utions generated in accordance with the principle of entitlement" (Nozick 154). This implies a rational but not predetermined, or still less, morally enforced transaction environment. Acquisition and transfer of holdings, which have the effect to creating entitlements, are a function of individual choice and preference. Distribution is the result of a series of choices, preferences, and exchanges, and to the degree such choices, preferences, and exchanges are voluntary they are also naturally occurring. Nozick contrasts this with an environment in which there is artificial interference in the distribution and transaction processes, e.g., in the case of a state that forbids transactions between individuals. Only a state that protects parties to transactions from fraud and coercion is justified in interfering with transactions of this kind: "Any favored pattern would be transformed into one unfavored by . . . people choosing to act in various ways" (Nozick 159).
In context, favored pattern refers to state supervision of transaction outcomes; this, Nozick finds unnatural and so objectionable. He argues that the results of voluntary transactional entitlements override whatever state-imposed pattern of entitlement distribution might be conceived: "Any distributional pattern with any egalitarian component is overturnable by the voluntary actions of individual persons over time; as is every patterned condition with sufficient content so as actually to have been proposed as presenting the central core of distributive justice" (Nozick, 160).
It is from this vantage point that Nozick describes individual rights as natural. His view appears to be that an environment of voluntary entitlement transactions, which includes the option to exercise or relinquish rights, is self-regulating. Specifically, Nozick rejects the view that transactions must proceed from a highly structured set of social assumptions about and social evaluations of the valid...