 The problem with patterned principles is that, in Nozick’s words, liberty upsets patterns. “No end-state principle or distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives” (1974: 163). To illustrate, Nozick asks you to imagine that society achieves a pattern of perfect justice by the lights of whatever principle you prefer. Then someone offers Wilt Chamberlain a dollar for the privilege of watching Wilt play basketball. Before we know it, thousands of people are paying Wilt a dollar each, every time Wilt puts on a show. Wilt gets rich. The distribution is no longer equal, and no one complains. Nozick’s question: If justice is a pattern, achievable at a given moment, what happens if you achieve perfection? Must you then prohibit everything—no further consuming, creating, trading, or even giving—so as not to upset the perfect pattern? Notice: Nozick neither argues nor presumes people can do whatever they want with their property. Nozick, recalling the focus on connecting property rights to liberty that animated liberalism in its classical form, notes that if there is anything at all people can do, even if the only thing they are free to do is give a coin to an entertainer, then even that tiniest of liberties will, over time, disturb the favored pattern. Nozick is right that if we focus on time slices, we focus on isolated moments, and take moments too seriously, when what matters is not the pattern of holdings at a moment but the pattern of how people treat each other over time. Even tiny liberties must upset the pattern of a static moment. By the same token, however, there is no reason why liberty must upset an ongoing pattern of fair treatment. A moral principle forbidding racial discrimination, for example, prescribes no particular end-state. Such a principle is what Nozick calls weakly patterned, sensitive to history as well as to pattern, and prescribing an ideal of how people should be treated without prescribing an end-state distribution. It affects the pattern without prescribing a pattern. And if a principle forbidding racial discrimination works its way into a society via cultural progress rather than legal intervention, it need not involve any interference whatsoever. So, although Nozick sometimes speaks as if his critique applies to all patterns, we should take seriously his concession that “weak” patterns are compatible with liberty. Some may promote liberty, depending on how they are introduced and maintained. See Schmidtz (2006: chap.6). For work by modern liberals that resonates with Nozick’s dissection of the dimensions of equality that plausibly can count as liberal, see also Anderson (1999), Young (1990), and Sen (1992).