ABSTRACT
THE READING HERE FROM NOZICK’S Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) outline his case
against ‘patterned’ approaches to distributive justice. In Nozick’s view, any stable pattern
of holdings runs up against constraints put in place by individuals’ property rights over
themselves and over the products of their labour. In the much discussed Wilt Chamberlain
example, he aims to show that free exchanges of resources will lead to instabilities in any
pattern of resource distribution. Because the exchanges are uncoerced, there can be no com-
plaint against them, and no injustice in a process that leads to inequality. By employing a
modified version of Locke’s account of appropriation, he aims to establish that widespread
inequalities of holdings between individuals cannot justly be broken down by redistribu-
tive tax policies. This is because taxation is a form of forced labour, and so infringes the rights
of individuals. The upshot of Nozick’s argument is that intuitions about equality are trumped
by intuitions about self-ownership and the property rights that these intuitions entail.
