holdings are that the holdings of a person are just if he is entitled to them by the principles of justice in acquisition and transfer, or by the principle of rectification of justice (as specified by the first two principles). If each person’s holdings are just then the total set is just” [Nozick (1974); p. 153]. He recognises that “past injustices” may shape “present holdings in various ways”, but fails to pursue the allimportant question of the “rectification” of past injustices, nor does he suggest any principle of redress, even in a mild form. On the contrary, he specifically rules out any “patterning” of the existing structure of property (by the government) because “from the point of view of an entitlement theory, redistribution is a serious matter, indeed; involving, as it does, the violation of people’s rights” (p. 168). Nozick recognises that past injustices may directly contribute to significant inter-generational inequities, a socially undesirable inequitable distribution of income and wealth, and great poverty. Yet, while all this is “morally unfortunate” or merely unfair – a state of affairs which rich people should be encouraged to remedy by voluntary charity – it is not morally unjust because no one (even the starving poor) has a moral right to aid!8 Hence, people cannot be forced to be charitable by any coercive government action.
This seemingly impenetrable defence of moral rights has, however, several holes in it. Firstly, as Hayek (1960) maintains, not all distributive patterns or end-states are disruptive of moral rights – e.g., providing minimum sustenance to the poor and the implementation (for redistributive purposes) of long-standing publicised laws specifying tax obligations. Nor are these end-states incompatible with the existence of a stable pattern of expectations which is the essence of the “rule of law”. He explicitly states that “coercion, however, cannot be altogether avoided because the only way to prevent it is by the threat of coercion” (p. 21). Secondly, Nozick neglects the need for a balance between charity and efficiency that is necessary for greater social cohesion. The point is that, as Arrow (1974) notes, the act of giving is an “expression of individual volition” based on “an implicit social contract such that each performs duties for the other in a way calculated to enhance the satisfaction of all” (p. 348). More generally, “ethical behaviour is a socially desirable institution which facilitates the achievement of economic efficiency” (p. 354). In other words, downplaying the ethical aspects of social life – e.g., distributive justice, charitable giving, etc., – would erode the efficiency of Nozick’s liberty-preserving free markets. Thirdly, it is idle to expect that extreme poverty or distributive inequity can be remedied by uncoordinated voluntary acts of charity on the part of the rich, even assuming that they are morally upright people of altruistic disposition: “the laudable desire [on the part of the rich] to be effectively beneficent may be self-defeating where coercion is absent” [Allen Buchanan (1985); p. 73]. The reason is that the free-rider and assurance problems, noted above, are likely to block the generation of a large enough flow of resources by voluntary and uncoordinated beneficence alone. It may, therefore, be necessary to make acts of non-contribution subject to penal action, even if it is accepted that, as Nozick asserts, the poor have no moral right to aid. In this connection a distinction can be made between people who may desire to be charitable and those who desire that the poor should be provided for. In the latter case, free-rider and assurance problems will apply with even greater force because knowledge that the poor have been provided for by someone may satisfy their rather shallow concern for the poor. What may not be so obvious is that the outcome will be no different in the former case as well. The need for government action, therefore, remains vital in both cases. The point is that foundational issues such as poverty alleviation cannot be addressed just by appealing to moral intuition and voluntary beneficence, and leaving it at that.
Fourthly, Nozick’s defence of the nearly unlimited right to private property, on the ground that inequities in income and wealth mostly flow from the differential abilities of the people and their use of these abilities, is also weak. It neglects the cumulative adverse effect of the morally unexceptionable individual cases in which merit is rewarded. But “to assume that the cumulative result of a series of just actions must itself be just is to commit the fallacy of composition” [Allen Buchanan (1985); p. 68].9 In fact, wealthy individuals, even those who earn their wealth legitimately, come to exercise a disproportionate amount of political, social and economic influence, which is then used to deny (poor) people their legitimate political and economic rights. Finally, Nozick’s insistence that the state confine itself only to preventing the violations of “negative freedoms” (i.e., the freedoms from…., rather than the freedoms to...) is altogether extraordinary because having some freedoms does not by itself guarantee that the same will also be exercised effectively. Thus, for instance, large inequalities of income and wealth preclude poor people’s exercise of their political rights (say, to free speech and to free political participation). Sen (1999b) observes: “Economic unfreedom can breed social unfreedom, just as social or political unfreedom can also foster economic unfreedom” (p. 8). Whence follows that some coercion (state intervention) is required even to achieve the libertarian’s apparently well-meaning aim that no one should have a greater moral right than any other. This is granted even by Hayek (1960), who recognises that a free society has conferred on the state a “monopoly of coercion” to protect “known private spheres of the individual against interference by others...” (p. 21). It is really common sense to assert that the worth of most rights lies in people’s ability to use them rather than in the mere knowledge that they have them. For these reasons, Nagel (1975) has derided Nozick’s entitlement theory as “libertarianism without foundations”.
c) The ‘Morality’ of Utilitarianism
Nineteenth century utilitarian philosophy (due to Jeremy Bentham), which has dominated economic thought, has been regarded as a theory of distributive justice. The maximisation rule says: “seek the greatest good for the greatest number”. ‘Good’ here has been synonymously used with (mental state) subjectively experienced individual happiness; and it is measured exclusively in terms of the metric of utility. Thus, those aspects of life which cannot be translated into a utility number (e.g., the fulfilment/violation of rights, duties, etc.) are excluded from the utilitarian calculus of human happiness.10 Sen (1987; 1999a; 1999b) points out that utilitarianism has three irreducible components: (i) ‘welfarism’, that which reflects the goodness of the human condition in a given state as a function of only the utility information about that state; (ii) ‘sum-ranking’, that which instructs that the utility information about a given state be measured only by the sum-total of utilities in that state, paying no regard to the distribution of this total among the individuals; and (iii) ‘consequentialism’, that which weighs the worth of any action and institution by their consequences, as measured by the utilities they generate. The aim of public policy should, therefore, be to maximise social welfare, which is defined as the sum-total of utilities generated by it. It is not always clear whether the maximisation of utility is secured through the market or brought about by the government; but that should not matter. All that utilitarianism requires is maximising the sum-total, regardless of how it is distributed.11
The utilitarian approach to distributive justice has the wisdom to seek information about the consequences entailed by specific policies. The objective is to evaluate the worth of such policies and to redesign them on the basis of such information. Quite properly, it worries about the well-being (welfare) of the people in the design of public policy. But its demerits offset its merits as a basis for public policy. Firstly, its central instruction to the policymaker: “seek the greatest good of the greatest number” is, at best, an ambiguous formula to maximise human economic well-being. Now, if this instruction is taken to mean that, for any given population, “aim at that distribution of resources that maximizes social welfare (measured by the sum total of utilities), and then choose a population size which maximizes this number”, then such a policy will, obviously, give no more than is necessary to keep the largest number of population so chosen at little more than starvation
