Reciprocal Harm and the Common Condition: Coase and the Question of Who Reorganizes

In The Problem of Social Cost, Ronald Coase holds that all harm is reciprocal: to avoid harm to B imposes a sacrifice on A, so that the question "who harms whom" does not by itself decide whom the law should favour. This paper examines what that thesis reaches when the conflict concerns access to a common condition: a path, a spring, an aquifer. Two situations that yield the same material results are distinguished: crossing because access depends on no one's will, and crossing because someone always authorizes it. It is argued that the reciprocity of sacrifices is compatible with a difference of object between the relations of authorization each attribution institutes, and that comparison by the value of production may remain indifferent to that difference; the leap occurs when the result of the comparison is taken as sufficient ground for instituting the winning position. Coase's English cases are reread with a uniform criterion, and none is found to involve a common condition in the sense fixed. Three dimensions are then separated, the diagnosis of a transformation of participation, its justification, and the distribution of competences, and the hard case of a community administering a scarce resource is examined in each. The result is a proposed interpretation of the defended book's criterion, with an examination of its consequences, and a contribution to the broader terms Coase acknowledged and left without content: identifying the transformation of a relation of participation determines what requires justification and before whom; the economic advantage of the arrangement does not by itself supply that justification.