A power station in Guangzhou, China. The 'tragedy of the commons' refers to a situation where a shared resource is rapidly depleted because no single actor considers how they affect other users. Image:
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By now, the danger from climate change and other forms of environmental degradation is so evident that it seems crazy to ignore it. And yet the world has failed thus far to devise an adequate response to the problem. Our first stab at a solution, the 1997 , set only modest goals and failed to include the world&s biggest polluters. The effort in Copenhagen in 2009 to craft a more potent global agreement ended in a breakdown of negotiations.
Our collective failure to take action is not the result of having chosen leaders who are insane or irrational. The reason we seem incapable of coming together to protect the climate is known as the &tragedy of the commons&: a shared resource tends to be rapidly depleted because no single actor & whether a country or a person & considers how their actions affect other users. In other words, because you reap all of the benefits, but suffer only part of the costs, you are tempted to over-exploit the resource. And, so far, there is little reason to believe that we are on track to find a way to ensure a happier ending.
The soon-to-be-endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna is one example. We have a shared interest in preventing the species from being fished to extinction. And yet individual fishermen have little reason not to catch as many tuna as possible, as any animal that escapes their net will likely end up in another&s. A similar logic applies to countries consid as a result, bluefin stocks are running low.
One approach to ending the tragedy of the commons was devised some 50 years ago by the economist Ronald Coase. His solution was to assign property rights to the shared resource, compensating the losers. With private ownership established, market mechanisms could restore efficiency.
Such a solution might work for fish, provided that migrating populati but it is far harder to apply it to something like the climate. How, after all, would one assign property rights to atmospheric composition?
The alternative approach & embodied by the Kyoto Protocol & is to implement quotas limiting individual actors& permissible greenhouse-gas emissions. Only then is a market created to allow actors to buy the emissions permits they need and sell those they do not use.
In theory, this approach provides an incentive for the participants to cooperate, as the arrangement&s breakdown would accelerate the depletion that all have agreed to avoid. In practice, however, these types of deals are difficult to conclude and often are violated.
For starters, domestic politics can pose an obstacle to participation in international treaties, especially when policymakers facing re-election are dependent on the support of interest groups with goals that run counter to the public&s welfare.
In other words, because you reap all of the benefits, but suffer only part of the costs, you are tempted to over-exploit the resource. And, so far, there is little reason to believe that we are on track to find a way to ensure a happier&ending.
Decisions made during US President George W. Bush&s two terms in office offer an illuminating contrast. In 2001, during his first 100 days in office, Bush blocked or overturned many laws and regulations protecting the environment, and he put a definitive end to American participation in the Kyoto Protocol. The mining and oil industries & important sources of support for his next presidential election campaign & had gotten their money&s worth.
Once Bush&s re-election was secured, however, he had less incentive to seek the support of these powerful lobbies. During his second term, Bush created the world&s largest ocean preserve & a 360,000-square-kilometer area around the Hawaiian Islands. Because Bush was constitutionally barred from seeking a third term, the way was opened for more environmentally friendly policies.
Another impediment to cooperation is geopolitical. If conflict over valuable resources is unavoidable, as examples throughout history suggest, there is little reason for a country not to exploit a given resource to the maximum possible extent prior to the emergence of scarcities. To the extent that countries believe that resource-based conflict is inevitable in the future, negotiations to limit resource depletion become more likely to break down in the short run.
Of the two obstacles, domestic interest-group politics is the more easily surmountable. Over the past two centuries, political leaders have become more accountable to constituencies within and outside of their countries& borders, and voters have become less susceptible to lobbying groups and the media. Further education of the electorate may be the key to speeding up this process.
The geopolitical concerns are more difficult to address. The challenge of persuading countries to cooperate is similar to the one governments have always faced in inducing their citizens to contribut everyone benefits from good roads, but most people would prefer not to contribute to the cost of their construction.
