Entitlement Theory of Justice and End-State Fairness in the Allocation of Goods

Abstract

Robert Nozick allegedly introduced his liberal theory of private ownership as an objection to theories of end-state justice. Nevertheless, we show that, in a stylized framework for the allocation of goods in joint ventures, both approaches can be seen as complementary. More precisely, in such a context, self-ownership (the basis for Nozick's entitlement theory of justice) followed by voluntary transfer (Nozick's principle of just transfer) can lead to end-state fairness (as well as Pareto e ciency). Furthermore, under a certain solidarity condition, the only way to achieve end-state fairness, following Nozick's procedure, is to endorse an egalitarian rule for the initial assignment of rights.⇤ We thank Roberto Veneziani, as well as the remaining participants of the 2015 QMUL Exploitation Workshop for helpful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to William Thomson, Richard Bradley, and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments to revise the paper.

The half life of economic injustice

“…Rawls looks at the fairness of end states rather than the process by which they came about. More recently work has shown that under some circumstances the con ‡ict between Nozick's theory and end-state theories of fairness may disappear (Ju & Moreno-Ternero 2018). Amartya Sen calls Nozick's principles (and those of Rawls) an example of a transcendental theory of justice (Sen (2009)) -that is one that puts forth a single notion of a completely just outcome and which does not allow competing and partially con ‡icting notions of what is fair.…”

Economies with rights: Efficiency and inequality

“…These observations lead to a search for alternative permit designs that possess sufficient other virtues to make them attractive for one reason or another. For instance, Ju and Moreno‐Ternero (2017, 2018) focus on market‐based allocation rules that impose a two‐step procedure: assignment of rights based on claims first and voluntary exchange afterward. They characterize the egalitarian permits assignment that guarantees that the allocation rules are fair and apply their results to problems of greenhouse gas emissions and contested water rights.…”

Loss sharing: Characterizing a new class of rules

“…One should also mention contributions by Shapley (1953), O'Neil (1982, Pfingsten (1991), and the comprehensive investigations by Thomson (2003Thomson ( , 2013Thomson ( , 2015Thomson ( , 2019 on the adjudication of conflicting claims and the division problem in the light of resource allocation. The latter aspect has also recently been addressed by Ju and Moreno-Ternero (2018). Ju et al (2007) characterize non-manipulable division rules which may treat an agent differently from other persons based on this agent's characteristic vector.…”