Lifeboat Ethics*
Subject Area :
Social Science, Religious Education, Family Life Education
Level/Target Group:
Upper Secondary, Adult groups
Objectives :
The students or learners should be able to examine options and consequences and
make decisions on population- related issues based on personal values clarification.
Materials Recommended :
Overhead Projector, Blackboard
Procedure :
1. Present this situation:
A ship with 100 people on board sinks in open ocean many miles from land.
Twentyfive (25) people, including you, manage to get into a lifeboat and 75
are in the water. Some of the sailors on board tell you these conditions (write
on blackboard):
a. The nearest island is two weeks away f the sea and wind conditions are
perfect.
b. If only 25 are on board the lifeboat, there is enough food for a month
and they are almost sure to survive.
c. The boat can hold 50, but with 50, the rations will last only 2 weeks.
With any number over 50 people, there is not enough food for two
weeks.
d. The boat will sink when more than 50 people get in, depending on the
weight.
e. The people outside are sure to die.
2. Ask the class for some options, e.g.:
a.
Do nothing - sail away.
b.
Pick up 25 more people or less.
c.
Pick up more than 25.
d.
Pick up all.
e.
Other options?
3. For each of the options suggested, discuss the possible consequences.
4. Give students time to answer these questions (put on blackboard):
.
As one in the boat, which option would you choose? Why? What are the
consequences?
a.
If you choose to pick up anyone, how do you choose which ones? Who in the boat
will make the decision? How? What about dissenters?
1
b.
How do you control rations?
c.
What is the "right" or Christian thing to do? (Would you give your place in the boat
up for another?)
d.
If you were outside the boat, what would you do?
5. Discuss the students' answers, allowing disagreements, as there will be many and
there are no "right" answers. Point out some possible criteria which some might
consider in selecting in 4 (b) above:
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
Related - Unrelated
Man - Woman - Child
Old - Young
Strong - Weak
Christian - Non-Christian
Chiefly - Commoner
Black - White (i.e., race)
Rich - Poor
Friendly - Not-so-Friendly
Same Politics - Opposition
Beautiful - Ugly
Skilled - Unskilled
Fat - Skinny
Smart- Dull
Other criteria?
22. Continue discussion as long as there is strong and serious interest.
23. Point out that the decisions made were very difficult ones based on examination of
consequences of each option and values each individual held. Some may even have
changed their decision after listening to others and may even have changed certain
values they held.
24. Also point out that while the situation was contrived, in the Pacific it could very well
be more common than one realizes, as scores of people are lost at sea every year.
25. In any case, "lifeboat ethics", making choices based on values, is found in many
population-related issues, which have tremendous implications on the lives of
individuals or groups of individuals, e.g.;
.
A country's immigration policies.
a.
A rich country's foreign aid policy.
b.
A family's decision on who should go for further schooling or even first priority in
food when resources are scarce.
c.
A university's admission policy.
Solicit other examples.
Discuss each of the above. For example, how do countries decide whom to admit as
immigrants, i.e. what criteria are used? If you do not meet the criteria, you are "outside the
boat". What implications would it have on your life?
26. Related to the students other examples:
. In World War I (and other wars/disasters) with so many casualties that
overwhelmed the resources available (medical, people, supplies, facilities,
2
time, etc.) a system called "triage" was practiced. The wounded were
categorized into three groups:
1.
The most seriously wounded but who would probably die even with
attention/treatment.
2.
Those who would probably survive with immediate care.
3.
Those who would probably survive even without immediate care.
First priority was given to the second group, i.e., not to the most
seriously wounded.
a. Cases have been reported where doctors have had to make a decision on
which patient needing an organ transplant would get it when several were
awaiting a transplant.
b. In some Eskimo tribes, when an elderly person felt he no longer could
contribute and was a burden on his family, especially on the scarce resources
available, he quietly went off to die in the freezing environment. Different
cultures have different values.
27. Emphasize to the students the importance of making responsible decisions based on
an examination of the options and consequences in his life. Also, that even values are
relative - what is "right" or "good" to one may not be another.
Updated 10 June, 2003
Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor
by Garrett Hardin, Psychology Today, September 1974
Environmentalists use the metaphor of the earth as a "spaceship" in trying to persuade
countries, industries and people to stop wasting and polluting our natural resources.
Since we all share life on this planet, they argue, no single person or institution has the
right to destroy, waste, or use more than a fair share of its resources.
But does everyone on earth have an equal right to an equal share of its resources? The
3
spaceship metaphor can be dangerous when used by misguided idealists to justify
suicidal policies for sharing our resources through uncontrolled immigration and foreign
aid. In their enthusiastic but unrealistic generosity, they confuse the ethics of a
spaceship with those of a lifeboat.
A true spaceship would have to be under the control of a captain, since no ship could
possibly survive if its course were determined by committee. Spaceship Earth certainly
has no captain; the United Nations is merely a toothless tiger, with little power to
enforce any policy upon its bickering members.
If we divide the world crudely into rich nations and poor nations, two thirds of them are
desperately poor, and only one third comparatively rich, with the United States the
wealthiest of all. Metaphorically each rich nation can be seen as a lifeboat full of
comparatively rich people. In the ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor of the
world, who would like to get in, or at least to share some of the wealth. What should the
lifeboat passengers do?
First, we must recognize the limited capacity of any lifeboat. For example, a nation's
land has a limited capacity to support a population and as the current energy crisis has
shown us, in some ways we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of our land.
Adrift in a Moral Sea
So here we sit, say 50 people in our lifeboat. To be generous, let us assume it has room
for 10 more, making a total capacity of 60. Suppose the 50 of us in the lifeboat see 100
others swimming in the water outside, begging for admission to our boat or for
handouts. We have several options: we may be tempted to try to live by the Christian
ideal of being "our brother's keeper," or by the Marxist ideal of "to each according to his
needs." Since the needs of all in the water are the same, and since they can all be seen
as "our brothers," we could take them all into our boat, making a total of 150 in a boat
designed for 60. The boat swamps, everyone drowns. Complete justice, complete
catastrophe.
Since the boat has an unused excess capacity of 10 more passengers, we could admit
just 10 more to it. But which 10 do we let in? How do we choose? Do we pick the best
10, "first come, first served"? And what do we say to the 90 we exclude? If we do let an
extra 10 into our lifeboat, we will have lost our "safety factor," an engineering principle
of critical importance. For example, if we don't leave room for excess capacity as a
safety factor in our country's agriculture, a new plant disease or a bad change in the
weather could have disastrous consequences.
Suppose we decide to preserve our small safety factor and admit no more to the
lifeboat. Our survival is then possible although we shall have to be constantly on guard
against boarding parties.
While this last solution clearly offers the only means of our survival, it is morally
abhorrent to many people. Some say they feel guilty about their good luck. My reply is
simple: "Get out and yield your place to others." This may solve the problem of the
guilt-ridden person's conscience, but it does not change the ethics of the lifeboat. The
needy person to whom the guilt-ridden person yields his place will not himself feel guilty
about his good luck. If he did, he would not climb aboard. The net result of conscience-
4
stricken people giving up their unjustly held seats is the elimination of that sort of
conscience from the lifeboat.
This is the basic metaphor within which we must work out our solutions. Let us now
enrich the image, step by step, with substantive additions from the real world, a world
that must solve real and pressing problems of overpopulation and hunger.
