Abstract

Nozick’s entitlement theory is often used to oppose redistributive interference with market holdings. Its historical structure creates a less convenient implication: present holdings cannot be presumed just when acquisition and transfer occurred through slavery, dispossession, exclusion, fraud, or coercive legal regimes. This paper argues that entitlement theory requires moral memory. Markets do not cleanse titles by passing them through repeated exchange; nor does the innocence of current holders settle whether institutions continue to enforce advantages generated by injustice. The paper distinguishes five questions frequently collapsed in debates about rectification: causal connection, persistence of benefit and burden, present institutional authorization, agent responsibility, and remedial fit. On this basis, it develops a moral-memory protocol for evaluating historically burdened holdings and institutions. The protocol asks what injustice occurred, how its effects were transmitted, which current rules preserve them, what evidence is available, who has capacity and authority to repair, and which combination of restitution, compensation, institutional reform, public acknowledgment, and future-oriented investment is proportionate. The account takes property rights seriously while rejecting the idea that existing legal possession supplies its own moral pedigree. It also rejects a simple inherited-guilt model: remedial duties can arise from institutional continuity, unjust enrichment, benefit, and capacity even when current persons are not personally blameworthy. Nozick’s incomplete principle of rectification should therefore be treated not as a dispensable appendix but as a standing challenge to market legitimacy. Entitlement without memory is not historical justice. It is a selective history that remembers transfers favorable to current holdings while forgetting the coercion that made them possible.