suVer theft or robbery. Nozick Wnds antecedents for these ideas in the
writings of John Locke, who does not fully commit to them. 3 From this
standpoint, the moral authority of the state to coerce people without their
consent even just to maintain minimal public order appears problematic. The
idea that society has the right and obligation to redistribute property to
achieve a more fair distribution cannotWnd a place in Lockean natural rights
theory. Property is owned by people, and the state, acting as agent of society,
has no more right to take from some and give to others than a robber does.
The right of each person to act as she chooses has as its core a universal
right of self-ownership: Each adult person is the full rightful owner of herself,
possessing full property rights over her own person. The next question that
arises here is how an individual may legitimately come to acquire rights to use
or own particular pieces of the world. Without some such rights self-owner-
ship would come to very little. The Lockean project is to specify how
legitimate private ownership of property arises in a world in which objects
are initially unowned, and what the terms and limits of such legitimate
ownership are. The main stream of Lockean views defends the idea that
private property ownership can be fully legitimate, given certain conditions,
no matter how unequal the distribution of privately owned property. Left-
wing Lockeans demur (Steiner 1994 ). They try to defend the view that each
person is the full rightful owner of herself but that the distribution of
ownership of the world must be roughly equal.
Mainstream Lockean views concerning the legitimacy of private property
ownership resonate strongly and positively with commonsense opinion in
modern market societies, but the philosophical elaboration of these views is
still a project that largely awaits completion. Nozick’s arguments are sometimes
brilliant but his views are sketchy. We are not yet in a good position deWnitively
to compare Lockean versions of liberal justice with their more egalitarian rivals.
2.5 Desert, Responsibility, and Luck Egalitarianism
Surprisingly, Rawls rejects the platitude that justice is giving people what they
deserve (Rawls 1999 a). He argues against the idea that notions of desert
belong in fundamental principles of justice (although, of course, norms of
3 See Locke ( 1980 ). See also the interpretation of Locke in Simmons ( 1992 ) and Waldron ( 1988 , ch.
6 ) and developments of Lockean ideas in Simmons ( 2001 ).
justice after rawls 57