The harsh ethics of the lifeboat become even harsher when we consider the reproductive
differences between the rich nations and the poor nations. The people inside the
lifeboats are doubling in numbers every 87 years; those swimming around outside are
doubling, on the average, every 35 years, more than twice as fast as the rich. And since
the world's resources are dwindling, the difference in prosperity between the rich and
the poor can only increase.
As of 1973, the U.S. had a population of 210 million people, who were increasing by 0.8
percent per year. Outside our lifeboat, let us imagine another 210 million people (say
the combined populations of Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Morocco, Pakistan, Thailand
and the Philippines) who are increasing at a rate of 3.3 percent per year. Put differently,
the doubling time for this aggregate population is 21 years, compared to 87 years for
the U.S.
The harsh ethics of the lifeboat become harsher when we consider the reproductive
differences between rich and poor.
Multiplying the Rich and the Poor
Now suppose the U.S. agreed to pool its resources with those seven countries, with
everyone receiving an equal share. Initially the ratio of Americans to non-Americans in
this model would be one-to-one. But consider what the ratio would be after 87 years,
but which time the Americans would have doubled to a population of 420 million. By
then, doubling every 21 years, the other group would have swollen to 354 billion. Each
American would have to share the available resources with more than eight people.
But, one could argue, this discussion assumes that current population trends will
continue, and they may not. Quite so. Most likely the rate of population increase will
decline much faster in the U.S. than it will in the other countries, and there does not
seem to be much we can do about it. In sharing with "each according to his needs," we
must recognize that needs are determined by population size, which is determined by
the rate of reproduction, which at present is regarded as a sovereign right of every
nation, poor or not. This being so, the philanthropic load created by the sharing ethic of
the spaceship can only increase.
The Tragedy of the Commons
The fundamental error of spaceship ethics, and the sharing it requires, is that it leads to
what I call "the tragedy of the commons." Under a system of private property, the men
who own property recognize their responsibility to care for it, for if they don't they will
eventually suffer. A farmer, for instance, will allow no more cattle in a pasture than its
carrying capacity justifies. If he overloads it, erosion sets in, weeds take over, and he
loses the use of the pasture.
5
If a pasture becomes a commons open to all, the right of each to use it may not be
matched by a corresponding responsibility to protect it. Asking everyone to use it with
discretion will hardly do, for the considerate herdsman who refrains from overloading
the commons suffers more than a selfish one who says his needs are greater. If
everyone would restrain himself, all would be well; but it takes only one less than
everyone to ruin a system of voluntary restraint. In a crowded world of less than perfect
human beings, mutual ruin is inevitable if there are no controls. This is the tragedy of
the commons.
One of the major tasks of education today should be the creation of such an acute
awareness of the dangers of the commons that people will recognize its many varieties.
For example, the air and water have become polluted because they are treated as
commons. Further growth in the population or per-capita conversion of natural resources
into pollutants will only make the problem worse. The same holds true for the fish of the
oceans. Fishing fleets have nearly disappeared in many parts of the world, technological
improvements in the art of fishing are hastening the day of complete ruin. Only the
replacement of the system of the commons with a responsible system of control will
save the land, air, water and oceanic fisheries.
The World Food Bank
In recent years there has been a push to create a new commons called a World Food
Bank, an international depository of food reserves to which nations would contribute
according to their abilities and from which they would draw according to their needs.
This humanitarian proposal has received support from many liberal international groups,
and from such prominent citizens as Margaret Mead, U.N. Secretary General Kurt
Waldheim, and Senators Edward Kennedy and George McGovern.
A world food bank appeals powerfully to our humanitarian impulses. But before we rush
ahead with such a plan, let us recognize where the greatest political push comes from,
lest we be disillusioned later. Our experience with the "Food for Peace program," or
Public Law 480, gives us the answer. This program moved billions of dollars worth of
U.S. surplus grain to food-short, population-long countries during the past two decades.
But when P.L. 480 first became law, a headline in the business magazine Forbes
revealed the real power behind it: "Feeding the World's Hungry Millions: How It Will
Mean Billions for U.S. Business."
And indeed it did. In the years 1960 to 1970, U.S. taxpayers spent a total of $7.9 billion
on the Food for Peace program. Between 1948 and 1970, they also paid an additional
$50 billion for other economic-aid programs, some of which went for food and foodproducing machinery and technology. Though all U.S. taxpayers were forced to
contribute to the cost of P.L. 480 certain special interest groups gained handsomely
under the program. Farmers did not have to contribute the grain; the Government or
rather the taxpayers, bought it from them at full market prices. The increased demand
raised prices of farm products generally. The manufacturers of farm machinery,
fertilizers and pesticides benefited by the farmers' extra efforts to grow more food. Grain
elevators profited from storing the surplus until it could be shipped. Railroads made
money hauling it to ports, and shipping lines profited from carrying it overseas. The
implementation of P.L. 480 required the creation of a vast Government bureaucracy,
which then acquired its own vested interest in continuing the program regardless of its
merits.
6
Extracting Dollars
Those who proposed and defended the Food for Peace program in public rarely
mentioned its importance to any of these special interests. The public emphasis was
always on its humanitarian effects. The combination of silent selfish interests and highly
vocal humanitarian apologists made a powerful and successful lobby for extracting
money from taxpayers. We can expect the same lobby to push now for the creation of a
World Food Bank.
However great the potential benefit to selfish interests, it should not be a decisive
argument against a truly humanitarian program. We must ask if such a program would
actually do more good than harm, not only momentarily but also in the long run. Those
who propose the food bank usually refer to a current "emergency" or "crisis" in terms of
world food supply. But what is an emergency? Although they may be infrequent and
sudden, everyone knows that emergencies will occur from time to time. A well-run
family, company, organization or country prepares for the likelihood of accidents and
emergencies. It expects them, it budgets for them, it saves for them.
Learning the Hard Way
What happens if some organizations or countries budget for accidents and others do
not? If each country is solely responsible for its own well-being, poorly managed ones
will suffer. But they can learn from experience. They may mend their ways, and learn to
budget for infrequent but certain emergencies. For example, the weather varies from
year to year, and periodic crop failures are certain. A wise and competent government
saves out of the production of the good years in anticipation of bad years to come.
Joseph taught this policy to Pharaoh in Egypt more than 2,000 years ago. Yet the great
majority of the governments in the world today do not follow such a policy. They lack
either the wisdom or the competence, or both. Should those nations that do manage to
put something aside be forced to come to the rescue each time an emergency occurs
among the poor nations?
"But it isn't their fault!" Some kind-hearted liberals argue. "How can we blame the poor
people who are caught in an emergency? Why must they suffer for the sins of their
governments?" The concept of blame is simply not relevant here. The real question is,
what are the operational consequences of establishing a world food bank? If it is open to
every country every time a need develops, slovenly rulers will not be motivated to take
Joseph's advice. Someone will always come to their aid. Some countries will deposit food
in the world food bank, and others will withdraw it. There will be almost no overlap. As a
result of such solutions to food shortage emergencies, the poor countries will not learn
to mend their ways, and will suffer progressively greater emergencies as their
populations grow.
