IV. ALLOCATION VERSUS STRUCTURE AND PROCEDURE One might think about the relation between a theory of justice and socioeconomic rights in the following way: Distributive justice involves choosing criteria for the distribution of something valuable, such as money or other goods, among people who have some claim upon a common stock or a common fund. These criteria are embodied in principles. One possible allocative principle is P,: "To each according to one's needs." So a belief in socioeconomic rights is a belief that something like this distributive principle should be one of the outputs that a theory of justice comes up with, and that it should be applied to the resources that society has at its disposal. Of course there are other candidates; for example, Pd, "To each according to one's desert," is an alternative principle that is often heard. To think that there are socioeconomic rights, therefore, is to think that theorizing about distributive justice will show that P, is a correct principle, at least over some important range of needs, and that Pd is not a correct principle to the extent that it is incompatible with P,. Theories of distributive justice that aspire to yield principles like P,, or Pd are sometimes called allocative theories. Allocative theories have a venerable history in the discussion of justice: they have a prominent place in Aristotle's discussion of distributive justice, particularly in his discussion of the proper distribution of political power in The Politics.40 But most modem theorists of justice reject the allocative approach or at best confine it to a very special range of cases where there is a common stock of resources on which a number of identifiable individuals have undoubted-but so far unquantified-claims. The division of matrimonial assets upon divorce might be an example. Robert Nozick's theory is adamantly opposed to the allocative approach. The reason is straightforward: allocation treats goods as though they were simply there, awaiting distribution, as though the process by which they were produced had no relevance. It is part of his rejection of what he calls patterned principles-principles that try to pattern the distribution of goods on something else like need or desert: Isn't it implausible that how holdings are produced and come to exist has no effect at all on who should hold what? To think that the task of a theory of distributive justice is to fill in the blank in " is to be predisposed to search for a pattern; and "to each according to his " treats production the separate treatment of "from each according to his entitlement view issues. On an and distribution as two separate and 4independent 1 these are not two separate questions. 40. See ARISTOTLE, NICOMACHEAN ETHICS 113, 116-18 (Martin Ostwald trans., Bobbs-Merrill Co. 1962); ARISTOTLE, THE POLITICS, reprintedin THE POLITICS AND THE CoNsTITuTioN oFATHENS9, 63, 67, 71, 78-79 (Stephen Everson ed., 1996). 41. 788 NOZICK, supranote 10, at 155, 159-60.