ABSTRACT
Nozick's political philosophy gains much of its polemical power from the attractive thought that constitutes its foundation. That thought is that each person is the morally rightful owner of himself. It is to be noted that the thesis of self-ownership does not say that all that is owned is a self, where self is used to denote some particularly intimate, or essential, part of the person. A union of self-ownership and unequal distribution of worldly resources readily leads to indefinitely great inequality of private property in external goods of all kinds, and hence to inequality of condition, on any view of what would constitute equality of condition. Libertarians are prone to maintain that the market legitimates the distribution of goods it generates. The question of what would constitute a rightful original acquisition of private property enjoys a certain priority over the question of what constitutes a rightful subsequent transfer of it.
