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Notes
Similarly, Morrow sometimes misrepresents my position. For example, I do not claim that most commentators make universal benefit definitional, that Bodansky does so (he is my main citation for the narrow account), or that Morrow’s nonrivalry amounts to ‘nothing more’ than nonexcludability.
Carbone 2007.
Notably, the UNDP offers a broad account even while defining ‘public good’ itself narrowly, in terms of nonrivalry and nonexcludability alone (Kaul et al. 1999, 511).
Morrow claims that Barrett’s “later discussions and examples clearly indicate” the narrow account, but provides no references. Previously, I considered several more charitable interpretations of key passages.
Morrow diminishes this advantage by reducing the principle to the claim that public choice is necessary. He also argues that it is uncharitable to attribute a universal benefit claim to the Oxford authors, since they “clearly allow for the possibility that geoengineering might make some people worse off”. However, this inference is flawed. First, the Oxford universal benefit claim is normative: it implies that SSI that makes people worse off should be prohibited, not that it is impossible. Second, the only normative proposal the Oxford authors consider that allows worsening is the Kaldor-Hicks interpretation, but even this involves hypothetical universal benefit.
Narrow accounts also include things that harm everyone; however, proponents of the broad account often think of preventions of such “global public bads” as themselves global public goods.
Notice that, even if SSI is nonrival in the third sense, it does not follow that it should be described as a global public good just because of this. The existence of two other, much more ethically salient, senses in which it is rival undermines that inference (and distortionary framing effects matter).
I prioritize the verbal definitions because they are almost always presented as constituting the real definitions (in policy documents, articles and textbooks), and because their ambiguities help to explain common variations in interpretation. Moreover, the distinction between verbal definition and mathematical interpretation is not very robust: mathematical formulae also require interpretation in natural language. Given this, the issue is really about which verbal accounts are correct: those in the usual definitions, or the one accurately representing Morrow’s favored mathematical specification.
Morrow’s claim is regional; however, the global scope is more relevant, and the objection also applies regionally.
Cf. ‘destruction of the polio virus’.
Note that, on the deflationary sense of nonrival, x is something that has effects on people that they have no choice but to “consume”. It is not a resource that provides people with options.
The efficiency claim is also not specific to public goods, but characteristic of neoclassical treatments of all economic goods.
Rayner et al. (2013) state that “consideration of global and intergenerational justice” is required, but only in the context of “specifying exactly what counts as” universal benefit, and the main criteria they propose (Pareto and Kaldor-Hicks) are narrow distributive principles from economics.
Interestingly, Morrow grounds it on my second sense of rivalness; but this does not follow either.
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Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for research support to the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington. He also thanks audiences at Arizona State University and Harvard University for helpful discussion, especially Sandy Askland, Timo Goeschi, and David Keith. The views expressed remain the sole responsibility of the author.
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This reply refers to the comment available at 10.1007/s10584-013-0967-1.
Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of the Human Dimensions of the Environment.
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Gardiner, S. Why ‘global public good’ is a treacherous term, especially for geoengineering. Climatic Change 123, 101–106 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1079-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1079-2