive sense, and so allowing distributive shares to depend on them.