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.
As a utilitarian, that makes no sense to me. It
seems to me that by sharing the benefits of the
resource we can increase the total happiness or
the average standard of living enormously.
That's exactly what we should do.
But even if we are not utilitarians, the people
of our hypothetical country 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.
But it seems to me that the loss is enormous.
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 a
non-utilitarian justification for regulating
property for the good of the majority, I think
that's it.
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