The domain of Coase’s axiom

In my previous post, I explained why Ronald Coase’s reciprocal-harm insight should be treated as an axiom, i.e. an indemonstrable first principle or formal logical expression used in a deduction to yield further results. Today (Merry Christmas!), I will explore what I like to call the domain question: what is the domain or scope of Coase’s axiom? Does it apply to all harms or only to economic harms like the ones discussed in Coase’s original FCC and social cost papers, i.e. the papers in which Coase first introduced his reciprocal-harm model? There are three logical possibilities: narrow, intermediate, and broad.

Narrow: economic harms. On one end of the reciprocal-harm domain space are so-called economic harms, i.e. the spillover effects of otherwise lawful or socially-useful business activities such as cattle trespass, noise and vibrations, railway sparks, signal interference, smoking chimneys, etc., i.e. the examples that Coase himself surveys in his FCC and social cost papers. In support of this narrow interpretation of Coase’s axiom one need look no further than the very first sentence of Coase’s social cost paper itself, which begins thus: “This paper is concerned with those actions of business firms which have harmful effects on others.” (Coase 1960, p. 1)
Intermediate: involuntary harms. Although the ostensible subject matter of Coase’s FCC and social cost papers is the problem of economic harms (e.g. cattle trespass, noise and vibrations, railway sparks, signal interference, smoking chimneys, etc.), why should we limit the domain of Coase’s axiom in such an artificial or arbitrary way? Why not extend the domain of Coase’s axiom to include all involuntary or unintentional harms more generally? On this intermediate view of the problem of harmful effects, what matters is not the source of any given harm (i.e. whether the harm was generated by a business firm or not); what matters is the intent or motive of the actor who generated the harm: did he (or in the case of a business firm, it) intend to injure another party?
Broad: all harms. On the other extreme of the domain space are all harms, not just unintentional harms or accidents but also deliberate and intentional ones. After all, what is a “harm” — whether unintentionally or deliberately produced — but an action or omission that imposes a disutility or cost on another party? (For general philosophical definitions of the concept of harm, see Feinberg 1984; Gert 2004.) On this broad view of harms, what matters is not the intent or motive of the actor producing the harm, i.e. whether the actor acted deliberately or not. What matters is that someone has incurred a disutility or cost without consenting to the imposition of that cost.

Which of these three logical possibilities is the most plausible one? Should it matter whether the harm is an “economic” one? (If so, how does one distinguish “economic” from “non-economic” harms?) Or in the alternative, should the motive of the person or firm producing the harm matter? (If so, why should intentionality matter?) For my part, I see no reason why the domain of Coase’s axiom should be limited to options one or two above; from a purely logical perspective, the domain of an axiom (or a set of axioms) includes anything that can be derived or deduced from that axiom or set.