Only those goods in which everyone, whatever their view of the good life, takes an interest are to be admitted to consideration. In Nozick’s argument too, the concept of community required for the notion of desert to have application is simply absent. To understand this is to clarify two further points. The first concerns the shared social presuppositions of Rawls and Nozick. It is, from both standpoints, as though we had been shipwrecked on an uninhabited island with a group of other individuals, each of whom is a stranger to me and to all the others.
