I think you’re definitely right about the baseball-card example, but it’s a rather artificial example because it depends on Beth being the only possible buyer for Adam’s card. If there are a hundred Beths all of whom would happily give Adam $100 for his card, then magically bringing one into existence and giving it to one of the Beths costs Adam only whatever incremental reduction this brings in the “market” price of the card. (While still bringing the lucky Beth $100 worth of gain.)
Of course you can make Adam’s loss be the full $100 by giving cards to all the Beths—but now the benefit to them is much more than the $100 Adam has lost.
I haven’t thought this through carefully, but it seems like the key feature here that makes your baseball-card example “work” is precisely this one-to-one relation. I don’t know how common that is. It seems like something of the sort is the case with the Liverpool Street platform, or at least would be in some Libertarian World where everyone’s expectation was that if a platform’s inaccessible to disabled people then disabled people should band together and pay for it to be made accessible. Here in the real world that isn’t quite the expectation, of course, which is more or less the point in your last paragraph.
Ah, I forgot that “the case of the baseball card” is actually two cases. I think you’re right about the case where Beth gets given a new card; if there are lots of Beths, there’s a large net utility gain. But I don’t think that works in the case where Adam’s card gets given to one of the Beths; the loss to him is still close to the market value of the card.
It seems plausibly true if we think only of the cases where… something like “A loses power because B gets something they want, but A’s circumstances ignoring B are unchanged”. But I don’t immediately trust that to be a sensible set of cases to think about, in more complicated scenarios.
I think you’re definitely right about the baseball-card example, but it’s a rather artificial example because it depends on Beth being the only possible buyer for Adam’s card. If there are a hundred Beths all of whom would happily give Adam $100 for his card, then magically bringing one into existence and giving it to one of the Beths costs Adam only whatever incremental reduction this brings in the “market” price of the card. (While still bringing the lucky Beth $100 worth of gain.)
Of course you can make Adam’s loss be the full $100 by giving cards to all the Beths—but now the benefit to them is much more than the $100 Adam has lost.
I haven’t thought this through carefully, but it seems like the key feature here that makes your baseball-card example “work” is precisely this one-to-one relation. I don’t know how common that is. It seems like something of the sort is the case with the Liverpool Street platform, or at least would be in some Libertarian World where everyone’s expectation was that if a platform’s inaccessible to disabled people then disabled people should band together and pay for it to be made accessible. Here in the real world that isn’t quite the expectation, of course, which is more or less the point in your last paragraph.
Ah, I forgot that “the case of the baseball card” is actually two cases. I think you’re right about the case where Beth gets given a new card; if there are lots of Beths, there’s a large net utility gain. But I don’t think that works in the case where Adam’s card gets given to one of the Beths; the loss to him is still close to the market value of the card.
It seems plausibly true if we think only of the cases where… something like “A loses power because B gets something they want, but A’s circumstances ignoring B are unchanged”. But I don’t immediately trust that to be a sensible set of cases to think about, in more complicated scenarios.