markets—are fairly situated because equally endowed and aware only of the
overall distribution of brute luck rather than their personal fortunes. He then
argues that the victims of brute luck are entitled to the level of compensation
delivered by the average package of cover purchased in such a market. Such
compensation is, furthermore, to beWnanced by a system of general taxation,
which includes a progressive income tax.
To summarize, then, Dworkin’s core claim is that a distribution of re-
sources is fair only if the individuals involved, given their convictions and
ambitions, might have produced such a distribution through a speciWc
market process. The process involves those individuals exercising certain
rights to produce and trade, using resources they have acquired in an equal
auction, and to pool risks in a manner mimicking a fair insurance market.
Thus summarized, the extent to which equality of resources continues the
luck-sharing project initiated by Rawls, and opposed by Nozick, should be
apparent. Various features in Dworkin’s argument serve to redress inequal-
ities in fortune, most obviously individuals’ equal endowment in the initial
auction and subjection to the same veil of ignorance in the later insurance
market. At the same time, however, the argument accommodates convictions
about economic liberty far closer to Nozick’s than Rawls’s view. For Dworkin
it is a matter of principle that individuals are entitled to become private
owners in the means of production rather than merely in what Rawls terms
‘‘personal property’’ (Rawls 2001 , 114 ). Dworkin’s view, therefore, accepts far
more readily Nozick’s suggestion that socialism objectionably restricts the
liberty of potential entrepreneurs who prefer to transform their personal
possessions into means of production, and employ others to labor with
them (Nozick 1974 , 162 ). Indeed, equality of resources might even provide
more robust support for private ownership than the views of either Rawls or
Nozick, given that both display only a contingent commitment to capitalism,
which depends respectively on instrumental arguments or historical assump-
tions about how earlier owners exercised their powers of bequest.
It is also noteworthy that assumptions about economic liberty play a
fundamental role in Dworkin’s explanation of the way in which justice
requires individuals to share in each other’s fortunes. As mentioned, equality
of resources compensates individuals for misfortune in a way that depends on
how actual individuals, given their values and attitude to risk, would have
chosen to exercise certain rights to purchase protection against misfortune.
Because it assumes the existence of such rights, and so seeks to secure
‘‘endowment-insensitivity’’ in an ‘‘ambition-sensitive’’ manner, Dworkin’s
liberty, equality, and property 497