According to the American economist Mancur Olson, these types of cooperation problems are easier to solve when there are as few decision-makers as possible. Within a country, the problem is overcome by providing governments with the coercive capacity to collect taxes, redistribute public goods, and mediate conflicts between citizens. By extension, one solution to the global problem would be for all of humanity to be ruled by a universal government, accountable to its constituents, and endowed with the authority to enforce its decisions.
Such a scenario is of cours nation-states will never agree to hand over their sovereignty to a world government. In the absence of alternatives, the best solution, it seems, would be a reduction in the number of actors & a return to a bipolar world in which two superpowers decide for themselves and their subordinates. But, while this solution would contain the problem of the commons, the dangers could outweigh the benefits. Last time, international cooperation was underpinned by fear of blowing up the planet. Now, too, fears of mutually assured destruction could re-emerge.
Petros Sekeris is Principal Lecturer in Economics at the Department of Economics & Finance, Portsmouth Business School.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2015.
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The best Eco-Business stories, jobs and events delivered to your inbox & daily or weekly.Right to Private Property | Internet Encyclopedia of PhilosophyBeyond solidarité: How the West can respond to the Paris attacks - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Beyond solidarité: How the West can respond to the Paris attacks
While some call for a militaristic response to the Paris attacks, there is wisdom in restraint - particularly in light of the nature of the challenge posed by extremist jihadism as represented by Daesh. John Blaxland writes.The events in Paris last Friday night are hard for modern and mostly secular Westerners to comprehend. How is it that the country of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité could be subject to such targeted acts of gratuitous and apparently meaningless violence?The echoes of multicultural sentiments in modern Australia are chilling for what they appear to portend. Yet Australians want both to do something to show support for France and to address the evil scourge that is the so-called Islamic State, or Daesh.But to argue that fighting Daesh in Syria and Iraq reduces the security threat at home is a demonstrably false line of reasoning. Both Australia and France have seen signs of planning for a number of home-grown terrorist incidents recently. The background "chatter" has grown louder and more frequent.At the same time it has become considerably more difficult to monitor as they improvise and adapt, developing countermeasures to publicised intelligence eavesdropping techniques. Acting internationally therefore has to take account of the likely domestic blow-back among those attracted to the sickly-sweet rhetoric of Daesh.With this in mind, Australia has avoided major ground force contributions in Syria and Iraq. Like France, it has committed combat aircraft in the fight against Daesh, but to little effect so far.So what to do now? One thing to avoid is an over-reaction without thinking through the strategy.
Twelve years after the US led intervention in Iraq, there is little evidence major ground force operations will have a lasting effect, but that hasn't stopped hawkish calls for massive military intervention. That would be to court disaster and make a mockery of concerns about rebalancing great power dynamics in East Asia.There is also talk of peacekeeping forces and of the West acting perhaps in solidarity with Russia. But that would be premised on a military showdown that saw Daesh defeated in detail on the ground in Syria and Iraq - they appear immune to negotiations with infidels. This overwhelming application of military force is what some call for, but there is wisdom in restraint, particularly in light of the nature of the challenge posed by extremist jihadism as represented by Daesh.Daesh has been goading the West to act against their own Muslim communities, hoping they will feel so ostracised that they will become ever more fertile grounds for the generation of more daeshists. But they also want the West to overreact by sending back ground combat forces to fight them in Iraq and Syria. They hope for a scene akin to the quagmire the US-led coalition encountered in the Sunni heartland of Iraq in the mid-2000s and yearn for a bloody conflagration as a precursor for the clash of civilisations they hope will trigger a resurgent caliphate.
