F Robert Nozick's How Liberty Upsets Patterns - Essay Example

This paper agrees that a society, even a socialist one, can still be unequal because of the uneven distribution of skills, knowledge, and attitudes among people, but liberty is a natural equalizer, ensuring that people, no matter how small their financial/nonfinancial gifts may be, can have opportunities for self-development and economic prosperity, so that they can increase their shares to more socially equitable terms. Nozick employs the concepts of distributive justice and supply and demand to depict the complexities of justice in the real world.

Distributive justice can have different patterns, depending on the preferred pattern of society. It aims for the fair distribution of benefits and burdens using particular criteria, such as equality, merit, and needs. Liberty, which is married to a capitalist society, relies on the criteria of equality and merit. Nozick uses the example of Wilt Chamberlain to explore the effects of in-demand skills on its supply. Chamberlain knows that he is in high demand as a basketball star. This allows him to change D1 to D2, where the public changes D1 by the nature of their preferences.

D2 is different from D1, where “[a]fter someone transfers something to Wilt Chamberlain, third parties still have their legitimate shares; their shares are not changed” (Nozick). The public has legitimate ownership of their shares, which they can skew, if they want, in favor of Chamberlain. As a result, even if Chamberlain may be working as hard and as long as, let us say Spitzer, the former earns higher than the latter because of the third party intervention. The level of demand dictates the price of the supply.

The key steps of Nozick’s argument are giving examples on how a preferred distribution of justice may be upset and changed, comparing capitalist with socialist societies, and establishing the primary argument that in a liberal capitalist society, the concept of free will and diversity of inherent or inherited financial and non-financial resources will definitely skew the original distribution of justice, unless a constant form of control is imposed on society.