Response # 1

Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ generates a dilemma that I have a problem with. The article is essentially an argument for population control through breeding limit laws, such as China’s one child limit law, justified through the explanation of the phenomenon of its title- the ‘tragedy of the commons.’ Although potentially disturbing when considering an individual’s rights, it is not the proposal of such a law that I have a problem with. His rationale, choosing to protect the rights of the world’s populations as a whole rather than the individual’s (what he calls making the world as a whole ‘more free’), and enacting laws to do so, follows well. He applies this logic when addressing solutions to other problems relating to what King has referred to as ‘public goods,’ (such as the ocean or clean air) or what are here seen as the ‘commons.’ When it comes to population control, Hardin seeks the best interest for the world as a whole, seeking to limit population to a number ‘optimal’ for living based on the finitude of the world’s resources, which makes sense.
My problem with Hardin’s argument though, is his implicit use of what Professor King outlined as the ‘rationality assumption,’ that all individuals would behave in such a manner to basically maximize their own personal good and will not act otherwise unless influenced to do so by some form of coercion. In particular, Hardin addresses the issue of pollution, and people’s lack of willingness to avoid polluting without incentive. Hardin necessitates coercion through laws, sanctions, and taxes to influence people’s behaviors. He warns against appeals to people’s sense of guilt or conscience, alluding to the consequence of anxiety and other potential mental illnesses, and differentiates between propaganda and a more comprehensive education which teaches people the meaning of the laws and necessity for them.
All of this coercion, though, requires some sort of government, institution, or external force’s intervention, and limits the people’s sense of vision. How then, I want to know, does Hardin account for those members of societies that I suppose we might call idealists. The society that Hardin conjures in which the rationality assumption is assumed and applied to each individual in society does not take in to account those in society who are willing to look at the ‘big picture,’ take responsibility for public resources, and act on this. In particular, where do the likes of environmentalists and conservationists fit in?
Is coercion really required in all circumstances to protect the common good? If not, then the situation at hand might not be quite as ‘tragic’ in regards to the finitude of our resources and people’s ‘limitless’ ambition to use them, as Hardin makes it out to be. I’d like to believe that at least some people have a little bit more common sense than to go about behaving in a manner that assumes a false sense of ‘limitless’ resource at all time, but then, according to Hardin’s argument, I suppose that would make me irrational. And that would probably mean that all environmentalists and conservationists are also irrational as well.