[Reader-list] Tragedy of the Commons/Tragedy of Capital?

[Lachlan Brown]

Jeebesh,

   There is a bit of a debate on the use 
and relevance of 'tragedy of the commons'
with reference to contemporary and historical
redistributed media in Nettime bbs. 

I cannot find your previous post and would 
be really interested to see it.

   Best,

   Lachlan Brown
   C. (416) 826 6937
   VM. (416) 822 1123

   http://third.net

> 
> In my last postings there was refrences to the phrase `The Tragedy of the 
> Commons`. On request from friends I am enclosing an article written in 1968 
> which kind of gave velocity to this phrase. cheers. Jeebesh
> 
> 
> The Tragedy of the Commons
> Garrett Hardin (1968)
> 
> "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin, Science, 162(1968):1243-1248.
> 
> At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, J.B. Wiesner 
> and H.F. York 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.'' [1]
> 
> I would 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. 
> 
> In our 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 exhibited 
> this courage; 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 head; 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 do.) 
> 
> The class 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. 
> 
> 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 decrease. Is ours a finite world?
> 
> A fair defense can be put forward for the view that the world is infinite 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]
> 
> A finite world can support only a finite population; 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? 
> 
> No -- for 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 (1717-1783).
> 
> 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 work in common speech; 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, reversed; but Bentham's goal is 
> unobtainable. 
> 
> The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum. The difficulty of 
> defining the optimum is enormous; 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. 
> 
> We want the maximum good per person; 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 for hunters to shoot; 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 this may be true; 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. 
> 
> Man must 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. 
> 
> Has any 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. 
> 
> We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until 
> we explicitly exorcise 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 in 1833 by a mathematical 
> amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852). [6] 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 tragedy. 
> 
> 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. 
> 
> 1. The 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. 
> 
> 2. The 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 decision­making 
> herdsman is only a fraction of - 1. 
> 
> Adding 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. 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. Education 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. 
> 
> A simple 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 act.) 
> 
> 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 
> agreed­upon 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 objectionable. But we must choose -- or acquiesce in the destruction 
> of the commons that we call our National Parks. 
> 
> Pollution 
> 
> 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 heat 
> wastes into water; 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 ten 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? 
> 
> Analysis 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 Chinese; but it may take ten thousand 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 
> essence 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 smog­control, 
> by law we delegate the details to bureaus. The result is administrative law, 
> which is rightly feared for an ancient reason -- Quis custodies 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. 
> 
> If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the 
> children of improvident parents starved to death; if thus, over breeding 
> 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 over breeding 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 thirty nations agreed to the following: 
> "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.'' [14]
> 
> It is painful to have to deny categorically the validity of this right; 
> denying it, one feels as uncomfortable as a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, 
> who denied the reality of witches in the seventeenth 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 fault with it; 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. 
> 
> Conscience Is Self-Eliminating 
> 
> It is a 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. 
> 
> People 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 differences will be accentuated, 
> generation by generation. 
> 
> In C. G. 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 it; but it 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: 1. 
> (intended communication) "If you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn 
> you for not acting like a responsible citizen"; 2. (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 commons." 
> 
> Every man 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] 
> 
> One does 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 mechanisms 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 
