A just outcome, or just exchanges?
On the axis: Distributive justice · a distribution
Is a distribution just by the outcome it produces, a certain sharing of wealth, or by the way each person legitimately came to hold what they have, through labor and free exchange?
This problem is brought out by the thought experiment Wilt Chamberlain: Liberty against Equality:
Start from a society where wealth is distributed exactly as you judge just, in equal shares if you like. A much-admired basketball player, Wilt Chamberlain, offers his games; a million delighted spectators each freely drop a small coin to watch him play. By the end of the season he has become far richer than everyone else. No one was wronged, each gave what they wished, and yet the fine equality of the start has vanished.
Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
Is this new inequality unjust? And to correct it, would we have to forbid people from freely using what belongs to them?
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Justification
If the earth is given in common to all, how can a thing become mine without each person's consent? Locke's answer starts from a title prior to any compact: every man owns his own person, and therefore the labour of his body. By mixing that labour with something held in common, I join to it something already mine and rightfully withdraw it, owing no one's agreement. Property is thus a natural right grounded in labour, prior to the state, which places Locke toward the end of the axis. Yet the famous Lockean proviso, that "enough, and as good" be left for others, inscribes from the outset a moral limit on appropriation.
The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided ... he hath mixed his labour with, and thereby makes it his property.Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 5, §27
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 5 ("Of Property", labour and the Lockean proviso)
Anchors: Nozick · Locke · Rawls