Nozick heavily critiqued Rawls’s assertion that people should not be entitled to a higher proportion of wealth based on their natural abilities. The latter thinker asserted that whenever these people would gain, they would do so at the expense of others, who would lose out as a result. As such, their acquisition of wealth, while natural, would make a state that did not address it unjust, as it would allow the strong to take from the weak. Hence, Rawls asserted that it was the duty of the government to redistribute wealth to promote equality within society.
Nozick’s view is that, regardless of whether people deserve their abilities from a moral standpoint, they are entitled to possess and use them. They may use these abilities to act immorally and profit off of others, but that is not a matter of justice, which should permit them to do so and experience the consequences. As such, in contrast to Rawls’s view of natural abilities as collective assets that should only be used for the betterment of the whole society, Nozick believed that each person should use their abilities as they see fit.
Ultimately, this view leads Nozick to consider a paradigm where natural abilities play a role in the distribution of wealth to be the justest arrangement. To him, justice was in letting people make choices freely, even if they led to the creation of socioeconomic differences. Per Soames (2017), he opposed Rawls’s interventionist view because it would be disrupted if natural order were to resume, making it unjust. Only patterns that would persist in a free society through the choices of their members can be considered just, in Nozick’s view.
Reference
Soames, S. (2017). Analytic philosophy in America and other historical and contemporary essays. Princeton University Press.