The Essential Robert Nozick

Since Nozick sees rights as boundary conditions on the permissible treatment of others, he argues that to reject this conception of rights would entail either a rejection of all morality entirely—no one has any constraints at all on how they may treat others—or else a rejection of the idea of the reality of the uniqueness of each person. [...] The first point Nozick makes in this regard is that the very expression “distributive justice” loads the dice somewhat, for it presupposes that there is a particular amount of stuff to be distributed and that some distributor has gotten something wrong that needs to be corrected by the state. [...] Lastly, Nozick is skeptical that the “veil of ignorance” deliberations nec- essarily commit everyone to agreeing to the arrangements of inequality that are supposed to be structured to work to the best advantage of the worst off. [...] Since this allows the capitalist to appropriate the surplus value of the worker’s labour, the worker is said to be exploited. [...] Nozick points out that the underlying premise in this account is the “labour theory of value,” on which the value of a good is a function of the labour that went into making it.