Public goods and fairness

Abstract

To what extent can we as a community legitimately require individuals to contribute to producing public goods? Most of us think that, at least sometimes, refusing to pay for a public good that you have enjoyed can involve a kind of ‘free riding’ that makes it wrong. But what is less clear is under exactly which circumstances this is wrong. To work out the answer to that, we need to know why it is wrong. I argue that when free riding is wrong, the reason is that it is unfair. That is not itself a very controversial claim. But spelling out why it is unfair allows us to see just which forms of free riding are wrong. Moreover, it supplies a basis from which some more controversial conclusions can be defended. Even if a public good is one that you have been given without asking for it or seeking it out, it can still be wrong not to be prepared to pay for it. It can be wrong not to be prepared to pay for public goods even when you do not receive them at all. And furthermore, it can be right to force you to do so.

Notes

¹This is Rawls's label for the following principle [1971: 111 – 12]:

a person is required to do his part as defined by the rules of an institution when two conditions are met: first, the institution is just (or fair), that is, it satisfies the two principles of justice; and second, one has voluntarily accepted the benefits of the arrangement or taken advantage of the opportunities it offers to further one's interests.

Rawls presents this as a version of Hart's 1955: 185] principle of ‘mutuality of restrictions’. For earlier expressions of similar ideas, see [Broad 1916: 384 – 90] and [Ewing 1953. Many revised versions have been subsequently defended by others (including myself, in [Cullity 1995: 18 – 19]).

Rawls originally endorsed the project of justifying political obligation on these grounds [1964]. However, he abandoned this project in [Rawls 1971: 113 – 16], on the grounds that the principle of fairness generates obligations only in respect of voluntarily accepted benefits. This has become the standard objection to grounding political obligation in the principle of fairness: for some other influential statements of this objection, see Simmons 1979a; 1979b: chap.V; 1993: 256 – 60] and Dworkin 1986: 192 – 3]. For further criticism, see also Pateman 1979: 121 – 9].

²Recent supporters of the project include Klosko 1992; 2001; Arneson 1982; Dagger 1997: chap.5]; Davis 1987; and (with qualifications) Wolff 1995.

These writers have largely been concerned to show that the principle of fairness can be formulated in a way that avoids intuitively compelling counterexamples without being restricted to voluntarily accepted benefits, and that the principle so formulated forms a coherent fit with intuitively appealing judgements about political obligation. The aim here is to complement those discussions by offering a deeper explanation of how refusing to pay for unsolicited benefits can be unfair.

³In Cullity 1995, I argued that if free riding is unfair, then it can be unfair not to be willing to pay for compulsory goods. The aim here is to show why free riding is unfair, and to use this to strengthen the argument for thinking that refusing to pay for public goods can be wrong, even when they are compulsory.

⁴I am not offering this explanation as an analysis of impartiality—as if the relevant concepts of neutrality or abstraction were more basic than that of impartiality itself.

⁵Impartiality, as I have explained it, is relative to a group. In this example, I treat my children impartially. But I am being partial towards my children in preference to other people's.

⁶I discuss this range of cases in slightly fuller detail in Cullity 2004: 115 – 17].

⁷Simmons 1992 suggests otherwise.

⁸The line I am drawing between ‘distributive’ and ‘procedural’ fairness does not correspond to everyone's use of these labels. For example, Rawls 1971: 86], would count the competition prize example as an instance of pure procedural justice.

⁹Saying this is consistent with John Broome's view 1991: 95] that distributive fairness satisfies each person's claim to a good in proportion to the strength of the claim. However, an objection to that view comes from cases in which it is fair to conduct a lottery to distribute an indivisible good to which several people have equal claims. The resulting distribution satisfies one claim completely; the others not at all. It therefore seems better to say that distributive fairness requires responding to claims to a good in a way that is appropriately proportional to the strength of each person's claim to that good. (On the distribution of indivisible goods, see Szaniawski 1991.) This suggestion also differs from Broome's in its implications concerning divisible goods. Suppose I have a cake to distribute, everyone with a claim to it has an equally strong claim, and I simply throw the cake away. On Broome's view, this is not unfair [1991: 97 – 8]; on the alternative just suggested, it is unfair, since I am responding to those who have a claim in the way that it is appropriate to respond to those who have no claim at all.

¹⁰‘But surely there's nothing wrong with exploiting the trust of a gangster’. I agree that there can be morally defensible exploitations of trust. However, it is no help to the current objection to maintain that this is always true about gangsters. For that either abandons the idea that this is unfair and hence a counterexample to my account, or it turns into the objection discussed in the appendix.

¹¹I am not saying cruelty, dishonesty, or disloyalty can never be unfair. On the contrary: leaving my partner to bring up our young children on her own might be all of those things. My point is that not all instances of these other moral failings are also unfair, and my account explains why not.

¹²In saying this, I am not taking sides on the deeper question whether the content of morality as a whole is determined by a criterion of impartial acceptability. (For discussion of this further question, see, e.g., the symposium in Ethics 101 [1991], Nagel 1991: chap.2], and Wolf 1992.) Maybe what makes cruelty morally wrong is that it involves a standard of behaviour that could not be accepted from a completely impartial point of view. But that is not to say that we are criticizing the cruel person for failing to act impartially.

