Public property, collective integrity, and environmental justice. Issue 4 (7th June 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ellis, Elisabeth
• Is Part Of: Critical review of international social and political philosophy. Volume 24:Issue 4(2021)
• Page Start: 650
• Page End: 656
• Publication Date: 2021-06-07
• Subjects: Environmental justice -- liberalism -- collective action -- sovereignty -- climate change; Political science -- Philosophy -- Periodicals; Policy sciences -- Philosophy -- Periodicals; Social sciences -- Philosophy -- Periodicals; 320.01
• DOI: 10.1080/13698230.2020.1744077
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1369-8230

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In The People's Duty, Shmuel Nili employs the concepts of collective integrity and public property to amplify and clarify popular intuitions about political wrongs, providing his readers with a powerful theory of 'liberal democracy with no excuses.' Here I extend Nili's analysis to environmental justice: overuse of the global carbon sink is like theft of public property, while exporting polluting production to less developed countries would violate Nili's global integrity test. However, environmental justice seems to confound the division of collective political agents into discrete occupants of well-defined territories, and that division is one of Nili's foundational assumptions. I argue here that Nili's theory ought to apply to cases like the conflict over water extraction in New Zealand, even though some of the relevant agency in that case is exercised at the subnational level.