Camille: Ripstein on Collective Action, Coercion, and Climate Change

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What interested me most about this reading was how force and coercion can be justified and required in public domains and how collection action problems should go about being solved. 


Ripstein outlines Kant’s account of freedom, where everyone has independence from being constrained by another’s choice so long as it coexists with everyone else’s systems of freedom. Therefore, everyone is entitled to be their own master, and you can use your body and powers to pursue your own purposes and ends. This innate right to freedom leads to private right, which governs interactions between free persons (like property, contract, and status).


But unlike a private right, the state has a series of distinct further powers that no private person could have. This includes the obligation and entitlement to secure, maintain, and improve a rightful condition (like creating public spaces, supporting the poor, guaranteeing formal equality of opportunity, punishing, and taxing). On a private, interpersonal level, no person could require you to modify your route on the road, even if you would benefit from it in the long run. To do so would be to force others to modify their behavior in pursuit of someone’s particular purpose – they no longer would become the master of their selves. 


The principle of public right is the key to analyzing how the state can force people to act. Because the state acts on behalf of the citizens as a collective body, it has legitimate powers that neither individual citizens nor groups can have apart from it. Therefore, it can enforce principles of social cooperation distinct from the obligations that private citizens owe each other, which can mandate cooperation when a system of equal freedom requires it. The state, therefore, is viewed as being tasked with providing public goods, which, when produced, benefit everyone and lead to positive externalities. With public goods, however, there often arise issues of free-riding and other collective action problems.


Connecting the theory to the real world, climate change is a pressing collective action problem with dire consequences, and I would argue that it is the state’s entitlement and obligation to enforce certain sustainable standards to secure freedom.


Ripstein uses the argument of roads to show how the exercise and enforcement of the state are used to prevent people from misappropriating public space for private purposes. If someone parks their car in a driving lane, they cause inconvenience to other drivers and turn what was once a collective and public space into something for their exclusive private use. Parallels can be drawn to natural resource extraction and poor treatment of natural environments. We all should have a shared claim to things like clean air, healthy water, and security in natural resources. Yet major corporations and non-environmentally conscious people pollute, extract, and degrade access to these seemingly key public goods. Therefore, the libertarian account doesn’t cut it regarding climate change. Something like the state must act on behalf of the citizens as a collective body to secure the rightful condition of people. In the case of something like public health, the state’s mandate to protect public health comes from its mandate to see to its own preservation, which allows the state to compel citizens into paying taxes for that cause. Climate protection should be viewed similarly (and is beginning to). The maintenance and health of our earth is a direct connection to human freedom, and the state should be entitled and obliged to make efforts to compel citizens and corporations to act more sustainably and restrict harmful practices. (This, too, leads to an interesting question on the rights and responsibilities of corporations compared to citizens).


I found it interesting that when considering collective action problems and mandatory cooperation, Ripstein warned against justifying it through benefits, burdens, or externalities because these externalities do not generate any issues of right. Instead, these compulsory cooperation efforts are required to sustain a rightful condition. In these mandatory cooperation efforts, everyone has to do their part; otherwise, those “free-riders” violate other people’s freedom by taking advantage of their efforts for their own purpose or benefit. 


Overall, Ripstein offers an interesting account of the mandatory cooperation and types of coercion allowed by the state compared to private right and interactions. Climate change is a major collective action problem, and it is interesting to consider the state’s obligation to mandate and enforce certain behaviors for citizens and corporations.

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