¹³The two usual suggestions seem to have obvious flaws. One suggestion is that what fair actions have in common is that they are ways of treating people as they deserve—giving them their due [Hinton 1990: 285]. This seems too broad: if you are uniformly aggressive to other people you are not giving them their due, but the moral objection against you is not that you are being unfair (for a memorable illustration of this point, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Morgenbesser). It also seems too narrow: if the undeserving athlete finishes first within the rules, it would be unfair to deprive her of the prize [Rawls 2001: 73 – 4]. At best, fair action would have to be described as one way of treating people as they deserve; and the task of giving an account of fairness becomes the task of saying what is distinctive of that way.

The other suggestion is that we might explain the concern for fairness as a concern for equality. This takes various forms: thus fairness is taken to require that ‘similar individuals should be treated similarly’ Klosko 1992: 34], ‘that no one should be advantaged or disadvantaged by arbitrary factors’ Wolff 1998: 106], or ‘equality of status’ Hinton 2001. A similar view is suggested by Griffin 1985 and Dworkin 1981. However, such suggestions struggle to account for several of the non-distributive kinds of fairness and unfairness I have identified—unless they are qualified in a way that makes them equivalent to the account I have offered. The same, I would argue, is true of a third kind of view, advocated by Carr 2000 and Rescher 2002, according to which fairness consists in fidelity to social practices that meet certain conditions.

¹⁴The literature on public goods presents several different and incompatible definitions; but they all cluster around these two broad characteristics. For a careful survey of those definitions, see Cullity 1995; 2001.

¹⁵This is rough because it spans two distinguishable features: the ‘compulsoriness’ of goods one cannot avoid receiving without excessive cost and the ‘nonexcludability’ of goods one cannot be prevented (without excessive cost) from taking for free, once produced.

¹⁶Discussions of ‘non-rival’ goods often run together two issues: whether one person's consumption of a good diminishes the amount available for consumption by anyone else, and whether it diminishes the benefits available to anyone else from consuming it. For economists, the interesting feature of joint consumption goods is that total consumption of them is not equal to the sum of individual consumptions. See, e.g., Samuelson 1955: 350].

¹⁷One version of this problem will be a many-person ‘Prisoner's Dilemma’: a situation in which non-contribution is in the interests of each whatever anyone else does. But there are other versions as well. For a helpful discussion of the variety of strategic situations surrounding the production of public goods, see Hampton 1987; also Frohlich et al. 1975.

¹⁸On the variety of motives underpinning contributions to collective action, see Elster 1985. For an empirical study of the conditions under which the uncoerced production of public goods actually happens, see Ostrom 1990. For studies of the social psychology governing cooperating individuals, see Goldberg et al. 2005.

¹⁹Of course, my contribution also involves a form of partiality: partiality to this group rather than others. But that is no objection to my claim: see note 5.

²⁰My individual failure of impartiality might not actually contribute to explaining our collectively failing to do what we ought: if enough others join in, we might still succeed. But it remains true that such individual failures can contribute to explaining this.

²¹Most versions of the principle of fairness require that the costs and benefits of a cooperative scheme must be fairly distributed. Where this condition is justified, it will be a corollary of the account presented here, because it will bear on whether we ought to be operating the scheme as we are. However, I think it is wrong to claim that non-contribution is only unfair when costs and benefits are distributed with perfect fairness: I explain why in Section V.

²²Nozick's discussion does not commit him to this conclusion. However, he does argue that it is always wrong to force a person to pay for unsolicited goods.

²³Compare Arneson 1982: 622]. I give some reasons for thinking that this is only usually the case [1995: Section III].

²⁴As Section II showed, my actively taking a good without paying might be unfair even if the good ought not to have been produced. This is because it might be an exploitation of trust, procedurally unfair, or unfair in some other way. But refusing to pay for a compulsory good that ought not to have been produced is not unfair in any of those ways.

²⁵These worries seem central to Nozick's discussion [1974: 94 – 5].

²⁶I mention here some of the reasons that bear on what we ought to do, but have given nothing like a full account of them. My aim is not to offer full justifications for claims about what we ought to do; but to argue that when there is something we ought to do, requirements of fairness follow.

²⁷‘Usually’: some collective decisions reached by fair procedures might be so bad that, all things considered, I ought not to respect them.

²⁸Is this true? The alternative is to say that although we ought not to have decided to perform this action, having decided to perform it, we ought to perform it. The present paper remains agnostic on this issue: my [unpublished] is not. (For relevant discussion, see Rawls 1964: Sections 3 and 4].)

²⁹For some suitable specification of ‘good enough’. See note 26.

³⁰With small groups, we can often solve this by unanimity. With large ones, we often cannot.

³¹This point—a point often made since Hobbes—invites another application of my argument, in support of the conclusion that vigilantism is a kind of unfairness. The rule of law is a very important public good which we ought, all things considered, to produce; the way it ought to be produced is through individuals' relinquishing the personal use of force; and doing so involves a kind of impartiality, doing what is required from a point of view that abstracts from one's own situation.

³²‘Usually’: I leave open the possibility of emergency cases.

³³Compare Arneson 1982: 621].

³⁴This is not the only way the four conditions might be met. In particular, it is often unreasonable to have to try producing a good without coercion before resorting to coercion.

³⁵I might have a right to favour one of my children unfairly over the others, at least in the sense that no one else is morally entitled to prevent me.

³⁶My argument cannot do this; perhaps another can. Perhaps non-democratic societies as well as democratic ones can justifiably tax their citizens to produce important public goods. But a defence of this would have to come from elsewhere.

³⁷This paper has been greatly improved by helpful comments from Maurice Goldsmith, Daniel Shapiro, Paul Tudico, two anonymous readers for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and audiences at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews, CAPPE Canberra, the inaugural LSU Ethics Symposium and the 2003 AAP conference.