Collapsing Goods, Innovation, and Precaution CHRIS MACDONALD Department of Philosophy, Saint MaryÕs University, Halifax, NS, Canada e-mail: chris.macdonald@smu.ca Goods, items or practices or experiences that bear utility are not all of a kind, in terms of the dividend they pay in social utility as usage of them increases. Some of them continue to be good no matter how few or how many of us have or practice or experience them. Others become less good, or perhaps even bad, if too many or too few people have or practice or experience them. This matters for the way we control the distribution of goods, in situations in which such control is feasible. In this paper this distinction among types of goods will be used as a way to evaluate the merits of innovation and precaution on the other, as tools of public policy. A problem of variable goodness, and of suitable policy responses to goods the goodness of which varies with increasing use, is broached by Thomas Magnell in his stimulating paper, ‘‘Collapsing Goods in Medi- cine and the Value of Innovation.’’ Magnell usefully differentiates col- lapsing goods from what he calls ‘‘socially unconstrained goods.’’ 1 Socially unconstrained goods are goods that, he writes, are ‘‘goods without limit.’’ 2 For each additional individual person who receives such goods an additional increment of social utility is gained. As the number of individual persons receiving such goods increases, the net social utility increases ad infinitum. Magnell further notes two sub-types of socially unconstrained goods. In some cases, he notes, goods are merely uncon- strained: more users lead to more utility, such that social benefit is something like a linear function of the number of individuals enjoying the good in question. In other cases, the relation is instead exponential. Vaccination, he notes is an ‘‘expanding good.’’ 3 As more and more people are vaccinated, the safety of every member of the community, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, increases substantially, as it becomes increasingly harder for diseases to infect even unvaccinated individuals. The distinction between types of goods that Magnell describes is useful and enlightening, but in the end insufficient to guide policy. Indeed, MagnellÕs simple typology seriously understates the diversity of possible The Journal of Value Inquiry (2007) 40:169–179 Ó Springer 2007 DOI 10.1007/s10790-007-9052-1