Common Property and (Pre) Distributive Justice

Abstract

This paper discusses the impact that so-called common goods might have in distributive social regimes. While questioning some of the most accepted notions of property rights, it suggests the philosophy of natural rights and of the bundle of rights to conceptualize it as a particular constellation of collective rights involving different agents, who shape a sort of fiduciary relationship. Common property thus understood appears as a way of fostering a pre-distributive regime in which the property rights of wealth and productive assets are designed for, and applied in the structural circumstances of the distribution itself, and not merely in response to the outputs of a unfair and unequal system of distribution.