principle of justice in transfer’’ (Nozick 1974 , 179 ) that limits owners’ powers to
dispose of their holdings, and the same presumably holds for the terms of a
bequest that limit future owners’ powers. More generally, Nozick’s remarks
about individuals partitioning their self-ownership rights in order to sell some
of the elements (Nozick 1974 , 282 ) indicate he accepts that ownership involves a
complex bundle of rights, capable of disaggregation (Ryan 1977 ). Despite such
acceptance, however, Nozick does little more to justify his assumption about
individuals’ powers inD 1 than ask the question, ‘‘If... people were entitled to
dispose of the resources to which they were entitled (underD 1 ), didn’t this
include their being entitled to give it to, or exchange it with, Wilt Chamberlain?’’
(Nozick 1974 , 161 ). The fact that Nozick does so little to pre-empt a negative
answer tends to support Thomas Nagel’s charge thatAnarchy, State and Utopia
is an example of ‘‘Libertarianism Without Foundations’’ (Nagel 1975 ).
5 Nozick’s Challenge
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Despite its counter-intuitive and incomplete character, it would be a mistake
merely to dismiss Nozick’s work on distributive justice. Self-styledleft-liber-
tarianshave followed Hillel Steiner’s lead in arguing that measures designed
to redress inequalities in fortune can be justiWed from within an entitlement
theory, and are consistent with some version of full self-ownership (Otsuka
2003 ; Steiner 1994 ; Vallentyne 1998 ; Vallentyne and Steiner 2000 ). Whether
such arguments are persuasive in their own right is debatable (Fried 2004 ,
2005 ; Risse 2004 ; Vallentyne, Steiner, and Otsuka 2005 ), but they merit
attention and serve, at the very least, as plausiblead hominemarguments
against libertarian critiques of the luck-sharing project.
There is an additional reason why Nozick’s work should remain important
even for those who reject full self-ownership, or any presumption of full
ownership right over impersonal resources, namely that it poses an important
challenge for any philosophical account of distributive justice. Having argued
that ‘‘the particular framework of property and contract rights which Nozick
proposes does not constitute an adequate account of the claims of economic
liberty’’ (Scanlon 1975 , 25 ), T. M. Scanlon states the challenge well when
making the following remarks aboutAnarchy, State and Utopia:
liberty, equality, and property 493