Abstract
In Anarchy, State and Utopia Robert Nozick criticizes a broad range of theories of distributive justice using a thought experiment that involves the financial incentives for playing basketball. In this paper, I defend the so-called “patterning” conceptions of justice that are the targets of Nozick’s “Wilt Chamberlain” argument, via the development of an extended analogy between the distribution of politically relevant resources and the playing of games, as this latter activity is characterized by Bernard Suits in his influential book on the subject, The Grasshopper. I argue that the plausibility of this analogy makes possible a more decisive refutation of Nozick’s argument than those suggested by Thomas Nagel and G.A. Cohen. I also briefly speculate about the implications of my game analogy for how philosophers should think about particular types of economic utopianism, especially those that involve conjectures about what human life would be like in a post-scarcity environment.
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Notes
For a provocative summary of the role played by such analogies in the development of postwar Anglo-American political philosophy, see Forrester, 2020, pp. 11–17.
Or, in other words – supposing that Leibniz’s Laws may be taken to hold of abstract specifications of the distribution of sets of commodities – D2 = D1.
C. Thi Nguyen has argued, in Nguyen 2018, that even some of the most hyperbolic and gruesome acts of simulated violence can undergo a closely similar type of transformation through gameplay.
For a detailed characterization and defense of sufficientarianism in the theory of distributive justice, see Shields 2016.
For an argument to roughly this effect, see Bradford 2003.
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Silcox, M. Distributive Justice and Gameplay. Philosophia 51, 2103–2115 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00662-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00662-9