I haven't been aware of such a discussion with Un. So...?

T Clark will be along soon to tell us that this is a trivial thread. — Banno

Remind me. When did I do that before? I don’t remember it.

Pretty much.

Come on, Banno. — T Clark

Three possible solutions:
1. A Big Fat Dictator who shoots anyone who tries to put two cows on the commons.
2. Sell the commons, making it private so that folk take care of it. (We might call this the Selfish Git solution)
3. Develop a culture that treats the commons with respect.

Which will you choose? — Banno

1. Destroy all cows and eat grass ourselves.

2. Destroy ourselves, and commonize all privately owned land.

3. Invent edible artificial turf.

4. Learn how to photosynthesize.

5. Steal everyone's cow and laugh like the wind. (Anti-gov, anti-tyrant)

6. Destroy the question.

7. Send prayer to the Lord and ask Him to make justice. Out of clay, if necessary.

A system of wise laws that will protect the commons from abuse.

What frank said.

but I want here to expose the morality of the very need for such a solution. — Banno

What does that mean, "expose the morality of the very need..."?
Is every policeman your enemy?

Not I.

A regulatory body with teeth falls under the Big Fat Dictator solution. All well and good, but I want here to expose the morality of the very need for such a solution.

Sure, Let's work out how many cows the commons will support. Let's also consider that having more cows than you ought is unethical. And that's what is missing from the economic analysis.

Accepting the economic, amoral analysis has led to the situation we are in now, where those with more cows on the common are somehow considered virtuous. — Banno

Taking for granted a succesful attempt at invirtuating the masses.

(Maybe a cabal of virtue ethicists slowly insinuates a noble lie/truth about the dignity of responsible one-cow-manship through hollywood screenplays, and the next generation has been so steeped in the vibe, it comes naturally to them. Or maybe, a group of economic determinists figures out how to change conditions such that social conditions also change and onecowmanship is rewarded, ground up..)

But even taking that invirtuation as a hypothetical fait accompli:

One bad apple spoils the bunch.

But even if there's not a bad apple:

The awareness that one bad apple spoils the bunch, makes it overwhelmingly likely that someone, even someone otherwise virtuous, prememptively, defensively bad-apples. If rot is inevitable, one has to protect one's family, after all, and provide them with meat and milk.

But even if no one does that :

The awareness that others might think of things in terms of a general awareness of bad apples spoiling the bunch, means that they preemptively, defensively bad-apple before someone else does.

That seems like a hard thing to work around -

So : We need an extraterrestial existential threat, more palpable than eventual global warming, that makes everyone share a common goal. Just gotta wait for one to show up.

Let's also consider that having more cows than you ought is unethical. — Banno

A truism. Doing anything more than you "ought" is immoral by definition. But this isn't a moral question. It's a political/legal one, so we impose laws to advance the state's interest. Whatever you're getting at, get at, which seems to be that you want our consciences to tell us that 3 trout per season is sustainable, but not 4. 10 trout is not gluttony, immoral, and a sin. It's just more than the population can sustain, so we regulate it. Maybe in other seasons 10 makes sense. Letting the democacy decide is how we decide, but you seem to think we must rework our moral compass to be truly just.

A truism. Doing anything more than you "ought" is immoral by definition. But this isn't a moral question. It's a political/legal one, so we impose laws to advance the state's interest. Whatever you're getting at, get at, which seems to be that you want our consciences to tell us that 3 trout per season is sustainable, but not 4. 10 trout is not gluttony, immoral, and a sin. It's just more than the population can sustain, so we regulate it. Maybe in other seasons 10 makes sense. — Hanover

For older societies, it often isthe case that 10 trout in a certain season is a sin, in other seasons virtuous. When everything is tightly woven together (as in the bizzarre breadth of the laws of Leviticus) It'snot a hippy thought - it's why an arch-conservative like Burke champions tradition in quasi-evolutionary terms, as an inherent understanding of what works and what disrupts, that builds up over time without anyone necessarily knowing why. James Scott calls it 'metis'.

The regulatory state enters in when this tradition falls apart, either because we're too recently transplanted to know without knowing what practices work, or because a new economic model/ behavior has torn to pieces organic communities.


But all that said, I agree, because however lamentable our lack of 'metis' or millennia-won tradition, it's already happened, so we can't just hearken back.

You internalize the negative externalities.

It's what happens when the ends justify the means and/or profit is the sole motive.

Discourage such thinking by showing what can and does happen as a result, and there may be something more worthy of calling "the commons".

So...

3.

A system of wise laws... — tim wood

mmm.

A truism. — Hanover

Indeed.

You're sounding too much like unenlightened. I'm out. — frank

Not at all. I'm a tyrant.

The regulatory state enters in when this tradition falls apart, either because we're too recently transplanted to know without knowing what practices work, or because a new economic model/ behavior has torn to pieces organic communities. — csalisbury

So, (1.) the Environmental Committee issues a dictat from time to time that declares the fish allowance this year, and (2.) the Hanoverian Hussars are deputed to kill the first-born of apostates.

In the happy Banno world of social responsibility, government is a simple matter of coordination, (1.) experts work out what is best and we all do it; (2.) the brutality of coercion, is only required because there are cheats.

