Rawls Versus Nozick

Robert Nozick, Rawls's colleague at Harvard, mounted the most famous libertarian critique. He argued that any distribution of wealth arising from voluntary transactions is just, no matter how unequal the result. If you freely buy a basketball ticket and the player gets rich, that inequality needs no justification.

Rawls answered that the starting conditions are never truly free. Born into wealth versus poverty, talent versus disability, a stable country versus a war zone — these circumstances are morally arbitrary. A system that rewards arbitrary advantages is not justice but disguised luck.