Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Nozick

Nozick’s line lands like a parody of moral certainty: it borrows the marching cadence of Marx (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”) and swaps in the chilly grammar of markets and consent. “Choose” and “chosen” do the ideological work. They turn what Marx framed as collective obligation into a series of voluntary transactions, as if social distribution were just the aggregate of private selections.

The specific intent is polemical and diagnostic. Nozick wants to puncture the romance of patterned justice - any theory that starts with an ideal end-state and treats people as inputs to be arranged. By making the principle sound like a slogan, he exposes how slogans smuggle assumptions: that taking from the “able” for the sake of the “needy” can be described as justice without asking who has a claim on whom. His alternative is not “greed is good,” but “stop pretending you can redesign society without coercion.” If you only get what others “choose” to give or trade for, redistribution no longer looks like moral tidying; it looks like overriding someone’s agency.

The subtext is that inequality isn’t automatically suspicious; it can be the moral footprint of countless legitimate choices. In Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain example, fans freely pay to watch a star, and a new distribution emerges. To undo it, the state must keep intervening, not once but continuously.

Context matters: this comes from Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to Rawls and the egalitarian mood of the postwar welfare state. The line works because it’s clever enough to be memorable, and austere enough to make you notice what it refuses to promise.