Things could be better than they are though, and mainly by not letting the cheats make the rules and enforce them.

If you put two cows on the commons, we should all move away from you when you go to the Pub for a beer after work — Banno

The real problem with the commons was not from the greed of the individual, who wants more than one's fair share of cows, it's a problem of too many individuals sharing the same resources. That's overpopulation. Overpopulation seems to be a natural tendency for any living species which is capable of dominating the others. Have you ever grown a culture on a petri dish? The thriving species will run rampant, rapidly overrunning and using up all the choice nutrients, then it dies because it hasn't the capacity to adapt: some might go into suspended animation (seeds or spores) waiting for another chance to dominate.

That's why the third option won't work. We haven't the capacity to adapt. I'd propose a fourth option, vegetarianism or something like that, and I think Plato suggested something like this in his Republic (which was supposed to be a communal society), saying that meat ought to be given up, as a relish. But again, I don't think we have the capacity to adapt. "Taste" might be the strongest of all instinctual motivators. We take oxygen for granted and don't need to taste it out, but food is not only fundamental to subsistence, it supports growth, loco-motion, and all the higher level activities like sensing and thinking. The variations between individual highly organized living beings, like the human, are probably closely related to taste.

Shun folk who put two cows on the Commons. — Banno

Right. Punish people who don't do as they ought. How is this different than fining or taxing for a privilege which Hanover suggested. Shunning people equates to not allowing their cows in the commons or not doing business with them, both of which hurt them financially. You an Hanover seem closer in your thinking than you'd like to admit.

The problem seems more like there was too many dairy farmers and therefore too much competition for dairy farmers in one local area. Maybe the Dairy Farmer should give up Dairy farming and get a Pell Grant from the government to go back to college and learn a different trade, like computer programming.

Shun folk who put two cows on the Commons — Banno

Sounds like a true libertarian response. Let the people, not the government, treat cheaters how they should be treated.

Sidestepping the question:

I recently read that there is not actually much historical evidence that the "tragedy of the commons" was a thing. That community owned land in England was not in especially bad shape, and that plenty of societies around the world have had communally owned land at some point during their history, without this apparently leading to some calamity.

Now I am not an anthropologist or a historian, so I cannot vouch for this view.

However, we should probably consider the option that humans, as social animals, are actually quite capable of dealing with the "tragedy of the commons" via self-policing, if the society is reasonably egalitarian (so that no-one can afford to anger everyone).

That community owned land in England was not in especially bad shape, and that plenty of societies around the world have had communally owned land at some point during their history, without this apparently leading to some calamity. — Echarmion

I think in England we even now have community owned roads and squares, that are fairly well looked after, likewise public beaches.

Another solution is to have an ultimately government-supervised management of the commons, where part of how the commons are run is via public polling of preferences, and whoever utilizes the commons in a manner that most closely meets the public preferences is rewarded with scarcer resources.

So we're avoiding a dictator shooting things, we're avoiding just making it private, and we're avoiding simply depending on ideal people via their good will.

Indeed. And can it be a coincidence that the idea, the tragedy of the commons, originated in the early 19th century, at the culmination of the enclosures? Generally it's a justification for either of Banno's first two solutions, primarily privatization.

That's not to say that it's never been a problem. It certainly is, in certain social circumstances.

This historical background is really interesting: http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain

I think it counts as an argument for option 3, and without, I think, requiring any special "invirtuation of the masses", in csal's words (unless the social changes that accompany the introduction of some kind of democratic socialism count as invirtuation).

The third option seems to me to be the one spoken of by First Nations folk. Respect for the world in which we are embedded, rejection of excessive individualism, all that airy-fairy stuff economists hate.

It’s also a bottom-up approach, so to speak, because it is freely chosen rather than enforced from above.

Pointing out that you were the dictator over and over again is not that helpful. — Banno

Your equating democracy as dictatorial is the problem. I understand you use the term dictator here as being any authority decreeing and enforcing rules, but I see a democracy in particular as a community expressing its will and therefore just, as best as it can be expressed. So I'm not the dictator, but a servant of the people, therefore protecting the commons as the common folk have said they wanted it protected.

As to what I think you wish to say, which is that ideally we'd live in a benevolent anarchy, where we'd need no laws and no enforcement because each person would internally know how many trout he could catch and would never violate his conscience, I roll my eyes. Sure, I want that too. Let's want that together and lament the sad state of humanity. In the meantime, let's send out the game wardens to search the buckets for extra fish.

Not at all. I'm a tyrant. — unenlightened

Sure. I was talking about the "I'm just bored with practicality, let's engineer the world with creative ethics."

folk will always take more than they ought. Someone will sneak in an extra cow.

And doubtless they are right. But I still prefer the third option. — Banno

Prefer whatever you like (which is why you prefer it) but what kind of sense does it make to ignore what you say are sound observations about behavior (taking more than they ought)? If option 3 occurs, then there is no problem; sometimes it occurs. Fairly often it does not occur and individual people ignore common interests.