Population Control the Crude Way
On the average poor countries undergo a 2.5 percent increase in population each year;
rich countries, about 0.8 percent. Only rich countries have anything in the way of food
reserves set aside, and even they do not have as much as they should. Poor countries
have none. If poor countries received no food from the outside, the rate of their
population growth would be periodically checked by crop failures and famines. But if
they can always draw on a world food bank in time of need, their population can
7
continue to grow unchecked, and so will their "need" for aid. In the short run, a world
food bank may diminish that need, but in the long run it actually increases the need
without limit.
Without some system of worldwide food sharing, the proportion of people in the rich and
poor nations might eventually stabilize. The overpopulated poor countries would
decrease in numbers, while the rich countries that had room for more people would
increase. But with a well-meaning system of sharing, such as a world food bank, the
growth differential between the rich and the poor countries will not only persist, it will
increase. Because of the higher rate of population growth in the poor countries of the
world, 88 percent of today's children are born poor, and only 12 percent rich. Year by
year the ratio becomes worse, as the fast-reproducing poor outnumber the slowreproducing rich.
A world food bank is thus a commons in disguise. People will have more motivation to
draw from it than to add to any common store. The less provident and less able will
multiply at the expense of the abler and more provident, bringing eventual ruin upon all
who share in the commons. Besides, any system of "sharing" that amounts to foreign
aid from the rich nations to the poor nations will carry the taint of charity, which will
contribute little to the world peace so devoutly desired by those who support the idea of
a world food bank.
As past U.S. foreign-aid programs have amply and depressingly demonstrated,
international charity frequently inspires mistrust and antagonism rather than gratitude
on the part of the recipient nation [see "What Other Nations Hear When the Eagle
Screams," by Kenneth J. and Mary M. Gergen, PT, June].
Chinese Fish and Miracle Rice
The modern approach to foreign aid stresses the export of technology and advice, rather
than money and food. As an ancient Chinese proverb goes: "Give a man a fish and he
will eat for a day; teach him how to fish and he will eat for the rest of his days." Acting
on this advice, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations have financed a number of
programs for improving agriculture in the hungry nations. Known as the "Green
Revolution," these programs have led to the development of "miracle rice" and "miracle
wheat," new strains that offer bigger harvests and greater resistance to crop damage.
Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize winning agronomist who, supported by the Rockefeller
Foundation, developed "miracle wheat," is one of the most prominent advocates of a
world food bank.
Whether or not the Green Revolution can increase food production as much as its
champions claim is a debatable but possibly irrelevant point. Those who support this
well-intended humanitarian effort should first consider some of the fundamentals of
human ecology. Ironically, one man who did was the late Alan Gregg, a vice president of
the Rockefeller Foundation. Two decades ago he expressed strong doubts about the
wisdom of such attempts to increase food production. He likened the growth and spread
of humanity over the surface of the earth to the spread of cancer in the human body,
remarking that "cancerous growths demand food; but, as far as I know, they have never
been cured by getting it."
8
Overloading the Environment
Every human born constitutes a draft on all aspects of the environment: food, air, water,
forests, beaches, wildlife, scenery and solitude. Food can, perhaps, be significantly
increased to meet a growing demand. But what about clean beaches, unspoiled forests,
and solitude? If we satisfy a growing population's need for food, we necessarily decrease
its per capita supply of the other resources needed by men.
India, for example, now has a population of 600 million, which increases by 15 million
each year. This population already puts a huge load on a relatively impoverished
environment. The country's forests are now only a small fraction of what they were
three centuries ago and floods and erosion continually destroy the insufficient farmland
that remains. Every one of the 15 million new lives added to India's population puts an
additional burden on the environment, and increases the economic and social costs of
crowding. However humanitarian our intent, every Indian life saved through medical or
nutritional assistance from abroad diminishes the quality of life for those who remain,
and for subsequent generations. If rich countries make it possible, through foreign aid,
for 600 million Indians to swell to 1.2 billion in a mere 28 years, as their current growth
rate threatens, will future generations of Indians thank us for hastening the destruction
of their environment? Will our good intentions be sufficient excuse for the consequences
of our actions?
My final example of a commons in action is one for which the public has the least desire
for rational discussion - immigration. Anyone who publicly questions the wisdom of
current U.S. immigration policy is promptly charged with bigotry, prejudice,
ethnocentrism, chauvinism, isolationism or selfishness. Rather than encounter such
accusations, one would rather talk about other matters leaving immigration policy to
wallow in the crosscurrents of special interests that take no account of the good of the
whole, or the interests of posterity.
Perhaps we still feel guilty about things we said in the past. Two generations ago the
popular press frequently referred to Dagos, Wops, Polacks, Chinks and Krauts in articles
about how America was being "overrun" by foreigners of supposedly inferior genetic
stock [see "The Politics of Genetic Engineering: Who Decides Who's Defective?" PT,
June]. But because the implied inferiority of foreigners was used then as justification for
keeping them out, people now assume that restrictive policies could only be based on
such misguided notions. There are other grounds.
A Nation of Immigrants
Just consider the numbers involved. Our Government acknowledges a net inflow of
400,000 immigrants a year. While we have no hard data on the extent of illegal entries,
educated guesses put the figure at about 600,000 a year. Since the natural increase
(excess of births over deaths) of the resident population now runs about 1.7 million per
year, the yearly gain from immigration amounts to at least 19 percent of the total
annual increase, and may be as much as 37 percent if we include the estimate for illegal
immigrants. Considering the growing use of birth-control devices, the potential effect of
education campaigns by such organizations as Planned Parenthood Federation of
America and Zero Population Growth, and the influence of inflation and the housing
shortage, the fertility rate of American women may decline so much that immigration
could account for all the yearly increase in population. Should we not at least ask if that
9
is what we want?
For the sake of those who worry about whether the "quality" of the average immigrant
compares favorably with the quality of the average resident, let us assume that
immigrants and native-born citizens are of exactly equal quality, however one defines
that term. We will focus here only on quantity; and since our conclusions will depend on
nothing else, all charges of bigotry and chauvinism become irrelevant.
Immigration Vs. Food Supply
World food banks move food to the people, hastening the exhaustion of the environment
of the poor countries. Unrestricted immigration, on the other hand, moves people to the
food, thus speeding up the destruction of the environment of the rich countries. We can
easily understand why poor people should want to make this latter transfer, but why
should rich hosts encourage it?
As in the case of foreign-aid programs, immigration receives support from selfish
interests and humanitarian impulses. The primary selfish interest in unimpeded
immigration is the desire of employers for cheap labor, particularly in industries and
trades that offer degrading work. In the past, one wave of foreigners after another was
brought into the U.S. to work at wretched jobs for wretched wages. In recent years the
Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans have had this dubious honor. The interests of the
employers of cheap labor mesh well with the guilty silence of the country's liberal
intelligentsia. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are particularly reluctant to call for a
closing of the doors to immigration for fear of being called bigots.
But not all countries have such reluctant leadership. Most education Hawaiians, for
example, are keenly aware of the limits of their environment, particularly in terms of
population growth. There is only so much room on the islands, and the islanders know it.
