 Nozick’s approach to justice in holdings has to be seen as emerging from his broad construal of the implications of the Rawlsian-Nozickean critique of utilitarianism. Whereas Rawls concludes that a due respect for the separateness of persons precludes imposing losses on individuals for the sake of the general welfare, Nozick concludes that it precludes imposing losses upon individuals for the sake of any conception of the overall social good—including deeply distribution-sensitive conceptions. The justice of a given individual’s possession of and discretionary control over certain economic goods cannot be a function of that possession and control contributing to the general welfare or to any other overall social end-state or pattern. All such consequentialist assessments of holdings are ruled out of court. So, if there is any acceptable account of the justice of individual holdings, it must be a backward-looking account. The justification must depend upon how the holdings in question have arisen.