Philosophy

Essay 2 Prompt

Wei Huang

The following paragraph summarizes Nozick’s Chamberlain argument:

In this society, Wilt Chamberlain is an excellent basketball player, and many teams compete with each other to engage his services. Chamberlain eventually agrees to play for a certain team on the condition that everyone who attends a game in which he plays puts 25 cents in a special box at the gate, the contents of which will go to him. During the season, one million fans attend the team’s games, and so Chamberlain receives $250,000. Now, however, the supposedly just distribution of holdings is upset, because Chamberlain has $250,000 more than anyone else. Is the new distribution unjust? The strong intuition that it is not unjust is accounted for by Nozick’s entitlement theory (because Chamberlain acquired his holdings by legitimate means) but conflicts with the egalitarian theory. Nozick contends that this argument generalizes to any theory based on patterns or historical circumstances, because any distribution dictated by such a theory could be upset by ordinary and unobjectionable transactions like the one involving Chamberlain. Nozick concludes that any society that attempted to implement such a theory would have to intrude grossly on the liberty of its citizens in order to enforce the distribution it considers just. “The socialist society,” as he puts it, “would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.”

Website: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Nozick#ref828038

Here, Nozick appeals to a thought experiment to convince us that all voluntary transactions are just. Let us agree with Nozick that the transactions between basketball fans and Chamberlain are just in Nozick’s thought experiment. And consider further whether there are any conditions that, if added to the original Nozick’s thought experiment, will give rise to unjust voluntary transactions. This question is not unimportant because if conditions as such indeed exist, then there are reasons to ensure that these conditions do not hold in our market economy.

In your essay, you need to

· State explicitly what condition gives rise to unjust voluntary transactions. You only need to raise one condition.

· Paraphrase Nozick’s thought experiment and put his Chamberlain argument in standard form.

· Devise a similar thought experiment in which your condition holds and argue that, in the thought experiment you devise, voluntary transactions may not be just.

· Put your argument in standard form.

· Upload your essay to Blackboard assignment section before 3/28 6pm.

You do not have to believe in the political left-wing to find such a condition. Friedman also mentions the ineliminability of “rules of the game” (page 15). So, if you believe in the political right-wing, you might as well ask what are rules of the game.