There is of course much of value to be learned from [Robert] Nozick's ingenious and diverting pages, but there are also many quite different criticisms to be made of its foundations apart from the one which I have urged. But since other critics have been busy with many such criticisms I will here mention only one. Even if a social philosophy can draw its morality as Nozick assumes only from a single source; even if that source is individual rights, so that the only moral wrongdoing consists in wrongs done to individuals that violate their rights, and even if the foundation for such rights is respect for the separateness of persons, why should rights be limited as they are by Nozick to what [Jeremy] Bentham called the negative services of others, that is to abstention from such things as murder, assault, theft and breach of contract? Why should there not be included a basic right to the positive service of the relief of great needs or suffering or the provision of basic education and skills when the cost of these is small compared with both the need to be met and with the financial resources of those taxed to provide them? Why should property rights, to be morally legitimate, have an absolute, permanent, exclusive, inheritable and unmodifiable character which leaves no room for this? Nozick is I think in particular called upon to answer this question because he is clear that though rights for him constitute the only source of constraint on action, they are not ends to be maximised; the obligations they impose are, as Nozick insists, "side constraints," so the rights form a protective bastion enabling an individual to achieve his own ends in a life he shapes himself; and that, Nozick thinks, is the individual's way of giving meaning to life.
But it is of course an ancient insight that for a meaningful life not only the protection of freedom from deliberate restriction but opportunities and resources for its exercise are needed. Except for a few privileged and lucky persons, the ability to shape life for oneself and lead a meaningful life is something to be constructed by positive marshalling of social and economic resources. It is not something automatically guaranteed by a structure of negative rights. Nothing is more likely to bring freedom into contempt and so endanger it than failure to support those who lack, through no fault of their own, the material and social conditions and opportunities which are needed if a man's freedom is to contribute to his welfare.
(H. L. A. Hart, "Between Utility and Rights," Columbia Law Review 79 [June 1979]: 828-46, at 835-6 [footnotes omitted])
