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tragedy of the commons

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What Public Bathrooms Can Teach Us About Justice

One of the criticisms that is often thrown at philosophy, and by extension philosophers, is that it spends too long on abstract issues that, at the end of the day, have little impact on the “real world.’” For example, in a Nerdist podcast, Neil deGrasse Tyson suggested philosophy is a useless pursuit that distracts from the questions with which we should concern ourselves today. He thinks, unsurprisingly, that science is where the intellectual action is. Similar perspectives on the “queen of the sciences” as Kant called it (although to be fair, he was talking just about metaphysics) have been expressed by Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and, perhaps surprisingly, Thomas Hobbes. Indeed, it is not uncommon for those who study philosophy to regularly be faced with the question “why?”

And, if I’m being honest here, I get it. As someone who has made a career doing philosophy, I sometimes look at the work to which philosophy lays its claim and think what the point of that is. If I’m being really honest, I struggle to grasp the point of metaphysics at times. While I enjoyed thinking about the problem of universals when I studied metaphysics at undergrad, it never struck me as something that would be helpful in life or had too much value beyond mere mental mastication.

It should come as no surprise then that my first philosophical love, and the one with which I am still enamored, is ethics. Normative and metaethical questions – how we should behave and why, how we know what right is, how it differs from wrong – are to me the best of philosophical traditions. It is also this area that I think has the easiest job of bringing those skeptical of philosophy’s value on board. It can be hard to demonstrate the value of the substantivalism (space exists independent of the objects within it) versus relationalism (space only exists as a relation between objects) debate to the average Joe on the street. But, if you ask them whether abortion should be criminalized, whether torture is permissible, whether they should help others at a cost to themselves, or simply whether they think they lead a good life, then, my intuition and experience tell me, it is far more interesting for them. They can more easily see the value of such study and contemplation.

It is this aspect of philosophy, to be action-guiding not just on the grandest scales but also the personal and practical ones, that I find most engaging. It is also in those aspects that I spend most of my time thinking and writing about; hence why I’m a bioethicist and why I like, or at least am unable to stop, thinking about philosophy as I go about my life. And, as a true standard bearer for grounded and applicable philosophy, I think it works its way down to the humblest and, for lack of a better word, messiest areas of life.

It is with all this in mind, the idea that philosophy should go where the people are and be embedded in the very real aspects of how we live our lives, that I want to talk about something which, although I have no evidence, I am willing to hazard a guess, doesn’t get talked much about in academic or public philosophy: public bathrooms.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: we talk about bathrooms all the time, specifically when discussing who and who does not get to use which bathrooms. And you’re right, that aspect of the discussion is well trodden, although not done well, in the public arena. But I want to turn our gaze not to the bathroom’s use but to its existence and its maintenance.

The reason for this is rather simple. I travel a lot. Thus, I tend to use public bathrooms. About a week ago, I was in Bristol Temple Meads station and needed to use the facilities. While in there, as with any busy train station, many people were coming and going. There was also a member of the station facilities team working hard and cleaning the bathroom. And as I was washing my hands, it struck me that this individual was getting a raw deal. They had the not-so-enviable job of cleaning up the messes of other people, and I’m assuming, if you’ve ever been in a public bathroom and know what state they can sometimes become, they were not getting paid enough to do so.

What’s more, there is an echo of the tragedy of the commons about the situation. Public toilets are a public good. However, their use deteriorates them. Thus, without continual maintenance, cleaning, and resupplying, that public good will eventually become depleted. This ruins that good for all.

This then started me thinking about a more just system. After all, the work of cleaning the bathroom needs to be done. If not, then the only option would be to leave the public toilet to fester or shut it, neither of which is viable in a busy train station. So, if we assume that it is not fair for those who have not made the mess in the bathroom to be expected to clear it up, even when they are financially compensated to do so, how might this be done better? It was then, as is so often, that John Harris’s work came to mind, and specifically, his 1975 essay The Survival Lottery.

