In pursuit of the common good: justifying the Aotearoa New Zealand dairy industry

Abstract As dairy farming has intensified since the 1950s, disputes over the global dairy industry’s contribution to environmental, societal and economic public goods have also proliferated. Multiple, contested interpretations of these goods, as well as the ethical and health consequences of the industry, allow public actors with different priorities to draw on a diversity of arguments as they debate the value of dairy production and its contribution to the common good. We use Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) worlds of justification as a framework to explore the reasoning used by a range of people publicly debating the present status and desirable future of the Aotearoa New Zealand dairy industry. Our findings indicate that the current conventions of dairy production are being challenged and defended from a variety of worlds of justification, primarily from the industrial, market, civic and green worlds. There appears to be a hierarchy of worlds of justification, i.e., unless the “worthiness” of the dairy industry is demonstrated in a person’s “foundational” world (i.e., the world they believe holds the greatest moral weight), the dairy industry cannot be deemed “worthy” on the basis of any other world. Insights from our study suggest that a way forward in the seemingly polarised debate around the “goodness” of the dairy industry would be to examine and clearly define our conception of what the common good consists of and how it should be realised while paying attention to the geographic scale of our arguments.