More on this story:
The choreographed YouTube video assassinations of last year were but a taste of what they have done in Paris, but the intention is consistent - to draw in those who fall for their millenarian rhetoric and to trigger extreme emotional and ill-thought-through over-reactions from those they deem to be infidels.On the surface, the daeshists' appeal to Islam resonates with certain texts considered sacred. But the Islamic world is not monolithic. For instance, the predominantly Sunni states of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf states have conflicting sentiments concerning their Sunni-co-religionists in Daesh. They recognise the threat Daesh poses to the established order, but they hate as much, or more those of the other major strand of the Islamic faith - the Shiites: this includes Iran, much of Iraq (and the current government in Baghdad), the government of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria, and Hezbollah (Party of God) - Iran's Shiite proxies based in Lebanon.To defeat Daesh convincingly and to generate an enduring peaceful solution would require an almost inconceivable alignment of the stars - those stars being the interests of regional Sunni and Shia states and the extra-regional great powers with a vested interested in Syria - including the United States, the European Union (including France) and Russia.If a coalition force of outsiders enters the fray in Syria (and possibly north-western Iraq) in large numbers, that force had better be predominantly locally sourced with Sunni and Shia groups represented. A force with considerable presence from NATO would be seen as crusaders and infidels. They would be unwelcome and their presence likely would generate further conflict.The momentum arising from the combination of Russia's military presence in Syria and France's terrible tragedy may well have generated the inflection point for change - enough to find a path to a resolution of the conflict in Syria and Iraq. But we should not let emotions mislead us as to how complicated and fraught the situation remains, the difficulties that lie ahead, and the limits to the utility of employing Australian military forces in such a complex and explosive situation.A century on from when the lines were drawn carving up the old Ottoman Empire, we should be wary of committing any forces to a situation where there are few if any viable solutions that perpetuate those lines in the sand. is a senior fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre in the Bell School of Asia pacific Affairs, College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Follow him on Twitter .
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AEDT = Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Time which is 11 hours ahead of UTC (Greenwich Mean Time)Lovearth.net - The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin
Tragedy of the Commons
by Garrett Hardin
The population
problem has n it requires a fundamental extension
in morality.
The author
is professor of biology, University of California, Santa Barbara.
This article is based on a presidential address presented before the
meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science at Utah State University, Logan, 25 June 1968.
end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner
and York (1) concluded that: &Both sides in the arms race are
... confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power
and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional
judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great
powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology
only, the result will be to worsen the situation.&
like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national
security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached,
namely that there is no technical solution to the problem. An implicit
and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional
and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion
has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one
that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences,
demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or
ideas of morality.
day (though not in earlier times) technical solutions are always welcome.
Because of previous failures in prophecy, it takes courage to assert
that a desired technical solution is not possible. Wiesner and York
ex publishing in a science journal, they insisted
that the solution to the problem was not to be found in the natural
sciences. They cautiously qualified their statement with the phrase,
&It is our considered professional judgment... .& Whether
they were right or not is not the concern of the present article.
Rather, the concern here is with the important concept of a class
of human problems which can be called &no technical solution
problems,& and, more specifically, with the identification and
discussion of one of these.
It is easy to show that the class is not a null class. Recall the
game of tick-tack-toe. Consider the problem, &How can I win the
game of tick-tack-toe?& It is well known that I cannot, if I
assume (in keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent
understands the game perfectly. Put another way, there is no &technical
solution& to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical
meaning to the word &win.& I can hit my opponent over the
or I or I can falsify the records. Every way in
which I &win& involves, in some sense, an abandonment of
the game, as we intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course,
openly abandon the game--refuse to play it. This is what most adults
of &No technical solution problems& has members. My thesis
is that the &population problem,& as conventionally conceived,
is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs
some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over
the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils
of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they
now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains
of wheat will solve the problem--technologically. I try to show here
that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem
cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem
of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.
The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and
fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision
with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the
family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.
It is painful
to have to deny categorically the va denying
it, one feels as uncomfortable as a resident of Salem, Massachusetts,
who denied the reality of witches in the 17th century. At the present
time, in liberal quarters, something like a taboo acts to inhibit
criticism of the United Nations. There is a feeling that the United
Nations is &our last and best hope,& that we shouldn't find
we shouldn't play into the hands of the archconservatives.
However, let us not forget what Robert Louis Stevenson said: &The
truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the
enemy.& If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even though it is promoted
by the United Nations. We should also join with Kingsley Davis (15)
in attempting to get Planned Parenthood-World Population to see the
error of its ways in embracing the same tragic ideal.
