The Wilt Chamberlain Argument

The scenario

Start with any distribution of holdings you consider just. Call it D1. It might be perfectly equal, or it might satisfy Rawls's difference principle, or whatever pattern you favor.

Now introduce an agreement: Wilt Chamberlain, the great basketball player, signs a contract saying a quarter from every ticket goes to him. One million fans choose to attend. They hand over their quarters voluntarily. Chamberlain ends up with $250,000. Call the new distribution D2.

D2 is different from D1. It is less equal. But is it unjust? Each person who gave a quarter did so freely. No one was coerced. Every transaction was voluntary. Nozick's question: if D1 was just, and every step from D1 to D2 was a free exchange, how can D2 be unjust?

The entitlement theory

The argument is meant to establish a general principle: justice in holdings depends not on what pattern the distribution fits, but on whether the holdings arose legitimately. Nozick calls this the entitlement theory.

Three principles define it. Justice in acquisition: how holdings are originally obtained. Justice in transfer: how holdings move from person to person. Rectification: what to do about past violations of the first two. If your holdings pass these three tests, they are just, regardless of whether the resulting distribution is equal, maximally useful, or anything else.

The implication is that patterned theories of justice, theories that say a distribution is just only if it matches some preferred pattern (equality, need, desert), will always require constant interference with liberty. As soon as people make free choices, the pattern gets disrupted. Maintaining it means overriding those choices.

The responses

Rawls and his defenders have two main lines of reply.

The first targets the starting point. Nozick assumes D1 is just, then asks whether free exchanges preserve justice. But in the real world, D1, whatever it is, reflects historical accumulation that includes theft, coercion, conquest, and exploitation. Entitlement theory requires clean acquisition all the way down. We don't have that. The whole exercise assumes away the problem.

The second targets background conditions. G. A. Cohen argued that Nozick conflates having the legal right to do something with having a genuine moral liberty. The fans' choices occur against a background of property rights, markets, and social structures that are themselves products of political decisions. Calling those choices "free" in a morally weighty sense smuggles in the conclusion. Free exchange within an unjust background doesn't generate just outcomes.

The argument remains one of the sharpest challenges egalitarians have to answer.