To Hawaiians, immigrants from the other 49 states present as great a threat as those
from other nations. At a recent meeting of Hawaiian government officials in Honolulu, I
had the ironic delight of hearing a speaker who like most of his audience was of
Japanese ancestry, ask how the country might practically and constitutionally close its
doors to further immigration. One member of the audience countered: "How can we shut
the doors now? We have many friends and relatives in Japan that we'd like to bring here
some day so that they can enjoy Hawaii too." The Japanese-American speaker smiled
sympathetically and answered: "Yes, but we have children now, and someday we'll have
grandchildren too. We can bring more people here from Japan only by giving away some
of the land that we hope to pass on to our grandchildren some day. What right do we
have to do that?"
At this point, I can hear U.S. liberals asking: "How can you justify slamming the door
once you're inside? You say that immigrants should be kept out. But aren't we all
immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants? If we insist on staying, must we not
admit all others?" Our craving for intellectual order leads us to seek and prefer
symmetrical rules and morals: a single rule for me and everybody else; the same rule
yesterday, today and tomorrow. Justice, we fell, should not change with time and place.
We Americans of non-Indian ancestry can look upon ourselves as the descendants of
thieves who are guilty morally, if not legally, of stealing this land from its Indian owners.
Should we then give back the land to the now living American descendants of those
Indians? However morally or logically sound this proposal may be, I, for one, am
10
unwilling to live by it and I know no one else who is. Besides, the logical consequence
would be absurd. Suppose that, intoxicated with a sense of pure justice, we should
decide to turn our land over to the Indians. Since all our other wealth has also been
derived from the land, wouldn't we be morally obliged to give that back to the Indians
too?
Pure Justice Vs. Reality
Clearly, the concept of pure justice produces an infinite regression to absurdity.
Centuries ago, wise men invented statutes of limitations to justify the rejection of such
pure justice, in the interest of preventing continual disorder. The law zealously defends
property rights, but only relatively recent property rights. Drawing a line after an
arbitrary time has elapsed may be unjust, but the alternatives are worse.
We are all the descendants of thieves, and the world's resources are inequitably
distributed. But we must begin the journey to tomorrow from the point where we are
today. We cannot remake the past. We cannot safely divide the wealth equitably among
all peoples so long as people reproduce at different rates. To do so would guarantee that
our grandchildren and everyone else's grandchildren, would have only a ruined world to
inhabit.
To be generous with one's own possessions is quite different from being generous with
those of posterity. We should call this point to the attention of those who from a
commendable love of justice and equality, would institute a system of the commons,
either in the form of a world food bank, or of unrestricted immigration. We must
convince them if we wish to save at least some parts of the world from environmental
ruin.
Without a true world government to control reproduction and the use of available
resources, the sharing ethic of the spaceship is impossible. For the foreseeable future,
our survival demands that we govern our actions by the ethics of a lifeboat, harsh
though they may be. Posterity will be satisfied with nothing less.
11
Introduction to Philosophy: Course Notes
“Lifeboat Ethics” by Garret Hardin
Attacking the "spaceship" metaphor:

Earth is like a spaceship:
o
limited resources which must be shared by all.
o No place else to go.
Hardin thinks this is not a good metaphor 

implies that everyone has a right to all of the resources equally.
Ignores the essential fact that a spaceship has a captian to allocate resources earth does not.
The world is a 'moral sea':


full of lifeboats (wealthy nations) and
swimming people (poor nations).
Poor nations are crying out for help - they want to come aboard our boat.
His first point :


a lifeboat has a limited capacityo
in some respects our lifeboat is already low in the water suppose the capacity of our boat is 60 people- and we already have 50 in the boat.
There are 100 people in the water crying for our help. Our safety factor is +10.
What are our options?

1. Take them all in.
o If we do this, our boat sinks and it is likely that we will all drown.
o While we might wish we could help them all, reality is that we cannot.
12


2. Take in 10 - up to the capacity of the lifeboat.
o If we do this, we will have saved 10, but will no longer have a safety
factor in our boat.
o In addition, what do we say to the 90 we do not let in?
o How do you choose which 10 get to come in?
o What if someone in the water is more “useful” than someone in the boat?
3. We can let no one in.
o If we do this, some in the boat might feel guilty about their 'fortune'.?
o If so, Hardin suggests that they get out of the boat, giving their space to
one of the needy people.
 (the person climbing in will not feel guilty about taking up a spot
in the boat, so the net result is that guilt is eliminated from the
boat.)
Hardin suggests the third option:


We will retain our safety factor of 10, which is necessary in the light of
population growth or 'stormy weather'
Some would suggest we teach them to “build their own boat”
o Where do they get the materials? From our boat?
o It is hard to swing a hammer while treading water.
General problems with the “spaceship” metaphor -
Problems with the World Food Bank:
The idea here was a noble one,


those nations with a surplus of food would put it into a 'Food Bank'
nations with a deficit of food could withdraw as needed.
There are several reasons why such a system will not work:
Why the Food Bank won’t work:


1. The poor nations will always be taking out - thus they have no motive to
improve their status. There will be no motivation for:
o a.improving the economy
o b. limiting population growth
o c. developing better food production
o d. preserving their environment
We can see a parallel problem with aid in this country.
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
2. Because of the overwhelming needs of the poor nations, there will never be a
surplus o the rich nations will keep making deposits, and
o the poor will keep taking them out.
Suppose we make the resources the ‘property of all’:
If we make it a 'commons', then we are assured of ruining the resources.
Consider a rancher who owns his own property (pasture).
If this rancher is responsible, she will not allow any more cattle on the pasture than it can sustain (the
'carrying capacity').
If she does, the pasture is ruined by overgrazing, and the rancher will lose the use of the pasture.
But, if we make the pasture the property of all in common who wish to use it, then each individual rancher
will want to graze as many cattle as they can on the land (justifying this by simple utilitarian reasoning.)
The problem
This will result in the quick destruction of the resource. For example:




Bureau of Land Management
o Severe overgrazing of pasture land
o Ranchers claim they have a “right” to use the land (tradition & economy)
National Park system
Yellowstone, Channel Islands, Etc.
Public parks/campgrounds in CA
Everyone feels they have a right to use these resources for their own purposes. But if all
have a right, and there isn't enough room, what can we do?


a. Close the resource to some - limit the use
o problem: those denied access can claim (rightly) that they have an equal
right to use the resource as those admitted.
o example - Denali National Park in Alaska
b. Close areas of the resource to all - rotate the use
o Problem: competing interests will cause conflict - which areas do you
close?
o Access areas cannot be closed - but this is where the most damage occurs.
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o

example - Yellowstone National Park, Assateague Island National
Seashore.
c. Close the entire resource to all for a period of time.
o Problem: this will severely impact those people who live near and make a
living from the resource o They will become destitute or homeless without the resource.
o example - BLM lands, National Parks.
Best solution to manage the resources?
Solution - private ownership.
No one has a 'right' to use the resource.
Those that wish to use the resource must pay to use it.
This will automatically limit the users and provide a means of maintaining the resource.
(why not turn the National Parks over to the remaining Indian tribes? It would better suit
their heritage than Casinos!)
Problem 

This cuts out the poor who cannot afford to pay the fees.
Possible response o fine, the 'free users' are usually the ones that trash the resource anyway since they have no responsibility as owners.
How does this apply to immigration?


Immigrants do not have a “right” to enter a country
o If they can contribute to the society - then we might let them in
o If they have their own resources or can afford to pay us for ours.