What Shall We Maximize?
Population,
as Malthus said, naturally tends to grow &geometrically,&
or, as we would now say, exponentially. In a finite world this means
that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.
Is ours a finite world?
defense can be put forward for the view that t
or that we do not know that it is not. But, in terms of the practical
problems that we must face in the next few generations with the foreseeable
technology, it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery
if we do not, during the immediate future, assume that the world available
to the terrestrial human population is finite. &Space& is
no escape (2).
world can support only therefore, population
growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations
above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.)
When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind?
Specifically, can Bentham's goal of &the greatest good for the
greatest number& be realized?
two reasons, each sufficient by itself. The first is a theoretical
one. It is not mathematically possible to maximize for two (or more)
variables at the same time. This was clearly stated by von Neumann
and Morgenstern (3), but the principle is implicit in the theory of
partial differential equations, dating back at least to D'Alembert
The second
reason springs directly from biological facts. To live, any organism
must have a source of energy (for example, food). This energy is utilized
for two purposes: mere maintenance and work. For man, maintenance
of life requires about 1600 kilocalories a day (&maintenance
calories&). Anything that he does over and above merely staying
alive will be defined as work, and is supported by &work calories&
which he takes in. Work calories are used not only for what we call
w they are also required for all forms of enjoyment,
from swimming and automobile racing to playing music and writing poetry.
If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we must do:
We must make the work calories per person approach as close to zero
as possible. No gourmet meals, no vacations, no sports, no music,
no literature, no art. ... I think that everyone will grant, without
argument or proof, that maximizing population does not maximize goods.
Bentham's goal is impossible.
In reaching
this conclusion I have made the usual assumption that it is the acquisition
of energy that is the problem. The appearance of atomic energy has
led some to question this assumption. However, given an infinite source
of energy, population growth still produces an inescapable problem.
The problem of the acquisition of energy is replaced by the problem
of its dissipation, as J. H. Fremlin has so wittily shown (4). The
arithmetic signs in the analysis are, as it were, but Bentham's
goal is still unobtainable.
The optimum
population is, then, less than the maximum. The difficulty of defining
the so far as I know, no one has seriously tackled
this problem. Reaching an acceptable and stable solution will surely
require more than one generation of hard analytical work--and much
persuasion.
the max but what is good? To one person it is
wilderness, to another it is ski lodges for thousands. To one it is
estuaries to nourish ducks
to another it is
factory land. Comparing one good with another is, we usually say,
impossible because goods are incommensurable. Incommensurables cannot
be compared.
Theoretically
but in real life incommensurables are commensurable.
Only a criterion of judgment and a system of weighting are needed.
In nature the criterion is survival. Is it better for a species to
be small and hideable, or large and powerful? Natural selection commensurates
the incommensurables. The compromise achieved depends on a natural
weighting of the values of the variables.
imitate this process. There is no doubt that in fact he already does,
but unconsciously. It is when the hidden decisions are made explicit
that the arguments begin. The problem for the years ahead is to work
out an acceptable theory of weighting. Synergistic effects, nonlinear
variation, and difficulties in discounting the future make the intellectual
problem difficult, but not (in principle) insoluble.
cultural group solved this practical problem at the present time,
even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves that none has:
there is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and
has had for some time, a growth rate of zero. Any people that has
intuitively identified its optimum point will soon reach it, after
which its growth rate becomes and remains zero.
Of course,
a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population
is below its optimum. However, by any reasonable standards, the most
rapidly growing populations on earth today are (in general) the most
miserable. This association (which need not be invariable) casts doubt
on the optimistic assumption that the positive growth rate of a population
is evidence that it has yet to reach its optimum.
make little progress in working toward optimum population size until
we explicitly exorcize the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical
demography. In economic affairs, The Wealth of Nations (1776) popularized
the &invisible hand,& the idea that an individual who &intends
only his own gain,& is, as it were, &led by an invisible
hand to promote . . . the public interest& (5). Adam Smith did
not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did
any of his followers. But he contributed to a dominant tendency of
thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based
on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions
reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire
society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance
of our present policy of laissez-faire in reproduction. If it is correct
we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so
as to produce the optimum population. If the assumption is not correct,
we need to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are
defensible.
Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons
The rebuttal
to the invisible hand in population control is to be found in a scenario
first sketched in a little-known pamphlet (6) in 1833 by a mathematical
amateur named William Forster Lloyd (). We may well call
it &the tragedy of the commons,& using the word &tragedy&
as the philosopher Whitehead used it (7): &The essence of dramatic
tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless
working of things.& He then goes on to say, &This inevitableness
of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents
which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the
futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.&
The tragedy
of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all.
It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle
as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably
satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease
keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity
of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is,
the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality.
At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates
As a rational
being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly,
more or less consciously, he asks, &What is the utility to me
of adding one more animal to my herd?& This utility has one negative
and one positive component.
positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since
the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional
animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.
negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created
by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are
shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular
decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of -1.
together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes
that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another
animal to his herd. A and another. . . . But this is the
conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons.
Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels
him to increase his herd without limit--in a world that is limited.
Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his
own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the
commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
Some would
say that this is a platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was
learned thousands of years ago, but natural selection favors the forces
of psychological denial (8). The individual benefits as an individual
from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole,
of which he is a part, suffers.
can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the
inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this
knowledge be constantly refreshed.
incident that occurred a few years ago in Leominster, Massachusetts,
shows how perishable the knowledge is. During the Christmas shopping
season the parking meters downtown were covered with plastic bags
that bore tags reading: &Do not open until after Christmas. Free
parking courtesy of the mayor and city council.& In other words,
facing the prospect of an increased demand for already scarce space.
the city fathers reinstituted the system of the commons. (Cynically,
we suspect that they gained more votes than they lost by this retrogressive
In an approximate
way, the logic of the commons has been understood for a long time,
perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private
property in real estate. But it is understood mostly only in special
cases which are not sufficiently generalized. Even at this late date,
cattlemen leasing national land on the western ranges demonstrate
no more than an ambivalent understanding, in constantly pressuring
federal authorities to increase the head count to the point where
overgrazing produces erosion and weed-dominance. Likewise, the oceans
of the world continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy
of the commons. Maritime nations still respond automatically to the
shibboleth of the &freedom of the seas.& Professing to believe
in the &inexhaustible resources of the oceans,& they bring
species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction (9).
The National
Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of
the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit. The
parks themselves are limited in extent--there is only one Yosemite
Valley--whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values
that visitors seek in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must
soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be of no value
to anyone.
What shall
we do? We have several options. We might sell them off as private
property. We might keep them as public property, but allocate the
right to enter them. The allocation might be on the basis of wealth,
by the use of an auction system. It might be on the basis of merit,
as defined by some agreed-upon standards. It might be by lottery.
Or it might be on a first-come, first-served basis, administered to
long queues. These, I think, are all the reasonable possibilities.
They are all objectionable. But we must choose--or acquiesce in the
destruction of the commons that we call our National Parks.
In a reverse
way, the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution.
Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons,
but of putting something in--sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and
he noxious and dangerous fumes into the air,
and distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of
sight. The calculations of utility are much the same as before. The
rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges
into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before
releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into
a system of &fouling our own nest,& so long as we behave
only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.
The tragedy
of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or
something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us
cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool
must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices
that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than
to discharge them untreated. We have not progressed as far with the
solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular
concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive
resources of the earth, favors pollution. The owner of a factory on
the bank of a stream--whose property extends to the middle of the
stream, often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right
to muddy the waters flowing past his door. The law, always behind
the times, requires elaborate stitching and fitting to adapt it to
this newly perceived aspect of the commons.
The pollution
problem is a consequence of population. It did not much matter how
a lonely American frontiersman disposed of his waste. &Flowing
water purifies itself every 10 miles,& my grandfather used to
say, and the myth was near enough to the truth when he was a boy,
for there were not too many people. But as population became denser,
the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded,
calling for a redefinition of property rights.
