Reconfiguring essential and discretionary public goods

Friedemann Bieber; Maurits de Jongh

doi:10.1017/S0266267123000329

Reconfiguring essential and discretionary public goods

Friedemann Bieber, Maurits de Jongh

OFR - Ethics Institute

University of Zurich

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

When is state coercion for the provision of public goods justified? And how should the social surplus of public goods be distributed? Philosophers approach these questions by distinguishing between essential and discretionary public goods. This article explains the intractability of this distinction, and presents two upshots. First, if governments provide configurations of public goods that simultaneously serve essential and discretionary purposes, the scope for justifiable complaints by honest holdouts is narrower than commonly assumed. Second, however, claims to distributive fairness in the provision of public goods also turn out to be more complex to assess.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	535-556
Number of pages	22
Journal	Economics and Philosophy
Volume	40
Issue number	3
Early online date	1 Sept 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267123000329
Publication status	Published - Nov 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Funding

This article has benefitted from conversations with many people, including (but by no means limited to) Uğur Aytaç, Ralf Bader, Andreas Cassee, Francis Cheneval, Serena Olsaretti, Adam Swift and Emma Tieffenbach. For excellent discussion of an earlier draft, we thank the participants of the workshop ‘Public Goods, Property Rights, and the Markets’, held at the University of Zurich in September 2022. We are especially grateful to Rutger Claassen, whose excellent set of comments provided at this occasion proved highly productive to the development of the article. Finally, we are indebted to two anonymous reviewers for this journal, whose constructive feedback has helped substantially clarify the argument. Friedemann Bieber’s work on this article has been supported by an Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) (Grant: 199654) and the University of Zurich’s Research Priority Program ‘URPP Equality of Opportunity’. 1

Funders	Funder number
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung	199654
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
Universität Zürich

Keywords

Public goods
distributive justice
economic efficiency
essential vs. discretionary public goods
honest holdout

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Cite this

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Reconfiguring essential and discretionary public goods

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

Access to Document

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