> parenthood; 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 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. 
> 
> If the 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 a commons; 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 as he wants to; 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 
> call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of the word coercion. 
> 
> 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 
> irresponsible bureaucrats; 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. 
> 
> To say 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. 
> 
> It is one 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] worshipers 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: (1) that the status quo is perfect; or (2) that the 
> choice we face is between reform and no action; if the proposed reform is 
> imperfect, we presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a 
> perfect proposal. 
> 
> But we 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 
> 
> Perhaps 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 another. 
> 
> First we 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. 
> 
> Somewhat 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 Western world; 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 has paid 
> out billions of dollars to create a supersonic transport which would disturb 
> 50,000 people for every one person 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? 
> 
> Every new 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 
> that we vigorously oppose; 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." 
> 
> The most 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. 
> 
> The only 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. 
> 
> Notes 
> 
> 1. J. B. Wiesner and H. F. York, Scientific American 211 (No. 4), 27 (1964). 
> 
> 2. G. Hardin, Journal of Heredity 50, 68 (1959), S. von Hoernor, Science 137, 
> 18, (1962). 
> 
> 3. J. von Neumann and O. Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior 
> (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1947), p. 11. 
> 
> 4. J. H. Fremlin, New Scientist, No. 415 (1964), p. 285. 
> 
> 5. A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library, New York, 1937), p. 423.
> 
> 6. W. F. Lloyd, Two Lectures on the Checks to Population (Oxford University 
> Press, Oxford, England, 1833). 
> 
> 7. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Mentor, New York, 1948), p. 
> 17. 
> 
> 8. G. Hardin, Ed., Population, Evolution, and Birth Control (Freeman, San 
> Francisco, 1964), p. 56. 
> 
> 9. S. McVay, Scientific American 216 (No. 8), 13 (1966). 
> 
> 10. J. Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Westminster, Philadelphia, 1966). 
> 
> 11. D. Lack, The Natural Regulation of Animal Numbers (Clarendon Press, 
> Oxford, England, 1954). 
> 
> 12. H. Girvetz, From Wealth to Welfare (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 
> Calif, 1950). 
> 
> 13. G. Hardin, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 6, 366 (1963). 
> 
> 14. U Thant, International Planned Parenthood News, No. 168 (February 1968), 
> p. 3. 
> 
> 15. K. Davis, Science 158, 730 (1967). 
> 
> 16. S. Tax, Ed., Evolution After Darwin (University of Chicago Press, 
> Chicago, 1960), vol. 2, p. 469. 
> 
> 17. G. Bateson, D. D. Jackson, J. Haley, J. Weakland, Behavioral Science 1, 
> 251 (1956). 
> 
> 18. P. Goodman, New York Review of Books 10 (8), 22 (23 May 1968). 
> 
> 19. A. Comfort, The Anxiety Makers (Nelson, London, 1967). 
> 
> 20. C. Frankel, The Case for Modern Man (Harper & Row, New York, 1955), p. 
> 203. 
> 
> 21. J. D. Roslansky, Genetics and the Future of Man (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 
> New York, 1966), p. 177. THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMON REVISITED
> by Beryl Crowe (1969)
> reprinted in MANAGING THE COMMONS
> by Garrett Hardin and John Baden
> W.H. Freeman, 1977; ISBN 0-7167-0476-5
> 
> "There has developed in the contemporary natural sciences a recognition that 
> there is a subset of problems, such as population, atomic war, and 
> environmental corruption, for which there are no technical solutions.
> 
> "There is also an increasing recognition among contemporary social scientists 
> that there is a subset of problems, such as population, atomic war, 
> environmental corruption, and the recovery of a livable urban environment, 
> for which there are no current political solutions. The thesis of this 
> article is that the common area shared by these two subsets contains most of 
> the critical problems that threaten the very existence of contemporary man." 
> [p. 53]ASSUMPTIONS NECESSARY TO AVOID THE TRAGEDY
> 
> "In passing the technically insoluble problems over to the political and 
> social realm for solution, Hardin made three critical assumptions:
> 
> (1) that there exists, or can be developed, a 'criterion of judgment and 
> system of weighting . . .' that will 'render the incommensurables . . . 
> commensurable . . . ' in real life;
> 
> (2) that, possessing this criterion of judgment, 'coercion can be mutually 
> agreed upon,' and that the application of coercion to effect a solution to 
> problems will be effective in modern society; and
> 
> (3) that the administrative system, supported by the criterion of judgment 
> and access to coercion, can and will protect the commons from further 
> desecration." [p. 55]
> 
> ERODING MYTH OF THE COMMON VALUE SYSTEM
> 
> "In America there existed, until very recently, a set of conditions which 
> perhaps made the solution to Hardin's subset possible; we lived with the myth 
> that we were 'one people, indivisible. . . .' This myth postulated that we 