Otherwise, to let them in does not address the root problem:
o If everyone flees the country, who will remain to fix what is wrong?
End of notes on "LifeBoat Ethics" by Garret Hardin
15
Garrett Hardin: Lifeboat Ethics
Garrett Hardin argues for a very harsh thesis: we simply should not provide aid to people
in poor countries. His argument is consequentialist: he claims that the net result of doing
so would be negative -- would in fact be courting large-scale disaster. One of the things
that we will notice about Hardin's essay, however, is that whether he is right or wrong, he
paints with a very broad brush. This makes it a good essay for the honing of your
philosophical skills; you should notice that there are many places where the reasoning
proceeds with less than total care.
Hardin begins with metaphors. He points out that while the metaphor of earth as a grand spaceship has a
certain popularity (or did 23 years ago) it is a flawed metaphor nonetheless. A spaceship has a captain, and
couldn't survive without one. The earth has nothing vaguely resembling a captain, the United Nations in
particular being a "toothless tiger."
Whatever we may make of the metaphor, we should note what it was meant to support. By Hardin's own
account, it was a way of bolstering the following proposition:
...no single person or instituion has the right to destroy, waste or use more than a
fair share of its resources.
The correctness of this view would hardly seem to depend on whether the earth has a
captain. But Hardin's reply would no doubt be that if we ae in a situation in which
allowing everyone a "fair share" will lead to disaster, then this seemingly innocuous
moral principle is dangerous.
In any case, Hardin prefers a different metaphor. Rich nations can be seen as lifeboats. The seas around
them are filled with poor people who would like to get in the lifeboat or at least get a shae of the walth.
Should we let them in?
Hardin fills out the metaphor. Suppose that our lifeboat has a capacity of 60 people and that there are now
50 people on board. Suppose there are 100 people in the water. If we take them all on board, we get
"complete justice, complete disaster," in Hardin's phrase; we all drown together. We might let 10 aborard,
but how do we choose? And what about the need for a safety factor? Aren't we irresponsible if we don't
plan ahead for possible emergencies by leaving ourselves some excess capacity? (Recall that in this
metaphor, capacity includes things like supplies.)
It should be obvious that this is a dubious metaphor. To begin with (and this will come up again) not all
countries are either rich or poor. Furthermore, it is not as clear as Hardin assumes that we lack the resources
to save everyone. And the argument from the safety factor may seem dubious. Couldn't we help some
people -- even if we select them in a fairly arbitrary way?
Leave the safety factor aside. Presumably it is true that we should not give all our "excess" resources away;
not planning for emergencies is irresponsible. The main reply that Hardin would make to our doubts is this:
even if we have enough resources to help everyone in the short run, we don't have nearly enough to do so in
the long run.
Why not? Because of the difference in rates of population growth between rich and poor nations. Suppose
that in 1974, the U.S. had decided to share its wealth with a group of countries such as Columbia,
16
Venezuala and Pakistan. Suppose that the combined population of the poor countries equaled the total
(1974) populationof the U.S.: about 210 million. The populaiton in the U.S. increass at a rate of about .8%
per year; the population of those countries increases at a rate of about 3.3% per year. By 2061 -- 87 years
later -- the population of the U.S. would have doubled to 420 million. The combined population of the poor
countries in the pool would be 354 billion. This is simply unsustainable; our sharing would lead to
catastrophe for all of us.
This is the consequence that Hardin believes would follow from following the sharing ethic inherent in the
"spaceship earth" metaphor. And he sees it as an example of a more general phenomenon that he labels
"The Tragedy of the Commons." A commons is a public resource, open for all to share. The air is such a
resource at present. To a lesser extent, water is as well, though the examle would have to be sharply
qualified. The model Hardin offers is a public grazing space. If the space is a comons, there is a real danger
that not everyone will use the resource with restraint and consideration for others. Adn, Hardin claims, "it
takes only one less than everyone to ruin a system of voluntary restraint."
Now this is hardly true -- if most people act decently nonetheless. But when it comes to earthly resources,
Hardin believes that there is no hope but for a system of stringent control. In particular, a World Food Bank
is a bad idea, he believes. The least of the reasons he gives is that it will probably benefit certain wealthy
corporations while raising prices for the rest of us. Still, if the scheme were effective, we might consider
this cost worthwhile. The problem is that the World Food Bank would be a commons in disguise. It would
do nothing to force poor countries to curb their populations. In the long run, it will result in catastrophe.
Another alternative to food aid is technological and agricultural aid. This might increase the food yield in
poor countries, but it is ikely to lead us to violate the carying capacity of the land. And this is
unnacceptable. Hardin quotes the late Alan Gregg, who expressed the point in grim fashion: "cancerous
growths demand food; but as far as I know, they have never been cured by getting it."
There is a large assumption here to which we will return. In the meantime, Hardin considers a third
allternative: immigration. This is simpky a way of moving the poor to the food rather than the food to the
poor, as he sees it, and is the equivalent of letting people stream into the lifeboat.
But someone might ask: isn't our situation completely unfair? It is by accident of birth and the theft of
aboriginal land by our ancestors that we are in the propserous position in which we find ourselves.
Hardin grants the point. But he sees it is as moot. We need to begin from where we are. And he notes: a
wise society imposes statutes of limitations on the distance into the past that one may reach in trying to
correct injustice.
We can grant this point: we need to begin form where we are. The question is: in what direction should we
head?
The postscript seems to hold out a less draconian approach. Hardin writes:
Having accepted disease control, the people [of poor countries] must now accept
population control.
This suggests an approach that Hardin does not develop: aid that has some very definite strings
attached in the form of stringent population control policies. But the fact that this comes up only in
a postscript is dismaying. Because Hardin's article is predicated on the assumption that there are
only two approaches: give aid in more or less unlimited and unrestricted fashion, or give no aid. If
the "sapceship earth" metaphor implies that aid should, indeed, be given without restriction, then
the spaceship earth metaphor is no doubt seriously flawed; that there is a serious case for giving no
aid is quite a different matter, and Hardin's argument is too crude to establish this stronger thesis.
17
18
Read the brief description of the Tragedy of the Commons and LifeBoat Ethics below.
The Tragedy of the Commons
Biologist Garrett Hardin used the term "The Tragedy of the Commons" to dramatize the conflicts
which can exist between people's short-term and long-term interests. The specific example he uses is
that of a community of herdsmen who graze their cattle on a common pasture owned by the village.
It is to the short-term advantage to any individual herdsman to increase the size of his herd, because
his production will be greater, and his family will benefit. The costs of his actions; overgrazing and
damage to the commons; will be minimal to the individual, because they are born by the community
as a whole.
Similarly, if other herdsmen increase the size of their herds and any given individual does not, that
individual will suffer because the commons will be damaged by overgrazing, but he will have nothing
to show for it.
Carried to its conclusion, each individual acting his own best short-term interests, increases the size
of his herd. This then leads to the tragedy of the commons; leading to the destruction of the
community pasture from overgrazing, the death all the herdsmen's cattle from starvation, and the
economic (and perhaps physical) death of the community.
Name some other ways in which individuals acting in their own best short-term interests may create
a tragedy of the commons situation, and damage their own long-term interests.
One example might be clearcutting a forest for short-term profit, even though the results will be
erosion - leading to silting of rivers and loss of salmon runs - loss of wildlife habitat, and loss of
recreational opportunities for the larger community. The failure of the forest to regenerate due to
erosion, may also result in a significant long-term financial loss to forestry interests.
