Question

Rawls and Nozick agree about which of the following claims:

a) Sometimes it can be wrong to perform the act that maximizes utility overall.

b) It is unjust for the state to tax people’s earnings in order to provide education for all citizens.

c) Departures from an equal distribution of shares are only permissible if it raises the expectation of the least advantaged member of society.

d) Distributive shares should not be influenced by such chance contingencies as accident of birth and good fortune.

e) All of the above are correct.

Answer 1

Option b

3 Similarities between their theories:

1. Both theories jump off with a sweeping statement of the primacy of justice — Nozick more or less retained Rawls’s first principle (liberty) while rejecting the second (difference).
2. Regarding governmental redistribution of wealth, Nozick seems to admit that his entitlement theory is insufficient to refute demands for a redistributionist state; surely some collective holdings were acquired via some original act of unjust conquest, right?. In response Nozick agrees that a Rawls-like difference principle is morally acceptable after all, what he terms “rectification,” on the premise that those currently least-well-off have the highest probability of being descended from previous victims of injustice.
3. Both shared a view of political philosophy as an exercise in the production of abstract theories, with little regard for the practical grounding of justice in human nature (i.e., of conformity with the likely demands of actual human beings). Therefore both theories rate a society’s success by how closely it’s laws and procedures adhere to the model rather than whether those laws produce morally maximized outcomes. Both clearly followed Immanuel Kant‘s dictum, “let justice triumph, even if the world perishes by it.