Garrett Hardin, an ecologist, published the influential Tragedy of the Commons essay in Science in 1968. Hardin defined the tragedy of the commons as the situation where common goods, such as a grazing land or clean water, will get overused by selfish individuals. Today we would call those people trolls. Hardin believed that the best way to limit the tragedy would be to give individuals ownership of common resources. Owners who would work to conserve their resources.
The tragedy of the commons is a useful philosophical tool to look at resource management. Unfortunately, Hardin used tragedy of the commons to focus on over-population. Hardin helped front a quasi-scientific movement in the 60s and 70s, including Paul Ehrlich, that focused on overpopulation. They made the rounds with pessimistic, hyperbole, the sky is falling rhetoric.
In Tragedy of the Commons, Hardin demonstrated an inherent conflict between the idea of building a society of the greatest good or one for the greatest number. The conflict arises from the mathematical fact that it’s impossible to maximize for two variables at once. Thus, enjoyment of life for some must come at the expense of others. Put another way, the assigning of calories for everyday life for everyone won’t leave enough calories for anyone to have any energy to create a life beyond necessity.
Hardin’s view leads to a stark, false, choice: recommend that we all become monks or start deciding who’s worthy enough to get extra calories. Hardin did the latter. He attacked the welfare state for causing over-population by providing food for the poor and criticized the UN Charter on Human Rights as immoral. He ended his essay by lamenting human’s desire for freedom and warned that humanity needs to be managed or all the newly born people would limit the wealth potential of those already maximizing society. A real, “it’s tough being the 1%” argument.
In 1974, Hardin expanded his views in Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor. Hardin argued that if the Earth’s a lifeboat then there aren’t enough necessities to go around. Success is zero-sum. Hardin pushed lifeboat ethics to justify restricting reproductive rights (eugenics), keeping excess food from countries that are in famine and limiting the free movement of immigrants. He argued that letting people suffer because of their geographic birth location is a moral obligation of all right minded people. A sort of white-man’s burden that doesn’t even pretend to help others. Hardin doesn’t describe how population controls should be enacted just that there should be an authority in place to do so.
To most modern readers, Hardin comes of as a bit of a monster. His beliefs feel like rebranded Social Darwinism, the “survival of the fittest.” Only the fittest in this case are the ones lucky enough to be born geographically close to food. I love how he assumes that the act of controlling population growth can be achieved without negative side effects such as riots or war. Side effects that are possibly as bad or worse than overpopulation.
Hardin offered a false dichotomy because, while it’s true that two variables can’t be maximized, both numbers can be a lot closer to whole than Hardin ever imagined. In the last fifty years, the world’s population has doubled and the average standard of living has increased (see UN Millennium Goals). In the more developed world, population growth has decreased without the need for population controls. Which suggests that the way to reduce population growth is to expand wealth, not force poor people around the world to be sterilized or be allowed to starve to death.
If the Earth’s a lifeboat, Hardin wanted to start killing the weak and unlucky with a year’s worth of food left. Which makes me wonder if he actually believed that choosing who had more worth was really a question of biology or simply an ex-post facto intellectual game to justify his beliefs on who deserves the world’s spoils.