Public Goods and Social Justice

Abstract

Why should the state provide public goods? I explore this question by focusing on the example of public parks. It examines the three most influential approaches to public goods (the market failures, the normative, and the democratic) and concludes that they fail to explain why parks should be public. I propose an alternative that I call solidarism, a social justice-based approach that provides a response to liberal arguments about the neutrality of the state. Solidarism emphasizes that modernity gives rise to growing levels of interdependence that generate benefits and burdens that are not shared fairly. Public goods as such are a way of compensating for the negative externalities of urbanization and industrialization. Left libertarians argue that such compensation should exclusively take the form of individual benefits. I challenge this view and provide three reasons for building public infrastructure that is shared among people who live together in a physical space: solidarity, decommodification, and politics. Exploring the publicness of parks provides a window into the broader question about the limits of the market and the importance of public space for democracy.

Legal and Ethical Perspectives on (Big) Data, Platforms, Ai and Algorithms

“…We examine three major approaches of the public good (market failure, basic rights, and democratic) (Kohn, 2020) to explain why big data should be regarded as a public good.…”

“…The market failure approach: This approach suggests that when goods are widely beneficial to the public and yet are not profitable, the inability of the market to provide these goods to a sufficient degree renders the state a legitimate reason to provide them (Kohn, 2020). Consider, for example, real-time traffic data.…”

“…The contributions of this paper are threefold: first, it develops an interdisciplinary political theory of data justice by connecting three major political theories of the public good (market failure, basic rights, and democratic) (e.g., Kohn, 2020) with empirical studies about the functions of big data (Christin, 2020), thus offering a distinctive perspective explicating why big data should be considered as a public good. Second, it systematically defends the state's right to collect big data from a public good perspective.…”

Towards a political theory of data justice: a public good perspective

“…The contributions of this article are twofold, namely, first, it develops an interdisciplinary political theory of data justice by connecting three major political theories of the public good (Kohn, 2021) with empirical studies about the functions of big data. It systematically defends the state’s right to collect and use big data from a public good perspective, while acknowledging the limitations of such data practices.…”

Public Goods and the Commons: Opposites or Complements?

“…Instead of conceiving them as foes, the challenge is to promote virtuous circles of interplay between public and common modes of providing and enjoying goods. 2 This challenge becomes especially crucial to counter undesirable instances of privatization. The underlying motivation for this essay is that an orientation on objects, and on different types of goods, does not block our sight of (in)justice in social relationships, but instead helps us to illuminate and criticize it in unforeseen ways.…”