In that work, Harris proposes that if organ transplantation becomes a perfect science where organs will save lives if transplanted, then we should collectively, as a society, implement a lottery which randomly selects healthy people from the populace and kills them so that we may then harvest their organs. This would then enable us to save the lives of two or more people, as well as improve the lives of many others. In other words, it is a simple numbers game: we sacrifice one person at random to save the lives of more than one person; thus reducing the net loss of life. Harris argues that, while the possibility of being selected would itself be a harm, this would be outweighed not just by the benefit gained from easy access to organs, but by the likelihood of actually being selected being so small as to be next to non-existent. Sure, we would live with the stress of possibly dying at some point; but that’s a stress that we already have in our daily lives.

Now, I suspect Harris was not serious in his suggestion. My intuition is that he suggested this as a means of highlighting an uncomfortably vague line between killing someone and letting them die. However, the premise itself – that a lottery can be a useful, perhaps even just, method of reassigning responsibility, and that a broader communal resource pool provides great benefit – strikes me as having something to it. For Harris, that communal resource was organs and the good they provide when available to those that need them for transplant. For me, I’ve been wondering, continue to wonder, and will likely continue to do so going forward, whether public toilets are comparable. Should there be a lottery for their upkeep?

The process would be rather simple. Each use of a public bathroom enters you in a lottery; if you’re selected at that moment, it is your turn to clean the bathroom. The chance of being selected would increase in relation to the condition of the toilet at the point of use. The dirtier the toilet, the greater the likelihood that someone would be selected. Ultimately, however, the chance of being selected, given how many people use public toilets each day, would be small. Much like with Harris’ organ suggestion, the risk to the individual remains low.

Of course, there are obvious objections. First, there is the practical problem. Many would rather miss their train than be informed that they’ve been selected to spend however long it would take to scrub a station lavatory sufficiently. Even if one were to accept the fairness of the arrangement in principle, and they need not, many would refuse. Any public authority attempting to implement such a lottery would almost instantly discover that civil disobedience becomes common.

There is also a deeper philosophical concern. Although lotteries distribute burdens impartially, they do not necessarily distribute them justly. Imagine two people. One uses public toilets several times a day because they work as a delivery driver and are constantly on the move. Another works from home and only occasionally ventures into public spaces. It seems strange that both might face an identical burden of being selected simply because they happened to enter a toilet at a particular moment. Fairness is not always the same thing as randomness.

Yet before we dismiss the idea entirely, it is worth considering why it feels so outrageous. The answer, I suspect, is that the proposal makes visible something that normally remains hidden. Public toilets do not remain clean by magic. Platforms do not remain swept, bins do not empty themselves, and hospital wards do not somehow reset overnight into a sanitary condition. Societies depend upon enormous amounts of maintenance work. Much of that work is physically demanding, poorly rewarded, socially invisible, or, most likely, all three and many more.

Political philosophers have increasingly directed attention towards what is sometimes called the ethics of maintenance. While we find acts of creation, innovation, and leadership captivating, far less attention is paid to the labor required simply to keep things functioning. We celebrate the architect who designs the building rather than the cleaner who keeps it usable. We applaud the politician who establishes a public service rather than the people who make sure it continues to operate day after day.

Across several works, such as Who Cares?, John Tronto argues that care is not simply a private virtue but a central political activity. Societies function because people engage in the often-unnoticed work of caring for others and maintaining shared institutions. And while Tronto is primarily interested in caregiving relationships, the insight generalizes quite neatly to public infrastructure. Clean toilets, as well as safe streets, public parks, libraries, and transport systems all rely on forms of maintenance labor that are easy to overlook precisely because they are successful. When things work, we normally don’t notice the work being done.

