Nozick on Distributive Justice and the Difference between Entitlement and Desert

First, let’s look at Nozick’s conceptions of desert and entitlement, which he borrows from Joel Feinberg, and then let’s examine how Nozick deploys those conceptions in his debate with Rawls.

Although the entitlement-​desert distinction is more prominent in Nozick’s argument against Rawls, that isn’t the first place it shows up in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In chapter 6, “Further Considerations on the Argument for the State,” Nozick is anticipating and answering what he sees as the likely objections to the story he has told in prior chapters about how a state could arise through an invisible hand process—an argument, basically, that the protection services provided by the state are a natural monopoly.

One such counter argument is that a state arising this way would lack “legitimacy,” and might lack “even the right to enforce rights and to prohibit dangerous private enforcement of justice provided compensation is made to those prohibited” (Nozick 1974, p. 133). “Legitimacy” in this context entails being “specially entitled” to wield (political) power in a way others are not (p. 134). To answer the question of whether the dominant protection agency would wield power legitimately, Nozick invites the reader to compare the dominant agency and a small upstart competitor. It is in this context that the concepts of entitlement and desert arise:

Here, Nozick inserts an endnote, which reads:

Thus, in an endnote to a chapter where in the opening paragraph Nozick advises that “[t]he reader who wishes to pursue the main flow of our argument may proceed directly to the next chapter,” we find something indispensable: the specific conceptions of desert and entitlement that Nozick later deploys to great effect against Rawls.

I have previously discussed Feinberg’s essay more extensively, where I characterized his conception of desert like this (internal citations omitted):

Feinberg goes on to explain that the relevant characteristic or prior activity will vary depending on the deserved type of treatment, and spends much of the rest of the essay constructing a helpful but incomplete typology of deserved treatments and their corresponding qualifications.

For Feinberg, desert is a reason to treat someone in a certain way, but neither a necessary nor sufficient reason. By contrast, eligibility is necessary but not sufficient, and entitlement is sufficient but not necessary.

Feinberg contrasts desert against eligibility (“a kind of minimal qualification, a state of not being disqualified,” a necessary but not sufficient condition someone must satisfy) and also against entitlement (the “satisfaction of a sufficient condition for, say, an office or prize”).

Consistently throughout “Justice and Personal Desert,” Feinberg identifies entitlement with having a right to something, and he generally describes entitlement claims as trumping desert claims–which makes it no surprise that Nozick makes entitlement claims the center of his theory of justice in holdings.

In an appendix to the essay titled “Economic Income as Deserved,” Feinberg argues that desert cannot justify differences in people’s incomes except “to compensate them for greater burdens or greater needs” (Feinberg 1970, p. 94)—but by itself, he continues, this does not mean more substantial differences in income are unjustifiable. There are other reasons—Feinberg focuses on utilitarian concerns—that might justify larger differences:

And there Feinberg’s essay ends. This final passage from Feinberg lays out the context in which Rawls and Nozick were addressing the question of distributive justice. Both philosophers rejected desert as a basis for determining the proper distribution of holdings in society. Rawls, while taking care to zero out any differences in holdings arising from differences in natural (inborn) endowments, or from any other differences between people that “seem arbitrary from a moral point of view” (Rawls 1971, p. 15), wants to systematically hash out which moral concerns that “have nothing to do with desert” ought to be considered and how much weight to give them. Nozick wants to shift the conversation away from desert entirely, centering it instead on entitlement.

For Nozick, the concept of entitlement can bear argumentative weight that the concept of desert cannot. Nozick imagines the following argument that might be levied against Rawls (Nozick 1974, p. 224, “counterargument E”):

Nozick explains that this argument, and similar ones, won’t work because “[i]t needn’t be the case that the foundations underlying desert are themselves deserved, all the way down” (p. 225). But by shifting the argument from focusing on desert to focusing on entitlement, you get an argument that Nozick thinks does work (pp. 225-6, “the acceptable argument G”):

Nozick concludes, “Whether or not people’s natural assets are arbitrary from a moral point of view, they are entitled to them, and to what flows from them” (p. 226).

We should note, here, that Nozick earlier argued as follows (p. 157):

This appears, at first blush, to throw some doubt on premise 3, “People’s holdings flow from their natural assets.” Let’s investigate whether Nozick is contradicting himself.

On one hand, part of this quote that seems like it might be incompatible with premise 3 turns out to be a case of the word “natural” being used differently in two different contexts. What Nozick means by “natural dimensions” does not encompass “natural assets.” “Natural” in “natural dimensions” is meant to contrast “artificial dimensions” that someone could “gimmick up” (p. 156) that would vary along with the distribution of holdings. It’s essentially a prohibition on cherry-​picking one’s way to finding a pattern in an unpatterned distribution.¹ The “natural” in Rawl’s “natural endowments” and also Nozick’s “natural assets” denotes something inborn. Therefore, we should not take Nozick to be contradicting himself in this way.

On the other hand, does my winning at gambling or receiving a gift “flow from” my “natural assets?” The paradigmatic, narrow case of holdings “flowing from” natural assets would be somebody using their talents to produce something new. But no good or service is produced by gambling, so if he is being consistent, Nozick must mean something more general than this by “flowing from,” or at least there must be more “specified types of processes” by which something can flow from one’s natural endowments than are found in the paradigmatic case.

Even in the case of something as arbitrary as winning or losing at pure gambling, one makes (legitimate) use of their body and their capacity to make decisions and to negotiate with others. This is a version of the libertarian principle of self-​ownership: Whether or not I deserve to decide how to employ my body and my various faculties, I am entitled to do so, and as such other people are not so entitled. We conclude, then, that Nozick is not contradicting himself in this second way, either.

This (successful) shift from desert to entitlement allows Nozick to bring certain ugly implications of Rawls’s treatment of people’s natural endowments into sharp relief. “Rawls,” writes Nozick, “proceeds as though distinct principles apply to macro and micro contexts, to the basic structure of society and to the situations we can take in and understand” (Nozick 1974, p. 205). This distinction runs contrary to how most philosophers have done political philosophy. While Nozick concedes there might nevertheless be good reasons for Rawls to insist on such an approach, he eventually concludes that “[t]he only reason I have thought of for discounting microtests of the fundamental principles is that microsituations have particular entitlements built into them,” and so Rawl’s insistence on excluding such tests might potentially amount to illicitly smuggling in his desired conclusions (Nozick 1974, p. 206). “Of course,” he imagines Rawls might reply, “the fundamental principles under consideration will run afoul of these [built-​in] entitlements, for the principles are to operate at a deeper level than such entitlements. Since they are to operate at the level that underlies such entitlements, no microsituation that includes entitlements can be introduced as an example by which to test these fundamental principles” (Nozick 1974, p. 206).

“May all entitlements,” wonders Nozick,

Sometimes you will hear people defend capitalism on the grounds that it’s meritocratic–it was this tendency that Parks and Recreation was satirizing when the show’s (generally sympathetic) libertarian character Ron Swanson described capitalism as “God’s way of determining who is smart, and who is poor.” Merit—which means, as used in this context, desert or something very close—has never been a solid foundation on which to build a defense of private property and market exchange. We can all think of examples of people who have gotten rich by just getting lucky, or by conducting themselves in ways deserving of reproach.

Entitlement is a much better basis for defending capitalism (or any other socio-​economic system, for that matter), because it centers the conversation where it belongs–on questions of how we may treat other people in a manner compatible with the proper recognition of their distinct personhood.