How To Legislate Temperance?
of the pollution problem as a function of population density uncovers
a not generally recognized principle of morality, namely: the morality
of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it
is performed (10). Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the
general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public,
the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable. A hundred and fifty
years ago a plainsman could kill an American bison, cut out only the
tongue for his dinner, and discard the rest of the animal. He was
not in any important sense being wasteful. Today, with only a few
thousand bison left, we would be appalled at such behavior.
In passing,
it is worth noting that the morality of an act cannot be determined
from a photograph. One does not know whether a man killing an elephant
or setting fire to the grassland is harming others until one knows
the total system in which his act appears. &One picture is worth
a thousand words,& said an ancient C but it may take 10,000
words to validate it. It is as tempting to ecologists as it is to
reformers in general to try to persuade others by way of the photographic
shortcut. But the essense of an argument cannot be photographed: it
must be presented rationally--in words.
That morality
is system-sensitive escaped the attention of most codifiers of ethics
in the past. &Thou shalt not . . .& is the form of traditional
ethical directives which make no allowance for particular circumstances.
The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and
therefore are poorly suited to governing a complex, crowded, changeable
world. Our epicyclic solution is to augment statutory law with administrative
law. Since it is practically impossible to spell out all the conditions
under which it is safe to burn trash in the back yard or to run an
automobile without smog-control, by law we delegate the details to
bureaus. The result is administrative law, which is rightly feared
for an ancient reason--Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?--&Who shall
watch the watchers themselves?& John Adams said that we must
have &a government of laws and not men.& Bureau administrators,
trying to evaluate the morality of acts in the total system, are singularly
liable to corruption, producing a government by men, not laws.
Prohibition
is easy to legislate (though not necessarily to enforce); but how
do we legislate temperance? Experience indicates that it can be accomplished
best through the mediation of administrative law. We limit possibilities
unnecessarily if we suppose that the sentiment of Quis custodiet denies
us the use of administrative law. We should rather retain the phrase
as a perpetual reminder of fearful dangers we cannot avoid. The great
challenge facing us now is to invent the corrective feedbacks that
are needed to keep custodians honest. We must find ways to legitimate
the needed authority of both the custodians and the corrective feedbacks.
Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable
The tragedy
of the commons is involved in population problems in another way.
In a world governed solely by the principle of &dog eat dog&--if
indeed there ever was such a world--how many children a family had
would not be a matter of public concern. Parents who bred too exuberantly
would leave fewer descendants, not more, because they would be unable
to care adequately for their children. David Lack and others have
found that such a negative feedback demonstrably controls the fecundity
of birds (11). But men are not birds, and have not acted like them
for millenniums, at least.
human family were dependent only
if the children
of improvident pare if, thus, overbreeding brought
its own &punishment& to the germ line--then there would
be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But
our society is deeply committed to the welfare state (12), and hence
is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
In a welfare
state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race,
or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that
adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement (13)?
To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone
born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a
tragic course of action.
Unfortunately
this is just the course of action that is being pursued by the United
Nations. In late 1967, some 30 nations agreed to the following (14):
The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and
fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision
with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the
family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.
It is painful
to have to deny categorically the va denying
it, one feels as uncomfortable as a resident of Salem, Massachusetts,
who denied the reality of witches in the 17th century. At the present
time, in liberal quarter, something like a taboo acts to inhibit criticism
of the United States. There is a feeling that the United States is
&our last and best hope,& that we shouldn't find fault with
we shouldn't play into the hands of archconservatives. However,
let us not forget what Robert Louis Stevenson said: &The truth
that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.&
If we love the truth, we must openly deny the validity of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, even though it is promoted by the United
Nations. We should also join with Kingsley Davis (15) in attempting
to get Planned Parenthood-World Population to see the error of its
ways in embracing the same tragic ideal.
