Liberal justice can fold environmental goods into distribution only after triage by public agreement.

Evidence

David Miller, another of the major figures writing in the liberal tradition, has also explored the environmental implications of justice theory, and offers a different approach (Miller 1999b). Rather than examine ways of justifying ecological ends, or of including nature in an overlapping consensus, Miller examines the possibility of including environmental goods along with other primary goods in calculations of distributive justice. Miller concludes by dividing environmental goods into three categories. There are some environmental goods that can be easily and directly attached to other primary goods. Ill health, caused by pollution, for example, would reduce the value of (not to mention access to) other primary goods. There are other environmental goods about which we can generate, through democratic procedure, enough public agreement that they would not generate issues of distributive justice. And finally, there are a number of environmental goods that are valued differently by different people, and would have to be counted as primary goods only by those who value them as such. In this case, in order to apply some principles of distributive justice, Miller argues that a form of cost– benefit analysis would be a crucial, if difficult, way to measure the desire, the losses, and the willingness of the public to pay for environmental goods. — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 368

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distills Miller’s three-way classification of environmental goods within a distributive framework.
• SEED: Miller’s triage (attachable goods, consensus goods, contested values needing cost-benefit) is a ready-made analytic schema to apply against real EJ disputes about who bears harms.
• XREF: connects to: A duty to restraint can insert sustainability into liberal justice — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 364