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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
THE “REVERSE” THEORY
There is a passage in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) where Robert Nozick voices the following general misgiving about the claim that people have affirmative rights to various things, such as social assistance or welfare:
The major objection to speaking of everyone's having a right to various things such as equality of opportunity, life, and so on, and enforcing this right, is that these “rights” require a substructure of things and materials and actions; and other people may have rights and entitlements over these. No one has a right to something whose realization requires certain uses of things and activities that other people have rights and entitlements over. Other people's rights and entitlements to particular things (that pencil, their body, and so on) and how they choose to exercise these rights and entitlements fix the external environment of any given individual and the means that will be available to him.…
There are particular rights over particular things held by particular persons, and particular rights to reach agreements with others, if you and they together can acquire the means to reach an agreement. … No rights exist in conflict with this substructure of particular rights. Since no neatly contoured right to achieve a goal will avoid incompatibility with this substructure, no such rights exist. The particular rights over things fill the space of rights, leaving no room for general rights to be in a certain material condition. […]
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