Overfishing might be another example. In catching more fish than can be sustainably harvested,
fishers (and the policymakers who regulate them) may deplete the resource to the point that none of
the fishers can survive economically.
A third example might be the success of the US automotive industry in delaying or defeating antipollution and fuel efficiency regulations. The individual manufacturers and their shareholders
benefit in the short-term because they did not have to invest in new technology, but the larger society
is harmed in the long-term by increased energy consumption and pollution. Citizens around the
globe may also be harmed in the long-term, because the additional pollution contributes to global
warming.
Lifeboat ethics
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Hardin also posed the question of "Lifeboat Ethics," using the metaphor of a lifeboat at sea to
dramatize the situation of the few prosperous and food-sufficient industrialized countries surrounded
by dozens of poor, rapidly-growing and resource-scarce nations. The rich nations are in the partiallyfilled lifeboat, and the poor are in the water.
Those in the lifeboat face three choices. They can try to pick up all those in the water, which will
overload and swamp the lifeboat. They can try to pick up as many as the lifeboat will hold, even
though this diminishes their own chances of survival by reducing their margin of safety, and forces
them to make the difficult decision of which people to rescue. Or they can fend off those in the water,
and row away. Hardin suggests the last option; rowing away; as the most realistic choice for the
industrialized nations.
This is harsh, he acknowledges, and may be perceived as unjust. But he suggests that those who
disagree with the choice can trade places with those in the water. In real terms, he recommends that
the US and other nations cease giving food aid to poor nations, because access to that food simply
allows the population to increase further, making the ultimate outcome of starvation and tragedy
that much larger in scale, but no less inevitable.
BONUS: For bonus marks, write your reaction to the lifeboat ethics scenario that Hardin proposes.
(No more than 1 page).
20
Saving Our Ship
By Richard Mouw
IT has occurred to me from time to time that there may be significant similarities between
the views of secularist advocates of "lifeboat ethics" and the outlook of those
fundamentalists who view themselves as inhabitants of "that late great planet earth." This
suspicion has been reinforced by two items I have recently come across. The first is an
excellent essay by James Sellers, "Famine and Interdependence: Toward a New Identity
for America and the West" (in Lifeboat Ethics: The Moral Dilemmas of World Hunger).
Sellers suggests that lifeboat ethics, as advocated by Garrett Hardin and others, is "a form
of ecological chiliasm"-although those of us who are familiar with the complexities of
evangelical eschatologies might want to be more specific, viewing it as a secularized
version of pre-tribulation rapturism. In any event, Sellers' suggestion seems to me to be a
helpful one. Secularist lifeboaters and fundamentalists both have a rather easy time
dividing the world up into "saved" and "lost." And they both seem to be preoccupied with
the survival of an élite group who will have the good fortune of escaping the general
wrath that is yet to come.
The second item is a piece of concrete evidence that fundamentalists were using the
lifeboat metaphor long before it was adopted by the recent secularist lifeboaters. In
Modern Revivalism: From Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham, William
McLoughlin reports this quote by Dwight L. Moody: "I look upon this world as a
wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, 'Moody, save all you can."
Of course, what this remark of Moody's also shows is that there are some significant
differences between secularist and Christian lifeboatisms. Indeed, if I had to choose
between the two I would have little difficulty embracing Moody's formulation as over
against Garrett Hardin's. Moody at least views himself as dealing with a lifeboat that is
not of his own making. His lifeboat has been given to him by God, and it carries with it
God's standards of occupancy.
Furthermore, there is an expansiveness in Moody's view of his mission as a keeper of the
lifeboat: "Moody, save all you can." One gets the impression that Moody is not operating
with some rigid notion of maximum capacity; if his lifeboat is sparsely populated, this
will not
Richard Mouw is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, Grand Rapids. He is the author of Political
Evangelism (1976) and a new member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY. This brief item
on "lifeboat ethics" appeared first in the May 1977 issue of Sojourners magazine and is reprinted here with
the permission of the publishers.
21
be because some were turned away, but rather because some invitées refused to come
aboard. It is precisely this willingness to make a "free offer" which is missing in the
attitudes of the secularist lifeboaters.
Moody's lifeboat, then, is a more humane vessel than that of the secularists. But, even so,
we must be wary of adopting his emphasis. Any view of the world that is dominated by a
lifeboat metaphor must ultimately be judged as deficient on some crucial points. For one
thing, a lifeboat perspective assumes that the larger world is in fact a "wrecked vessel." I
am not prepared to make this assumption.
It still seems to me quite proper to proclaim that "the earth is the Lord's and the fulness
thereof, the world and those who dwell therein" (Psalm 24: 1). There is no doubt that our
physical and cultural environment is broken and torn by sin. But it is still the Creator's
world-a world to which Jesus is sent, not for purposes of condemnation but for salvation.
Whenever I begin, then, to think in terms of a lifeboat, the boat seems to get bigger and
bigger until it finally becomes indistinguishable from the original vessel which I had
thought was wrecked.
But even if it is proper to think about surviving the wrath which may yet come, survival
cannot be the only valued commodity. As Sellers rightly states, "What we must ask is
whether survival-naked survival-is a sufficient moral end, or whether meaningful human
existence must not demand more than that." For the Christian, the question of survival
cannot be considered apart from a concern for justice.
Indeed, the Scriptures seem to put the issue of survival into a very different context. In
Matthew 25, Jesus makes it clear that the question of who will ultimately "survive" is one
that God will decide. And it will be decided on the basis of who it was that fed the
hungry, clothed the naked and visited the prisoners. In the light of such considerations,
then, we ought not to be thinking of survival at all. For, if the need for a lifeboat ever
comes about, room will be reserved for those who have not worried themselves much
about lifeboats, but who have sought instead to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk
in humility before God's face.
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Home
The Tragedy of the Commons
Garrett Hardin (1968)
(table of contents)
"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?
23
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
24
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 littleknown 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
25
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
26
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,
27
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.
28
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
29
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
30
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.
31
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]
32
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
33
"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]
34
GE 167: Environmental
Geoscience I
Tragedy of the Commons and Lifeboat Ethics
(the Ecophilosophy of Garrett Hardin)
In our first class you saw the photo of Earth, taken by astronaut Harrison Schmidt on Apollo 17 –
commonly dubbed "Spaceship Earth". The metaphor that "the Earth is like a spaceship has two main
implications: (1) It implies limited resources, which we must all somehow share. (2) There is no place else
to go (and nothing elsewhere that we can use). But biologist Garret Hardin has taken issue with this
common metaphor for two reasons:
• It implies equity – that everyone has a "right" to all of those resources equally
• It ignores the fact that a spaceship has a Captain to divvy up resources – and the Earth clearly
does not!
A better metaphor, Hardin argues, is that the Earth is like a "Sea Full of Lifeboats" (the Wealthy
Nations/People) and "Swimmers" (Poor Nations/People). The swimmers are crying out for help, to be taken
aboard the Lifeboats. But the Lifeboats have a limited capacity (Shall we call it "carrying capacity"?). The
boats are already full of people and riding low in the water.