Conscience Is Self-Eliminating
mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the
long run by an appeal to conscience. Charles Galton Darwin made this
point when he spoke on the centennial of the publication of his grandfather's
great book. The argument is straightforward and Darwinian.
vary. Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will
undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more
children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than
those with more susceptible consciences. The difference will be accentuated,
generation by generation.
Darwin's words: &It may well be that it would take hundreds of
generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but
if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety
Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the
variety Homo progenitivus& (16).
The argument
assumes that conscience or the desire for children (no matter which)
is hereditary--but hereditary only in the most general formal sense.
The result will be the same whether the attitude is transmitted through
germ cells, or exosomatically, to use A. J. Lotka's term. (If one
denies the latter possibility as well as the former, then what's the
point of education?) The argument has here been stated in the context
of the population problem, but it applies equally well to any instance
in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to
restrain himself for the general good--by means of his conscience.
To make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works
toward the elimination of conscience from the race.
Pathogenic Effects of Conscience
The long-term
disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn
but has serious short-term disadvantages as well. If we ask a
man who is exploiting a commons to desist &in the name of conscience,&
what are we saying to him? What does he hear? --not only at the moment
but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he
remembers not merely the words we used but also the nonverbal communication
cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously,
he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are
contradictory: (i) (intended communication) &If you don't do
as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible
citizen&; (ii) (the unintended communication) &If you do
behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who
can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the
then is caught in what Bateson has called a &double bind.&
Bateson and his co-workers have made a plausible case for viewing
the double bind as an important causative factor in the genesis of
schizophrenia (17). The double bind may not always be so damaging,
but it always endangers the mental health of anyone to whom it is
applied. &A bad conscience,& said Nietzsche, &is a
kind of illness.&
To conjure
up a conscience in others is tempting to anyone who wishes to extend
his control beyond the legal limits. Leaders at the highest level
succumb to this temptation. Has any President during the past generation
failed to call on labor unions to moderate voluntarily their demands
for higher wages, or to steel companies to honor voluntary guidelines
on prices? I can recall none. The rhetoric used on such occasions
is designed to produce feelings of guilt in noncooperators.
For centuries
it was assumed without proof that guilt was a valuable, perhaps even
an indispensable, ingredient of the civilized life. Now, in this post-Freudian
world, we doubt it.
Paul Goodman
speaks from the modern point of view when he says: &No good has
ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion.
The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves,
and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to
their anxieties& (18).
not have to be a professional psychiatrist to see the consequences
of anxiety. We in the Western world are just emerging from a dreadful
two-centuries-long Dark Ages of Eros that was sustained partly by
prohibition laws, but perhaps more effectively by the anxiety-generating
mechanism of education. Alex Comfort has told the story well in The
Anxiety Makers (19); it is not a pretty one.
Since proof
is difficult, we may even concede that the results of anxiety may
sometimes, from certain points of view, be desirable. The larger question
we should ask is whether, as a matter of policy, we should ever encourage
the use of a technique the tendency (if not the intention) of which
is psychologically pathogenic. We hear much talk these days of responsible
the coupled words are incorporated into the titles of
some organizations devoted to birth control. Some people have proposed
massive propaganda campaigns to instill responsibility into the nation's
(or the world's) breeders. But what is the meaning of the word responsibility
in this context? Is it not merely a synonym for the word conscience?
When we use the word responsibility in the absence of substantial
sanctions are we not trying to browbeat a free man in a commons into
acting against his own interest? Responsibility is a verbal counterfeit
for a substantial quid pro quo. It is an attempt to get something
for nothing.
word responsibility is to be used at all, I suggest that it be in
the sense Charles Frankel uses it (20). &Responsibility,&
says this philosopher, &is the product of definite social arrangements.&
Notice that Frankel calls for social arrangements--not propaganda.
Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed upon
The social
arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create
coercion, of some sort. Consider bank-robbing. The man who takes money
from a bank acts as if the bank were a commons. How do we prevent
such action? Certainly not by trying to control his behavior solely
by a verbal appeal to his sense of responsibility. Rather than rely
on propaganda we follow Frankel's lead and insist that a bank is not
we seek the definite social arrangements that will keep
it from becoming a commons. That we thereby infringe on the freedom
of would-be robbers we neither deny nor regret.
