Non-rivalry:6 one person's enjoyment of a good does not reduce the benefits available to anyone else as a result of that enjoyment. The force of this question is independent of any concerns about the extension of the principle. Moreover, the force of the question is certainly intensified by the existence of strong opposition to the extension of the fairness principle to involuntary benefits.
But now consider this simpler proposition, which is a prototype of the principle to be advocated here. The unreasonableness of my refusing to meet the requirements of the Shoe Repair Convention is contained in the principle stated above. There are no chaotic dangers in the adoption of their alternative commercial convention, so the fair generalization of the scheme remains acceptable.
The foregoing comments suggest the following interpretation of the requirement that the benefit a free rider receives must be worth its cost. It should be that the balance of the benefits and costs attributable (in the specified sense) to the participation of others in the scheme, plus the costs of my own compliance with the requirements of the scheme, but excluding any benefits that are attributable (in that sense) to the non-participation of others, is positive. Condition (i) builds on the previous formulation of the principle in the manner just set out, replacing the clause requiring that the benefits in question be worth their cost with the requirement that the practice of participating in the scheme represents a net benefit .
Condition (ii) similarly qualifies the clause requiring that a "reasonable generalization" of the scheme's requirements not be to the detriment of virtually everyone.
JUSTIFICATION OF THE PRINCIPLE
The question at issue is this: In what characteristic of Fare-Evader's conduct lies her inappropriate preferential treatment of herself. For him, we only identified the sense in which the Fare Evader's treatment of himself is arguably preferable when we referred to the fact that he deliberately takes away benefits for which he depends on the willingness of others to pay. A more promising attempt to show how taking the benefit of the Fare Evader contributes to its unfairness refers to the differences between the content of the intention of the beneficiary and the intention of the recipient.
That there are such differences is undeniable: the Danger Evader intends to take the advantage, whereas the recalcitrant fisherman does not - it is forced upon him against his will. And that is, the Fare-Evader allows her practical plans to be guided by the actions of indulgences in a way that the Recalcitrant Fisherman's is not. And this gives a sense that the Danger-Evader exploits and takes advantage of the advantage-creating compliance of the others, but the recalcitrant fisherman does not.43.
Paying commuters share Fare-Evader's intention to secure the benefits of the public transport system - their plans are therefore governed by the actions of other providers in the same way - and yet they are not acting unfairly. What it does show, however, is that if there is a morally significant sense in which the Danger Evader exploits or exploits the compliance of others, it is not provided simply by her intention to take the benefits it produces. It does not help to describe the Fare-Evader's intention more carefully as one of taking advantage without paying.
The problem with that, however, is the reverse: this intention is one that the Fare-Evader does not need to possess. It is therefore difficult to see how an appeal to the content of the Fare-Evader's intention helps advance my opponent's case, according to which her taking of the benefits is essential to the unfairness of her actions. Perhaps it is not their intentions in relation to their own actions that assure him the morally significant difference between the Fare-Evader and the Recalcitrant Fisherman, but their preferences in relation to others'.
It is, of course, true that, as described at first, the Fare Evader resorts to deception, but the Deceitful Fisherman does not: it is essential to the success of her plan that she does not announce her intention to default in the way he does. It is therefore difficult to see how the deliberate taking of benefits helps to characterize the disputed preferential treatment of the Ticket Evader, which consists in the unfairness of her conduct. The feature of primary moral importance seems to be simply the Fugitive's dependence of the benefits she receives on the willingness of others to pay for them without her being willing to do so herself.
About the proposed characterization of the suitor's unfairness is the accusation that I hardly give myself preferential treatment. Thus, it can be seen that all the clauses of the principle of fairness that I propose follow naturally from a simple characterization of the kind of unfairness exhibited by the Fare-Evader.
PRINCIPLES AND JUSTIFICATION
The question with which my discussion began - "If the free rider harms no one, what is it about her behavior that makes her unjust?" - is now fully answered, and both initial tasks are completed. The features of her behavior that make her unjust are those identified by my principle; and these features make it unjust by condemning it to the kind of objectionable preferential treatment often characteristic of injustice. He seeks to support various clauses of the principle by invoking a general characterization of the unfairness of Fare-Evader in terms of "the arrogating of preferential advantages."
The claim of the previous section is that the formulation of the principle is guided by a coherent and recognizable conception of fairness – one that the principle itself helps to clarify. Indeed, I would prefer this latter way of conceiving the justification of moral judgments, obligations, and actions. But defending it is another matter:46 the point here is merely that preserving the importance of the principle is compatible with an open-minded view of the structure of ethical justification.
2 The locus classicus of the contemporary literature on economic public goods is Samuelson (1954). For antecedents, see Head [1962], pp.197-98.) He emphasizes the third feature and infers the seventh; but the conclusion is questionable if those to whom a good with the third characteristic is available may have different capacities to consume it. Other writers prefer to use these characteristics to define pure publicity, making publicity a matter of the degree to which it is approximated. But if (as seems common) the conditional is interpreted more strongly – as requiring that it be of the nature of every good that exhibits commonality in supply, that its availability to one entails its availability to all – then follows non-excludability.
10 For this reason, the free rider problem is not a Prisoner's Dilemma (contra Hardin [1971]): it does not yet say that cooperation is suboptimal for each individual, regardless of the actions of other group members. As Miller and Sartorius (1975) point out, p. 152, many goods that meet the standard definitions of public goods are positive evils. A later claim is that the principle of fairness grounds all obligations, including the most prominent obligation of loyalty—that is, keeping promises—but political duties have a different source.
If, therefore, a more discriminating version of the principle can be provided that accommodates the Nozickian judgments with which Simmons begins, while supporting the charge of unfairness in these kinds of cases, then Simmons's method seems to force him to accept it . 29 Arneson (1982), p.622 clarifies this condition in more detail: "It is impossible for the cooperative scheme to be arranged in such a way that private benefits are delivered to each recipient of B in sufficient quantity to make all recipients contribute their reasonable share of the costs of the scheme." The rationale for this condition "is simply that if the necessary public good can be secured in a reasonable manner and without coercion, coercion should not be resorted to." But this move, which would make exclusion more properly a characteristic of benefit schemes than of the benefits themselves, has the more serious consequence that goods of any type conferred by a scheme whose essential characteristic is that it forces them on people will count as non-excludable.
This would mean endorsing the demands of a co-operative organized version of the Enterprising Elves' scheme. 31 There is certainly no threat to such an opponent either in the observation that the statements that Nozick actually makes are compatible with the recognition of obligations to pay for non-voluntary benefits in other circumstances (compare Maphai [1987], p. 74); the strategy of asserting the distinct nature of political obligations and claiming an account of the principle of equity as their best explanation (Klosko [1987], p.355); or the interesting argument that Nozick's Lockean account of the legitimacy of the appropriation of private property in a state of nature rests on foundations which likewise support an extended Principle of Fairness (Arneson [1982], pp.623-33 - compare Davis [1987] ).
