Theories of justice

What does it mean for a society to be just? In the twentieth century two answers came to dominate political philosophy, and they pull in opposite directions. John Rawls argued that justice requires fairness, and that a fair society may need to redistribute to help its worst-off members. Robert Nozick replied that justice is about respecting what people are entitled to, and that forced redistribution violates their rights. Their debate is the clearest modern statement of the tension between equality and liberty.

Rawls: justice as fairness

Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) asks a clever question: what principles would free and equal people choose to govern their society if they had to agree on the rules from a genuinely fair starting point? To make the starting point fair, Rawls imagines the original position — a hypothetical bargaining situation behind a veil of ignorance.

Behind the veil, you do not know your class, race, sex, talents, religion or even your idea of the good life. Stripped of that knowledge, you cannot rig the rules to favour yourself, because you might turn out to be anyone — including the worst off. Rawls argues that rational, cautious choosers in this situation would pick two principles:

1. Equal basic liberties. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties — speech, conscience, the vote — compatible with the same for all.
2. Fair distribution. Social and economic inequalities must satisfy two tests: positions must be open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and inequalities are just only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. This second clause is the famous difference principle.

Crucially, the first principle has lexical priority: basic liberties come first and cannot be traded for economic gains. You can permit the rich to grow richer, but only if doing so also lifts those at the bottom.

Nozick: the entitlement theory

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) Robert Nozick offered a libertarian reply. Justice, he argued, is historical, not patterned. A distribution is just not because it matches some ideal pattern like equality or need, but because of how it came about. His entitlement theory has three parts: just acquisition of previously unheld things, just transfer through voluntary exchange or gift, and rectification of past injustice. If holdings arose through just steps, the resulting distribution is just, whatever it looks like.

Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.

To show why patterns and liberty conflict, Nozick offers the Wilt Chamberlain example. Start from any distribution you consider perfectly just. Now suppose a million fans each freely pay a small sum to watch a star basketball player. He ends up rich, and the original pattern is destroyed. Yet every transfer was voluntary, from a just starting point. So either the new distribution is just, or maintaining the old pattern requires constantly interfering with what people freely do with their holdings.

From this, Nozick defends only a minimal state — a “night-watchman” state limited to protecting against force, theft and fraud and to enforcing contracts. Anything more, such as redistributive taxation to engineer a pattern, he treats as a rights violation, provocatively likening taxing earnings to forced labour.

The equality–liberty tension

The clash is now clear. Rawls treats fairness of outcome as central: a just society arranges its institutions so that inequalities benefit the worst off, and the state may redistribute to that end. Nozick treats the inviolability of just holdings as paramount: if your property arose justly, no pattern can justify taking it from you. One foregrounds equality and the demands of fairness; the other foregrounds liberty and property rights.

Criticisms on both sides

Neither view escapes objection. Against Rawls, libertarians argue the difference principle licenses too much redistribution and overrides legitimate property rights, while others doubt that people behind the veil would really be cautious enough to choose his principles rather than gamble. Communitarians add that his abstract, disembodied chooser ignores the communities and identities that actually give people their values.

Against Nozick, critics note that his principle of just acquisition struggles with the real world, where original holdings were so often seized by conquest, slavery or fraud — which his own rectification clause then leaves enormously demanding. A minimal state may also leave the badly off without basic provision, and to call taxation “forced labour” arguably ignores how property rights themselves depend on the legal and social order that the state sustains.

These are not settled questions. But almost every modern argument about tax, welfare, opportunity and the proper size of the state can be located somewhere on the line Rawls and Nozick drew between fairness and freedom.