Now suppose there's capacity for 60 people, and there are already 50 (the "lucky, wealthy people") in the
boat. But there are 100 people in the water, crying out desperately to be saved. What are the options?
Basically they boil down to three (Or can you think of any others?):
• Take all the Swimmers on board – but this would swamp the Boat and everybody would be
drowned. The harsh reality is we can't take everybody in.
• Take 10 on, up to the capacity of the Lifeboat. If we do this we save 10 Swimmers, but lose the
"safety margin" of those already in the Boat. And how do you choose which 10 to let in the Boat?
What do you say to the other 90? What if one of the Swimmers is stronger and can paddle harder
(i.e., is more useful) than someone already in the Boat? Throw one off and take him/her on
instead?
• Let no one else on board. Some already on the Boat might feel guilty about their 'good luck' but
if they do, Hardin said, they could get out of the Boat and give their place to one of the needy
35
Swimmers. The person climbing in surely will not feel guilty about taking up a seat on the Boat,
so the net result is simply less "survivors' guilt"!
Hardin suggests there might be a 4th option: retain the safety factor of "10 less than full" – just in case there
are "stormy seas"– but teach the Swimmers how to build their own Lifeboats. Okay, sounds good at first,
but where do they get the materials (resources) to build these new boats? What if the only way is by
dismembering our Boat??? And even if the Swimmers could get other resources, how do they swing the
hammers and bang the nails, when these people are now just barely treading water?
Hardin's Lifeboat Ethics had often been applied to many questions about immigration. Do people have a
natural "right" to enter another country and to live, work and use resources there? Are their limits to how
many immigrants the host country can or should absorb? Should people be admitted only if they bring in
their own resources (i.e., wealth, needed education), or can somehow "payback" the host country? Or only
if they are "useful" and can contribute to society (and how is that judged)? Then again, people who are
useful to the Wealthy Nation would also generally be useful –perhaps more so – to the Poor Nation they
came from. If the useful people flee the donor country, who's left to fix whatever's wrong over there? And
so does this make it wrong, improper, immoral, etc. for a host country to take these people in, thus
depriving the donor country of their wealth and talents?
Is "Sea with Lifeboat" a better metaphor than a "Spaceship" for Earth? The problem with sharing
resources can be illustrated by food. There's currently enough food to feed all of the Earth's 6.2 billion
people, yet while we have surpluses here in the U.S. millions of people in Sudan, North Korea, Zimbabwe,
etc. go hungry. Suppose we created a Global Food Bank, where the nations with a food surplus would put
in their excess, and the nations with a food deficit would withdraw as much as they needed. It could
theoretically be done, because there's enough to go around. But Hardin foresees that there would still some
big problems:
• The Poor, Hungry Nations will always be taking out. Since they are given food, they would have
no reason to improve their status, no motivation to build their economies and develop better food
production for themselves, or to limit their population growth. So, their lives will never really
improve.
• The Rich, Well-Fed Nations will always be putting in. But they will have to use up and pollute
their own resources (water, soil, fertilizer, etc.) beyond their actual needs, in an effort to continue
producing a surplus for the poor and hungry. Why would they want to keep doing this? And
because of the overwhelming needs of the Poor Nations, there will never be much surplus. The
Rich will keep making deposits, the Poor will make withdrawals, and nothing changes – except
the environment deteriorates.
So, it's Lifeboat metaphor all over again. Which leads us to…
Suppose we make Resources the common property of all? This is the problem that Hardin made clear in
his other very famous essay "Tragedy of the Commons" (1968). To quote from it:
"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
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to my herd?"….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.
We may well call it 'the tragedy of the commons,' using the word 'tragedy' as the philosopher
Whitehead used it: 'The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity
of the remorseless working of things.' "
While Hardin's example is theoretical, there are many examples of this tragedy in real life: e.g., overfishing
in world's oceans, overuse of popular national parks, etc. Consider also the alternative to the Tragedy of the
Commons: a rancher who owns his own property (the pasture). The responsible rancher will not allow any
more cattle on the pasture than it can sustain (the 'carrying capacity'). If the rancher does, the pasture is
ruined by overgrazing, the loss of grass will cause the soil to erode, and the future use of this pasture will
be lost. The rancher may have to eventually sell the ranch, maybe also at a loss since the land is now worth
less. There would be nothing for the rancher's children to inherit.
So in many cases it may be better to have resource be bought and sold. When it becomes "privately owned"
no one has a right to use the resource except for the owners. This automatically limits use, and there is
generally better stewardship and management of the resource, but – it cuts out the Poor. In this case, you
have to pay to play.
There are also some resources that by their nature everyone feels they have a right to use for their
own purposes (e.g. air, and often water). But if all have rights to ''the commons'', and there isn't
enough to go around, what can we do? Options are to regulate the resource in some manner: (Can you
think of any others ways you might do this?):
• Close the resource to some, limiting use. Ex: Denali Natl. Park, White House tours, etc. But
those denied access can claim (often rightly!) an equal right to use the resource as those admitted.
• Close temporarily some of the resource, rotating use. This happens at some popular national
parks (e.g. Yellowstone), coastal fishing waters, etc. But there can be conflicts because of
competing interests in choosing which areas to close. And the access areas, where much of the
biggest damage occurs, can't really be closed.
• Close the entire resource temporarily, for all. This allows time for recovery, but can severely hurt
people living nearby who make a living from the resource (e.g., Georges Bank fishery off MA),
resulting in unemployment, homelessness, hunger, etc.
Is it immoral to have large families? Garrett Hardin thinks so, and he is a vocal critic of the UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which states 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". In a section of his
Tragedy of the Commons essay (headed "Freedom to Breed is Intolerable") Hardin says:
"The tragedy of the commons is involved in population problems…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. But men are not birds, and have not acted like them for millenniums, at
least….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
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own aggrandizement? 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."
The U.N. despite its belief that family size is a basic human right, also advocates strongly for family
planning and reducing world population growth (unlike current & recent U.S. policy!). However, Hardin
doesn't believe we can solve our population problems by simply appealing to human conscience. As he
says: "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."
FINAL FOOD FOR THOUGHT – One thing that Hardin does not much address, however, is excess
consumption of those "already in the Lifeboat." If coercion should be applied to ''the commons in breeding"
of some people, as Hardin advocates, why not apply coercion to the excessive consumption of resources by
others? Just 1/4 of the world's people consumes 3/4 of its energy resources – the Wealthy People/Nations
(and that includes us the U.S). In terms of Lifeboat Ethics, this means that some of the people filling the
lifeboat are also carrying heavy suitcases, and we could take more people on the Boat if we throw them off
and replace them with Swimmers! (This is my own personal "Hepburn analogy"–not one of Garret
Hardin's). But populations in the Wealthy Nations are barely growing today, and what growth they are
experiencing is mainly through immigration from the Poor Nations/People. Do those who breed less,
deserve to get more? Or should those who breed more (and thus have more genuine, basic per capita
needs), get more?
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Many people have come
up with different views on
the effect of human
population growth. Two
of the most famous
historical contrasting
views are those of
Thomas Malthus and Karl
Marx.
Malthus (1776-1834) believed that
human populations tend to grow until they exhaust
their resources and become subject to famine,
disease and war. This exhaustion of resources
occurs because human populations increase at an
exponential or compound rate, while food
production either remains stable or increases
arithmetically.