The morality
of bank-robbing is particularly easy to understand because we accept
complete prohibition of this activity. We are willing to say &Thou
shalt not rob banks,& without providing for exceptions. But temperance
also can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device.
To keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space
we introduce parking meters for short periods, and traffic fines for
longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long
we need merely make it increasingly expensive for
him to do so. Not prohibition, but carefully biased options are what
we offer him. A Madison Avenue man might
the greater candor of the word coercion.
is a dirty word to most liberals now, but it need not forever be so.
As with the four-letter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away
by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without apology
or embarrassment. To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions
of distant and irres but this is not a necessary
part of its meaning. The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual
coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.
that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required
to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it. Who enjoys taxes? We
all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes because we
recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless. We
institute and (grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices
to escape the horror of the commons.
An alternative
to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real
estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is
the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance.
Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist
I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences
in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated
with biological inheritance--that those who are biologically more
fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit
more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the
doctrine of &like father, like son& implicit in our laws
of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund
can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of
private property plus inheritance is unjust--but we put up with it
because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented
a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying
to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.
of the peculiarities of the warfare between reform and the status
quo that it is thoughtlessly governed by a double standard. Whenever
a reform measure is proposed it is often defeated when its opponents
triumphantly discover a flaw in it. As Kingsley Davis has pointed
out (21), worshippers of the status quo sometimes imply that no reform
is possible without unanimous agreement, an implication contrary to
historical fact. As nearly as I can make out, automatic rejection
of proposed reforms is based on one of two unconscious assumptions:
(i) that the s or (ii) that the choice we face
is between
if the proposed reform is imperfect,
we presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a perfect
can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years
is also action. It also produces evils. Once we are aware that the
status quo is action, we can then compare its discoverable advantages
and disadvantages with the predicted advantages and disadvantages
of the proposed reform, discounting as best we can for our lack of
experience. On the basis of such a comparison, we can make a rational
decision which will not involve the unworkable assumption that only
perfect systems are tolerable.
Recognition of Necessity
the simplest summary of this analysis of man's population problems
is this: the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under
conditions of low-population density. As the human population has
increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after
abandoned the commons in food gathering, enclosing farm land and restricting
pastures and hunting and fishing areas. These restrictions are still
not complete throughout the world.
later we saw that the commons as a place for waste disposal would
also have to be abandoned. Restrictions on the disposal of domestic
sewage are widely accepted in the W we are still struggling
to close the commons to pollution by automobiles, factories, insecticide
sprayers, fertilizing operations, and atomic energy installations.
In a still
more embryonic state is our recognition of the evils of the commons
in matters of pleasure. There is almost no restriction on the propagation
of sound waves in the public medium. The shopping public is assaulted
with mindless music, without its consent. Our government is paying
out billions of dollars to create supersonic transport which will
disturb 50,000 people for every one person who is whisked from coast
to coast 3 hours faster. Advertisers muddy the airwaves of radio and
television and pollute the view of travelers. We are a long way from
outlawing the commons in matters of pleasure. Is this because our
Puritan inheritance makes us view pleasure as something of a sin,
and pain (that is, the pollution of advertising) as the sign of virtue?
enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody's personal
liberty. Infringements made in the distant past are accepted because
no contemporary complains of a loss. It is the newly proposed infringements
cries of &rights& and &freedom&
fill the air. But what does &freedom& mean? When men mutually
agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not
less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free
only to bring on universal ruin once they see the necessity of mutual
coercion, they become free to pursue other goals. I believe it was
Hegel who said, &Freedom is the recognition of necessity.&
important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity
of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue
us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring
ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are
tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood.
The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently
acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience
in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.
way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is
by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. &Freedom
is the recognition of necessity&--and it is the role of education
to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed.
Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
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