Hanover's support for democratically determined rules for grazing, fishing, or sex in pubic parks is nothing like establishing dictatorship. What happens most often is that the commons are privatized and then everyone is excluded except the new owner. I'd rather have a cop on the prairie, by the river, or in the park enforcing the rules our elected representatives imposed, than have no access to the prairie, the river, and the park at all.

The first time I waded into the Atlantic Ocean on Cape Cod, I was informed that I was on a "private ocean beach". "Private beach" just didn't compute. How could such a thing even be the case?

"On the sign it said "Private Property". On the back side it didn't say anything -- that side was made for you and me!" Woody Guthrie. This Land Is Your Land

Shunning people equates to not allowing their cows in the commons or not doing business with them, both of which hurt them financially. You an Hanover seem closer in your thinking than you'd like to admit. — Harry Hindu

Hunter/ gatherers typically shun those who display self-important attitudes, or try to claim more than their fair share. This is a spontaneous act of community, not something imposed from above by law.

I might go further and say that the first two solutions don't seem to be effective. What would count as the commons, now? Anything owned by public entities? In which case the majority of the commons are covered by either option 1 or option 2 now -- in the sense that we treat "Big fat dictator" to mean any state monopolizing violence over a geography, however said state may be organized (with a democratically representative layer or not).

And we have to admit that option 2 requires option 1, though there are those who may wish to limit option 1.

But this just divides the commons up. And what would count as a pass would be the preservation of the commons for us all to benefit from it flourishing -- so we do not use the natural resources afforded us to a point that we can no longer do so.

But that doesn't seem to be happening now. And yet our main solutions are solutions 1 and 2 when it comes to dealing with the commons.

So if that doesn't work, why keep doing it?

In case anyone missed it:

https://www.quora.com/What-does-internalizing-the-externality-mean

So, (1.) the Environmental Committee issues a dictat from time to time that declares the fish allowance this year, and (2.) the Hanoverian Hussars are deputed to kill the first-born of apostates.

In the happy Banno world of social responsibility, government is a simple matter of coordination, (1.) experts work out what is best and we all do it; (2.) the brutality of coercion, is only required because there are cheats.

Things could be better than they are though, and mainly by not letting the cheats make the rules and enforce them. — unenlightened

'Things could be better than they are' feels to me like a necessary horizon for any happy world of social responsibility. There are those idyllic moments of communal self-sustaining, where there is pleasure (meaning, beauty) in simply, as a group, keeping things going. But the kind of virtue that extends across days and months and years seems to require a for-the-sake-of-which. Something like an ethical vanishing point around which virtuous deeds/behaviors/character organize.

If true, that's a problem, because if the happy world succeeds in getting rid of the cheats, it loses the for-the-sake-of-which or toward-which (to speak in faux-heidegger) that sustains social responsibility. On a broader scale, 'getting rid of the cheats' seems to be an ethical goal that corresponds to a cyclically repeated stage of 'corruption' or 'decadence' and usually leads to new cheats. The most obvious recent example being Stalinism.

That said, the recognition of this need to overthrow seems baked into whatever political/economic thing we have now, where we (1) incorporate that need for revolution into a series of elections and (2) cede the non-revolutionary boring-governing stuff to career technocrats, i.e. the guys who determine how many fish.

But a technocratic kibosh on over-fishing is different from a Levitican or Deuteronomic kibosh on promiscuous thread-weaving because the former is self-consciously an attempt to maintain equilibrium, while the latter is shot-through with cosmic significance and is enmeshed in epically understood historical struggle.

( First, against pharaoh. then as part of a divinely sanctioned campaign to take Canaan. Then a struggle against Assyria, and Babylon. Then as the hope for restoration. Then as the hope for a messiah.....there's always a struggle and the laws are always reimparted with value in the face of that. What we know as Deuteronomy was, scholars say, a conscious attempt to bring a mythical past to bear on a troubled present. Deuteronomy was probably heavily rewritten by priests almost a millennia after its official date of composition. )

Well-secularized economic revisionists will point out that what these strange prescriptions and ordinances were doing really was maintaining equilibrium and imparting it with some mystical significance ideologically- and maybe. But that doesn't change the fact that explicitly, consciously, making the end-goal maintenance of equilibrium destroys the idea of an end-goal. If there is no goal, and we're still not happy, then why maintain equilibrium? The rational reconstruction eats itself. We can maintain equilibrium under false pretenses, only because the pretense is why we maintain equilibrium in the first place. as in: explain rationally to a date that all this romantic stuff you're doing is really just to perpetuate your genes. Even if that were true, it would end up in you not perpetuating your genes.

The mirage I'm trying to point at is a commons maintained for the sake of maintaining a commons. I like the idea but it seems otherworldly (or something that pokes into profane reality in heightened moments) but to actually do it seems, to me, to require some common goal and struggle, which will get people out of the game-theory mess I tried to sketch in my first response. The alien threat was tongue-in-cheek, but virtue has always been tied to real world threats, stormclouds on the horizon. Abstracting ethics from struggle seems a lot like what Derrida does when he extracts the formal structure from whatever he happens to be reading. Kant and all subsequent formal ethics are good t know, but ethics without situation is empty. Virtue is always directional.