Right – for countless historical reasons, folk nowadays just claim
them as consequent on the moral status of person that they have
insisted on conferring on themselves and others whose moral
status they recognize. But I expect this reading to be controversial.5 Distributive justice
1 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §185.
2 For a utilitarian approach, see P. Singer, Practical Ethics, Cam-
bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979. For a Kantian approach,
see O. O’Neill, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice and
Development, London, Allen and Unwin, 1986. For contractualist
approaches, see C.R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Rela-
tions, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1979, and T.
Pogge, Realising Rawls, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1989.
3 R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 151.
4 Ibid., p. 153.
5 Ibid., p. 153.
6 To use Waldron’s language, a legitimate property holding always
requires the validation of some special rights claim. If so, a theory
of distributive justice necessarily grounds such claims. If so, one of
Waldron’s major theses: that special rights arguments cannot be
appealed to in the defence of a specific allocation of private prop-
erty since it is vulnerable to the claims of general rights, cannot be
defended, since it is a proper requirement of an acceptable general
rights argument that it detail which special rights claims are legit-
imate. Nozick assumes, wrongly, that the dialectic begins with the
vindication of special rights claims. Waldron concludes, wrongly,
that special rights-based arguments have no distinctive place in the
justification of a system of property holdings. See J. Waldron, The
Right to Private Property, Chs 4, 7.
7 R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 161.
8 Ibid., p. 163.
9 Ibid., p. 169.
10 This point is stressed by J. Waldron, The Right to Private Property,
pp. 266ff., and endorsed by Leif Wenar in ‘Original Acquisition of
Private Property’, Mind, 1998, vol. 107, pp. 799–819.
11 J. Locke, Second Treatise, §25.
12 R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 174–5.
13 In what follows, I reproduce the argument of D. Knowles, ‘Auton-
omy and Side-constraints’, Mind, 1979, vol. LXXXVIII, pp. 263–5.
NOTES