(Return to main path)

I don’t think Nozick's condition is strong enough. Here's why.

Suppose that someone, call him A, appropriates a valuable natural resource X in a poor country. It might be oil or diamonds, for example. Now, according to Nozick's criterion, A can take the diamonds and make any amount of money off them and everything is morally unobjectionable as long as the other people in the country are not made worse off. If he means "materially" worse off, and I think he does, then as long as everyone either stays the same or gains a single penny there is no problem with A taking resource X, making it his own, and making a fortune. The distribution of benefits from the exploitation of X doesn't matter at all.

Now in this case people of the country end up gaining very little from a valuable resource. That doesn't matter to Nozick. In addition, they have lost the right to control a valuable resource in a collective way for the benefit of everyone (or at least for the benefit of most people). They might want to nationalize the resource, but that doesn't matter. Losing the option to do that doesn't seem to count as being "worse off" to Nozick.

Can we really accept this as a criterion of justice so far as acquisition is concerned? I don't think so.

It seems to me that if we are to justify the original acquisition of property in limited natural resources, there must be a way to compensate the people who lose access to those resources because others have acquired them. In other words, people can only acquire private property in limited natural resources if they do so within a framework of rules that requires that substantial benefits go to those who lose access to those resources. If you want the justification for regulating property for the good of the majority, I think that's it.