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Different theories justify property ownership: through labor (Locke), first occupancy, utility maximization, and desert. Justice in property distribution is fundamental to evaluating economic systems. Political philosophy debates whether justice requires protecting initial acquisition, respecting current holdings, or actively redistributing property.
Apply different property justifications to concrete cases: taxation, inheritance, resource extraction. Observe how different theories lead to radically different conclusions about fair distribution.
From your study of Locke, you have the classic labor theory: by mixing your labor with unowned natural resources, you acquire a property right in them, subject to the Lockean proviso (leave enough and as good for others). From distributive justice, you have frameworks for evaluating distributions — Rawls's difference principle, utilitarian aggregation, sufficientarianism. Now the question is how these connect: what makes property holdings just in the first place, and what constraints does justice place on how property may be distributed and redistributed?
Nozick's entitlement theory is the most radical extension of the Lockean tradition. Justice in holdings is entirely historical: a distribution is just if it arose through just original acquisition and just voluntary transfers. If you legitimately acquired your property and freely gave or sold it, the resulting distribution is just — full stop. No pattern of distribution (equality, sufficiency, proportionality to need) is independently required by justice. This has a striking implication for redistribution: any taxation of earnings that doesn't compensate for rights violations is morally equivalent to forced labor — the state takes the product of your work without consent. Applying this to inheritance: since parents can transfer property to children, even vast dynastic wealth is just if the chain of acquisition and transfer was clean. The historical process, not the resulting pattern, is what justice tracks.
Utilitarian accounts reach radically different conclusions from a different starting point. Property rights are justified not by a natural right to the product of labor, but by their consequences: secure, well-defined property rights incentivize investment, enable voluntary exchange, reduce transaction costs, and generate prosperity. This justification is entirely contingent. If the evidence showed that some redistribution or alternative property regime produced better aggregate welfare, utilitarianism would favor it. More importantly, the utilitarian says that there is no natural right to property prior to social institutions — property is a legal and social creation, and its rules should be designed to produce good outcomes. The Lockean proviso becomes, on this reading, not a natural rights constraint but a welfare constraint: don't structure property rights in ways that make the overall result worse.
The deepest fault line is between views that treat property as a natural right (pre-political, constraining what the state may do) and views that treat it as a social institution (created by law, to be designed for justice or welfare). On the natural-rights view, the state finds property already there and must respect it as a side-constraint on its authority — legitimate taxation is strictly limited to funding the protection of those pre-existing rights. On the social-institution view, Rawls's difference principle determines the structure of property institutions from the ground up: the basic rules governing acquisition, transfer, and inheritance should be those that maximize the position of the worst-off members of society. A Rawlsian might endorse quite extensive estate taxes, not because the state is taking what you earned, but because the very institution of inheritable property is only justified to the extent that its structure benefits everyone, including those at the bottom. The dispute about property rights is thus ultimately a dispute about whether rights are foundational — grounding justice — or derivative — grounded by prior principles of justice that determine which rights we should recognize.
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