Distributive justice and global public goods

Thesis

Public goods are goods that are non-rival and non-excludable. One person enjoying the benefits of a public good will not reduce the value of the good for others. And nobody within a particular population can be excluded from enjoying those benefits. While we often think of the relevant population being co-citizens of a state - national defence is taken to be the archetypal public good - in recent years the importance of public goods that benefit individuals across different countries has increasingly been recognised. We can refer to these as "global public goods".

When global public goods are supplied, various costs and benefits are generated, and these costs and benefits can be shared among countries in different ways. This thesis explores how justice requires us to share them; I develop a theory of distributive justice for global public goods. I begin by developing two principles for assigning the costs and benefits of supplying public goods within a state, and then argue that these should, for the most part, also govern the distribution of costs and benefits arising from global public good production. Finally, I assess how certain private goods that the supply of public goods make possible should be shared among states. The fact that these goods rely for their production on the supply of global public goods, I argue, will affect the principles of distributive justice that should govern these.

Authors: Taylor, I

• Publication date: 2014
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: Oxford University, UK
• Language: English
• Keywords: global public goods; distributive justice; global justice
• Subjects: Political science; Philosophy