Bleached Foundations 115argument appears as just an elaborate fictional game. The book in fact opens with the
unambiguous assertion that ‘Individuals have rights and they are things no person
or group may do to them (without violating their rights)’ (Nozick 1974: xi). These
rights are indefeasible and act as negative side-constraints upon all individuals. They
also act as procedural devices that pre-exist any notion of the good. Rights create no
duties other than those that are freely consented to. In fact, for Nozick, consent is
crucial at every stage of the argument and the whole process of politics. The rights
themselves are thus foundational. The non-interference with rights is what Nozick
calls the Kantian principle of inviolability. Persons are to be respected as ends in
themselves. For Nozick, there is also clearly no value whatsoever in the world outside
of individuals. As Nozick notes, ‘there is no social entity with a good that undergoes
some sacrifices for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual
people with their own individual lives’ (Nozick 1974: 32–3). Each individual has their
own interests and shapes the meaning and value to their own life.
The above theory forms the basis to Nozick’s notion of justice. His theory is
essentially concerned to establish that each person is protected or guaranteed their
entitlements. Nozick distinguishes between end-state principles and historical prin-
ciples. It is the latter that is compatible with justice. This distinction parallels another
he makes between patterned and unpatterned principles. Most distributive and social
justice theories draw upon patterned distribution under principles like need and the
like. Nozick claims alternatively that unpatterned distribution entails respect for the
inviolability of individuals rights, particularly life, liberty, and property. Each indi-
vidual owns themselves—their own body and its labour. If the individual acquired
property through labour, legitimate acquisition, or just transfer then he or she is
absolutely entitled to it. Justice exists where everyone has their entitlements. In this
sense, there can be no compulsory redistribution and no interference with individual
property (unless a good was unjustly acquired as in fraud or theft and then rectifica-
tion can take place). Justice is, in the end, a matter simply of how a distribution
comes about. Again here, there is no theory of the good being articulated by Nozick.
A society, if it has a central framework of laws and a dominant protection agency (a
minimal state) will only be concerned with maintaining procedural justice. In this
sense, Nozick’s conception of unpatterned distributive justice closely resembles, in
outcome, many of the major themes of proceduralism, qua Hayek.
Social Justice: Desert and Non-Desert
On the distributive or social justice dimension, desert theories, as mentioned, are less
common in the twentieth century. Desert arguments also vary greatly in content and
approach. Notions of merit, worth, services or work, have very different characters
for different cultures. Further, there is no clear social or political form that arises with
any of these desert theories. Thus, if one took, say, a desert based reading of a ‘moral
worth’ principle, to each according to their moral worth, two possible uses of the
argument can be immediately observed, each with very different social visions.