Malthus also believed that most people are too lazy
and immoral to regulate birth rates voluntarily,
therefore he opposed efforts to feed and assist
the poor because he feared that more food would
simply increase their fertility and therefore
perpetuate the problems of starvation and misery.
This view is often referred to as lifeboat ethics. In
the analogy of lifeboat ethics there are two types of
boats, one full of rich people and another
overcrowded boat of poor people. The poor often fall
out of their boat and swim, hoping to be admitted or
benefit from the rich lifeboat and the goods on it. If
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the rich choose to share their lifeboat, the boat will
become swamped and everyone will end up
drowning. Therefore, like Malthus, lifeboat ethics
state that we cannot risk the safety of all people by
helping the others in need.
Malthus believed that the only way to prevent the
population from stripping their food supply and
eventually collapsing into starvation, crime and
misery is through "positive checks" and "preventive
checks". "Positive checks" are factors such as
disease or famine that reduce the population by
killing people. "Preventive checks" are all factors
that prevent human birth, such as "moral restraint",
which is late marriage and celibacy until a couple
can afford to support children.
Malthus' views that we are approaching the carrying
capacity of the Earth are still relevant today. NeoMalthusians believe that we should make birth
control our top priority to prevent surpassing the
carrying capacity of the Earth.
Unlike Malthus, Marx (18181883) believed that population growth is a
symptom rather than the root cause of poverty,
resource depletion, pollution, and other social ills.
Marx believed that the real causes of these
problems lies in exploitation and oppression. This
view states that workers will always provide for their
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own sustenance given access to means of
production and a fair share of the fruits of their own
labor.
Marx believed that the way to slow population
growth and to alleviate crime, disease, starvation,
misery and environmental degradation at the same
time is through social justice, such as more
egalitarian economic systems, social welfare
programs, public health care, and other just
initiatives.
Marxian views are still present in our society today.
Neo-Marxians believe that the only way to solve
population problems is through eliminating
oppression and poverty through technological
development.
Garrett Hardin
A microbiologist by training, Garrett Hardin became famous in environmental circles for his 1968 essay,
The Tragedy of the Commons, which argued for strict controls on reproductive choice to solve the
population problem. The essay has become a staple in environmental literature, being reprinted at least 87
times. (1) Hardin’s success is mystifying not merely because he consistently presents pessimistic scenarios
unwarranted by the evidence, but because unlike other doomsayers Hardin is almost alone in his rejection
of incentives-based management of population and instead advocates blatantly authoritarian coercion which
would trample on human rights and civil liberties at every turn.
The main message of Hardin’s work is that reproductive decisions cannot be left in the hands of individuals
but must rest in society. Explaining why he thinks Zero Population Growth, a group which seeks funding
for birth control and abortion to help reduce population growth, is ineffective Hardin said,
The only answer is that family size cannot be left to individual decisions. You don’t have to be brutal about
it. You can use incentives. But control of population will have to take the form of mutual coercion,
mutually agreed upon. (2)
"Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" is a misnomer as Hardin routinely supports the actions of
authoritarian governments who rarely seek consent for their actions. When asked about China’s |one-child
policy|, for example, Hardin lamented that the Chinese government did not go far enough!
I give the Chinese credit for officially recognizing that they have a problem and for having the nerve to
propose the single-child program .... They have failed, however, by not making this directive universal
throughout the country. The one-child policy is only enforced in congested urban areas. People in rural
regions continue to have too many children -- so the Chinese haven’t solved their problems at al. (3)
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What many people throughout the world find repugnant about China’s policy is that it forces some women
to have abortions and others to abandon infant children. Hardin vacillates on his views of abortion, arguing
strictly for choice at times and other times implying women might need to be forced to have abortions.
Hardin has said, for example, that we should be very cautious about forcing women to abort anencephalic
fetuses, but has no qualms about using euthanasia to kill such children once they are out of the womb:
In the case of an anencephalic child, the parents can’t possibly pay the costs. Society pays the cost and
society can’t possibly have any reason for wanting an anencephalic child. (4)
Similarly Hardin derides critics of legalized abortion who claim the procedure is the start of a slippery
slope toward infanticide, but then he offers a bizarre response to a question about infanticide in an Omni
interview:
Omni: Infanticide as a form of population control is hard to accept, yet you support it in its historical
context.
Hardin: Yes. Looking at history with an open mind you’ll see that infanticide has been used as an effective
population control. In writings about the South Seas, Robert Louis Stevenson expresses astonishment that
island peoples practiced infanticide and yet were unusually loving towards children. Stevenson came from
Calvinistic Scotland where, by God, children were treated severely. The Scots would never think of killing
a child, but they’d never pamper it either. In the South Seas, the reverse occurred. In all societies practicing
infanticide, the child is killed within minutes after birth, before bonding can occur. The mother never
nurses the child. The South Pacific peoples must have easily seen the problems associated with
overpopulation. When you live on an island, you know you live in a limited world.
Throughout most of history there’s been no need for concern about population control. Nature would come
along with epidemic diseases and take care of the matter for us. Disease has been the primary population
controller in the past. Because widespread disease and famine no longer exist, we have to find other means
to stop population increases. (5)
In fact at times Hardin’s public statements seem to come dangerously close to warmed-over eugenics and
Social Darwinist rhetoric. Offering another critique of Zero Population Growth, Hardin explained:
ZPG also had another problem. To put it exceedingly bluntly and in prejudicial terms: In general,
people who go to college are more intelligent than those who don’t. It would be better to
encourage the breeding of more intelligent people rather than the less intelligent. ZPG’s entire
attraction has been among the college population. So, in effect, ZPG is encouraging collegeeducated people to have fewer children instead of encouraging reduced fertility among the lessintelligent. (6)
Hardin seems to believe that in order to be sustainable the world needs an extremely small population. "If
we control our numbers, we might be able to settle on a world population of up to 100 million, living a hell
of a good life." (7)
Like other population doomsayers and environmentalists, Hardin proposes to deal with high fertility in
Third World nations through a combination of ending legal immigration completely, discouraging future
economic growth and development in such nations, and forgoing any and all food aid to nations suffering
from hunger or famine.
Hardin argued, for example, that efforts to send food aid to Ethiopia to keep people from starving actually
promoted overpopulation.(8) Hardin is apparently convinced that starvation occurs in Ethiopia because of a
lack of resources, when in fact it appears to be caused by an oversupply of civil war and authoritarian
government.
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In an article written for Whole Earth Review, Hardin emphasized his hatred of immigration by expressing
his wrath at the Statue of Liberty:
I used to look on the Statue of Liberty as a sweet gesture to the rest of the world, but for years now I have
viewed it as pornography of the most reprehensible sort.
Not the statue itself ... But 17 years after the statue was erected some busybodies managed to get Emma
Lazarus's appalling poem inscribed at its base: "Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses,
yearning to be free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed
to me: / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
...What should we do? ... we need to blast Lazarus's pornography off the Statue of Liberty. Maybe we can
run a prize contest to find a new Lazarus to write a wiser poem for the 21st century: a poem that praises
other people for staying home and solving their problems on their own turf.(9)
For all the claims made in some environmental circles about Hardin's genius, he seems to be a reactionary
of the worst sort, willing to embrace the worst in human nature in order to solve the problems he sees
(many of which rest on entirely fallacious reasoning
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