To many basketball fans, Wilt Chamberlain was one of the greatest players of the 20th century. To others, Chamberlain is better remembered for his claim to have slept with twenty thousand women. (The figure seems impossible, but Chamberlain insisted that he’d used quite conservative assumptions in arriving at that estimate). Among philosophers, however, Wilt Chamberlain is best known for something he never actually did.
In his 1974 book , the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick proposed what’s known as the ‘Wilt Chamberlain Argument’, a simple but ingenious rejoinder to the idea that economic justice is a matter of how wealth is distributed within a society. For example, many of us would assume that a society where everyone has more-or-less equal amounts of wealth would be better than a society with greater inequality. Arguments about economic justice tend to start from the intuition that inequality is bad in itself, and then
