Water: Distributive Justice and the Commodification of Water

How should we regard the commodification of water? What grounds might there be for blocking exchanges in water? This, of course, is rather imprecise since water has several modes of normative significance. In this chapter I shall concentrate primarily on water as a public resource and the implications commodification has for access to commodified goods and, subsequently, for the justice or otherwise of the patterns of distribution that ensue. After defining commodification and its distributive implications, I shall outline several normatively salient features of water as a distributive good. After that I shall consider some moral objections that one might have to the commodification of water understood as a public good: these objections primarily concern issues of distributive justice. Ultimately, I suggest, the most important and compelling distributive reason for concern involves the implications for access to water for the satisfaction of basic human needs. I argue that in so far as commodification gives rise to a lack of access to a basic human need then it is morally wrong. The argument defended is, in essence, sufficientarian in that priority is accorded to ensuring the satisfaction of fundamental human needs. In the final section of this chapter, I shall outline a more general claim about what this sufficientarian approach might mean more generally for questions of how we should set the "moral boundaries of commodification".