> were the great 'melting pot' of the world wherein the diverse cultural ores 
> of Europe were poured into the crucible of the frontier experience to produce 
> a new alloy -- an American civilization. This new civilization was presumably 
> united by a common value system that was democratic, equalitarian, and 
> existing under universally enforceable rules contained in the Constitution 
> and the Bill of Rights.
> 
> "In the United States today, however, there is emerging a new set of behavior 
> patterns which suggest that the myth is either dead or dying. Instead of 
> believing and behaving in accordance with the myth, large sectors of the 
> population are developing life-styles and value hierarchies that give 
> contemporary Americans an appearance more closely analogous to the 
> particularistic, primitive forms of 'tribal' organizations in geographic 
> proximity than to that shining new alloy, the American civilization." [p. 56]
> 
> "Looking at a more recent analysis of the sickness of the core city, Wallace 
> F. Smith has argued that the productive model of the city is no longer viable 
> for the purposes of economic analysis. Instead, he develops a model of the 
> city as a site for leisure consumption, and then seems to suggest that the 
> nature of this model is such is such that the city cannot regain its health 
> because the leisure demands are value-based and, hence do not admit to 
> compromise and accommodation; consequently there is no way of deciding among 
> these value- oriented demands that are being made on the core city.
> 
> "In looking for the cause of the erosion of the myth of a common value 
> system, it seems to me that so long as our perceptions and knowledge of other 
> groups were formed largely through the written media of communication, the 
> American myth that we were a giant melting pot of equalitarians could be 
> sustained. In such a perceptual field it is tenable, if not obvious, that men 
> are motivated by interests. Interests can always be compromised and 
> accommodated without undermining our very being by sacrificing values. Under 
> the impact of electronic media, however, this psychological distance has 
> broken down and now we discover that these people with whom we could formerly 
> compromise on interests are not, after all, really motivated by interests but 
> by values. Their behavior in our very living room betrays a set of values, 
> moreover, that are incompatible with our own, and consequently the 
> compromises that we make are not those of contract but of culture. While the 
> former are acceptable, any form of compromise on the latter is not a form of 
> rational behavior but is rather a clear case of either apostasy or heresy. 
> Thus we have arrived not at an age of accommodation but one of confrontation. 
> In such an age 'incommensurables' remain 'incommensurable' in real life." [p. 
> 59]EROSION OF THE MYTH OF THE MONOPOLY OF COERCIVE FORCE
> 
> "In the past, those who no longer subscribed to the values of the dominant 
> culture were held in check by the myth that the state possessed a monopoly on 
> coercive force. This myth has undergone continual erosion since the end of 
> World War II owing to the success of the strategy of guerrilla warfare, as 
> first revealed to the French in Indochina, and later conclusively 
> demonstrated in Algeria. Suffering as we do from what Senator Fulbright has 
> called 'the arrogance of power,' we have been extremely slow to learn the 
> lesson in Vietnam, although we now realize that war is political and cannot 
> be won by military means. It is apparent that the myth of the monopoly of 
> coercive force as it was first qualified in the civil rights conflict in the 
> South, then in our urban ghettos, next on the streets of Chicago, and now on 
> our college campuses has lost its hold over the minds of Americans. The 
> technology of guerrilla warfare has made it evident that, while the state can 
> win battles, it cannot win wars of values. Coercive force which is centered 
> in the modern state cannot be sustained in the face of the active resistance 
> of some 10 percent of the population unless the state is willing to embark on 
> a deliberate policy of genocide directed against the value dissident groups. 
> The factor that sustained the myth of coercive force in the past was the 
> acceptance of a common value system. Whether the latter exists is 
> questionable in the modern nation-state." [p.p. 59-60]EROSION OF THE MYTH OF 
> ADMINISTRATORS OF THE COMMONS
> 
> "Indeed, the process has been so widely commented upon that one writer 
> postulated a common life cycle for all of the attempts to develop regulatory 
> policies. The life cycle is launched by an outcry so widespread and demanding 
> that it generates enough political force to bring about establishment of a 
> regulatory agency to insure the equitable, just, and rational distribution of 
> the advantages among all holders of interest in the commons. This phase is 
> followed by the symbolic reassurance of the offended as the agency goes into 
> operation, developing a period of political quiescence among the great 
> majority of those who hold a general but unorganized interest in the commons. 
> Once this political quiescence has developed, the highly organized and 
> specifically interested groups who wish to make incursions into the commons 
> bring sufficient pressure to bear through other political processes to 
> convert the agency to the protection and furthering of their interests. In 
> the last phase even staffing of the regulating agency is accomplished by 
> drawing the agency administrators from the ranks of the regulated." [p.p. 
> 60-61] 
> 
> 
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