In a previous post, I toyed with taxonomies of resources to explore the health impacts of different models of ownership. The category of 'public goods', however, went unanalysed beyond the basic definition of a non-excludable and non-rivalrous resource. It's a category, however, that could bear with a rather more fine-grained analysis. It also invites looking beyond the realm of material resources, to less tangible but equally important forms of 'good' (the kinds of thing economists might label 'social', 'cultural' or 'human' capital).
One important distinction between kinds of public good is that raised by an excellent paper I recently encountered by Heather Widdows and Sean Cordell. Some goods enjoyed by a community are such that the total benefit is simply the sum of the benefits enjoyed by all individual members of that community; if one is inclined to believe that costs and benefits may accrue only to individuals, then such is the only kind of sense that can be made of public goods. However, a more expansive conception of the kinds of thing that might be bearers of value opens the floor to another kind of good - where the benefits attach, not to community members, but to the community itself.
Widdows and Cordell call the first kind of goods 'aggregative' - their value is determined solely by the aggregation of their value to all individuals in a given community. The second kind they label 'corporate' goods:
"Not only do they require a community in order to be realised [...] but importantly they also only exist as community and social goods. These goods are best understood as 'emergent social properties', in that they come about from the association and relations of individuals, yet are distinct from those of individuals."
In other words, while aggregative goods may only come about within certain types of society, they are valuable only because of the benefits members of that society enjoy as a result. Corporate goods, by contrast, attach not to any individual member(s) of the community but rather emerge from the interrelations between members. In other words, corporate goods are not their (i.e. community members') goods, but rather its (the community's) goods.
Some are dubious of the significance of corporate goods; any methodologically individualistic position, of course, is premised on the impossibility of such a category of goods existing. But the sparse normative landscape of such positions is barren of much of the thicker content vital to interpreting the mid-level principles of much applied ethics.
So why think there are such things as corporate goods? Widdows and Cordell seem to suggest that goods whose value accrues to an indefinite number of present and future individuals, via an indefinite range of mechanisms, by that indeterminacy can be considered corporate, rather than aggregative, goods. A good example here is sustainable infectious disease control (or elimination of some communicable disease); it is not just those to whom the disease control/elimination measures are administered who benefit from not being affected by the disease, but all those present and future individuals who are thereby not exposed to the risk of contracting it; as we don't know the future of this population, that's an indeterminate group of people. Furthermore, the lower levels of sickness, avoidance of need for future coercive control measures like quarantine, and so forth produce a diffuse variety of economic, social and cultural benefits (see the well-established economic benefits of a healthier workforce, for isntance). Widdows and Cordell are sceptical that an exhaustive list of those benefits and their beneficiaries could be created. But if we accept 'infection control' as an emergent social property, it can instead bear value itself - as a corporate good.
I'm not altogether convinced by this argument, for the simple reason that it seems to me they take an argument for some aggregative goods having indeterminate value and propose that the conclusion is instead that they are not aggregative goods at all. However, I'd suggest there are several independent reasons to admit corporate goods into one's taxonomy of values. Some are more metaphysical, while others are a bit more pragmatic.
Firstly, while not everyone accepts the hypothesis, for anyone inclined to the communitarian view that individuals are constitutively social - that our emotions, desires, values, ourselves, only arise within a relational network of interaction with those around us. Charles Taylor's description of humans as 'self-interpreting animals', and the dialogical nature of such self-interpretation, for example, make the social community ontologically prior to the individual - as such, goods accrue first to that community.
Another argument for corporate goods exists as more of a technical advantage of the account. Aggregative accounts of value tend to fall foul of one or another form of the 'mere addition paradox' - most famously stated as Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion: "For any possible population of at
least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there
must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if
other things are equal, would be better even though its members have
lives that are barely worth living."
The repugnant conclusion arises because overall value is determined by purely aggregative means; the repugnancy comes from an intuition that certain distributions of value amongst certain sizes of community/population should be better than others - the world would not be made a better place purely by the addition of lots more people, especially not if everyone led a comparatively miserable life as a result! This intuition makes perfect sense on an understanding of value that permits corporate goods; certain communal structures are better, and one does not have to understand that in terms of benefits accruing to individuals, and the aggregation thereof, at all.
As a last note, I'd suggest there are certain values that are gaining increasing currency within bioethics and public health ethics that seem naturally more at home in the corporate goods framework. Solidarity, equity, thicker (non-liberal) conceptions of social justice - first and foremost, these are social properties - not of individuals. These fit alongside systems of value that have always rejected the anthropocentrism of aggregative accounts - deep ecology, for example.
Why am I concerned with the defence of corporate goods? Given communitarian sympathies, it's unsurprising that I'd be at home with them. There's a more deep reason, however; recent debates around access to NHS services have reinforced in my mind the conclusion that diseases don't afflict individuals; whether 'communicable' or otherwise, they are inescapably relational entities. Conceptualising health care as interventions targetted at individuals for individual benefit - and its overall worth as the aggregative sum of such benefits - misrepresents the social/relational nature of health and disease. Corporate goods may be a vital way of reimagining value in a way that allows for a fuller understanding of that nature.
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