Nozick Vs Rawls Research Paper

heresa Rocha

PHIL 349

Dr. Melkonian

May 9, 2017

Nozick vs Rawls on Rewards When you receive a gift, do you feel you are entitled to it? For some, receiving gifts in totally normal when it comes to birthdays, anniversaries and graduations. What if it was a right to receive a reward or gift? With this comes many questions about why or how does this even happen. John Rawls explains in Distributive Justice that we as humans deserve, or as he puts it desert for the responsible. While Nozick disagrees on Rawls statement saying that we are entitled to the holdings that we receive, and shouldn’t question it with the entitlement theory. Knowing that Rawls and Nozick has different ideals, makes the perfect ideas on who do we consider morally correct

He supposes that the best interpretation of a desert-based theory of justice would say that distribution of benefits and burdens should be set so that reward is proportional to virtue or moral worth. According to Steinberger “The theory of desert must be read as ruling out on moral grounds all in equalities regardless of their circumstances or consequences” (Steinberger 986). He wants to deny that we should set up institutions with the aim of rewarding the deserving, but neither does he wish to deny a role to individual agency and individual responsibility within his theory of justice. It can also be voluntary choices that the responsible can make. If it was voluntary, we can say that the responsible does receive the reward based on the desert principle. What would Nozick think of this type of principle? That’s next on my paper. The argument of

How are we entitled to what is rewarded to us? Is that hard work pays off or just because you do something that makes the world a greater good? Based on Nozick’s ideas, we are entitled to what we receive. An example of this is a job. We know in society that if we have a job, we are entitled to compensation for what we do. We should be earning money for what we do at our job and be compensated fairly. As Nozick States in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia, “If people force you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purposes your work is to serve apart from your decisions. This process whereby they take this decision from you makes them a part-owner of you; it gives them a property right in you. Just as having such partial control and power of decision, by right, over an animal or inanimate object would be to have a property right in it” (Nozick 172). Nozick wanted us to know that it isn’t right to be unrewarded for what you work hard