Public property, collective integrity, and environmental justice

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.