Obligations of Productive Justice: Individual or Institutional

If it is a requirement of justice that everyone has access to basic goods and services, then justice requires that the work that is necessary to produce the relevant goods and provide the relevant services is performed. Two views that are widely accepted in contemporary political philosophy, however, together rule out requirements of justice to perform such work. These are, roughly, that the state cannot force people to perform it, and that individuals are not obligated to perform it voluntarily. Lucas Stanczyk argues that we should resolve this inconsistency by endorsing some forms of state coercion, such as compulsory service requirements. I argue that Stanczyk’s proposal fails to fully resolve the inconsistency, and that the further coercive measures that we would have to endorse in order to do so are ones that we have strong reasons to reject. In addition, I claim that even if we were to accept that these coercive measures could be permissible, we could not consistently deny that individuals can be obligated to voluntarily perform the necessary work. My argument, then, shows that in order to accept even modest requirements of access to basic goods and services, we must reject the popular view that principles of justice do not apply directly to individual conduct.