In Section I, I introduce the Fair Play principle proposed by Rawls and criticize some of the ways in which its scope of application has been defined in the literature. But, contra Nozick, and perhaps surprisingly, my Fair Play account can be put to work in grounding a wide range of fairness obligations, including political obligation. I also show how my understanding of the principle of Fair Play accommodates the Nozickian voluntarist objection.
I show how the account of Fair Play that I develop, which I call the Shared Preference View, allows us to shed light on some important features of Fair Play that have so far remained unclear or underexplored, such as the basis for the contributors’ claims against free riders and the normative significance of the contributors’ intentions.
In this article, I develop an account of the normatively relevant similarities that must obtain between the free riders and the contributors for free riding to count as making an exception of oneself. But in order to know whether, and in what sense, failing to pay one’s share amounts to making an exception of oneself, we need to specify the ways in which the free rider and those who produce the benefit are otherwise relevantly similarly situated such that failing to pay amounts to unjustifiably making an exception of oneself. The specific form of wrongful partiality involved in free riding is making an unjustified exception of oneself by failing to pay one’s share. Like Cullity, I believe that unfairness, whenever it occurs, is a failure of appropriate impartiality. My account draws on Garrett Cullity’s discussion of the principle of fairness. It provides an account of the conditions that make free riding unfair that are derived from, and justified by reference to, a general understanding of why free riding is unfair when it is unfair. This article offers a systematic approach to Fair Play. 6 6 McDermott 2004 Wellman 2005 Normore 2010 Dworkin 20.
This lack of systematic analysis is partly to blame for widespread scepticism about Fair Play. This discussion, however, has proceeded largely through appeal to our intuitions in various cases, as opposed to systematic approaches to uncovering why free riding in certain conditions amounts to acting unfairly. This has been of particular interest to those who have regarded Fair Play as a promising basis for political obligation. The ensuing debate has attempted to spell out the conditions under which there can be Fair Play obligations to pay for unconsented-to benefits. Nozick’s voluntarist objection has been, and remains, a hurdle for any defence of Fair Play. Famously, Robert Nozick retorted that having to pay for benefits that one has not consented to paying for is tantamount to being held hostage to other people’s will. The now-familiar principle states that, when a group of people engage in a rule-governed, benefits-producing cooperative activity, third parties who voluntarily internalize these benefits owe it to the producers to do their part in their production.
proposed a principle of fairness (or Fair Play) meant to identify the wrongful forms of free riding. If your neighbour mows your lawn without having asked, is it wrong not to pay? What about not paying your taxes for a public service which you benefit from but would rather forgo?Īll of these are instances of free riding: of consuming benefits one has not paid for. Think of using public transport without buying a ticket, or failing to do your part in cleaning a shared flat. Do you have an obligation to pay for it? And if you refuse to pay, would you be wronging those who produced it? There are some cases in which failing to pay seems uncontroversially wrong. You have not consented to receiving and paying for it, but you consume it nevertheless.