Like Harris’ survival lottery, the toilet lottery functions not as a serious proposal, although I would be interested to see if it might. Rather, its function is to force us to notice an otherwise unnoticed reality. It asks us to imagine that the burden of maintenance might directly fall on us rather than on a largely invisible workforce. The horror you may experience at this prospect, I think, reveals less about the absurdity of the proposal and more about our assumptions regarding who ought to perform such labor.

Ordinarily, we solve this problem by assigning maintenance responsibilities to particular people and compensating them for their work. This may be preferable to a lottery. Most of us possess neither the skills nor the inclination required to maintain public facilities effectively. A randomly selected member of the public is unlikely to outperform a trained facilities worker. Nevertheless, the idea has, hopefully, got you thinking. It has exposed just how dependent we are on forms of labor that disappear from view the moment they are done well.

This, I think, brings us back to the beginning.

One of the common criticisms of philosophy is that it concerns itself with questions too abstract to matter in ordinary life. Fair enough. Yet philosophy, when it’s at its best, does not remove us from everyday experience but grounds us in it.

A public bathroom at a railway station is about as everyday as one can imagine. It is certainly not where most people expect to stumble upon a philosophical problem. Yet standing in Bristol Temple Meads, watching somebody quietly clean up after hundreds of strangers, that’s what happened. I found myself thinking about justice, responsibility, labor, public goods, and the often-invisible work on which social life depends; none of which are abstract in the slightest.

So, next time you use a public bathroom, perhaps it is worth pausing for a moment to acknowledge that the facility exists at all, that its continued usefulness depends upon somebody else’s contributions, and that many forms of work sustain the benefits we enjoy every day and rarely notice because they are done well. If nothing else, the toilet lottery may serve as a reminder that philosophical questions are not confined to seminar rooms, journal articles, or thought experiments involving runaway trolleys. Sometimes they are lurking in the most mundane corners of everyday life.

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Ashes to Ashes, Moondust to Moondust – Part 2

image of half-moon

Last month, I discussed some of the moral questions raised by Astrobotic Technology’s recent (and, ultimately, failed) attempt to land a probe containing human (and dog) remains on the moon. I focused on the cultural significance of the moon – particularly for the Navajo Nation, who protested the lander prior to launch. While there is an understandable allure to having one’s remains deposited on a celestial body, I expressed doubts that the interests of the dead (if such things even exist) are sufficient to outweigh the cultural harms caused by such practices.

But the potential concerns don’t stop there. The Peregrine lander raises a number of other ethical problems – the first and foremost of which is how we are to appropriately deal with property in space. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 held that no part of space can be subject to appropriation by a particular state. And while this merely establishes a legal (not moral) norm, it seems to support the more general idea of space as a sort of global commons. Like the oceans and the atmosphere, it’s there for the enjoyment of all. But does this enjoyment have its limits? Certainly. There are ways in which we can enjoy a commons that might limit the ability of others to enjoy it in that same way. While we might fish from a common lake, overfishing will deplete that resource so that others are unable to do so. This is the oft-cited “tragedy of the commons.”

Our use of the commons therefore requires restrictions. This is precisely what John Locke sets out to address in his theory of property. An important part of his theory describes the process by which we are able to take common property and make it our own. How? By mixing our labor with it. Thus, when I trudge into a common forest, fell a tree, and craft that timber into a birdhouse, I come to own that birdhouse. The same is true when I pick an apple or fish up a trout. But, according to Locke, there is one proviso: that in helping ourselves to the commons, we must leave enough – and as good – for others. Put another way, when dealing with the commons, we must limit our actions so that anyone who comes after us can deal with the commons in precisely the same way. Thus, if I take so much timber (or apples, or fish) that others are unable to take the same amount, I have used the commons in a way that is impermissible.

It’s an intuitive notion, and one that captures the more general sense in which we believe that people shouldn’t take more than their “fair share.” But how does it apply to the actions of Astrobotic Technologies? Well, the “Lockean proviso” doesn’t apply merely to taking things from the commons, but also to leaving them there. Again, it helps describe a common intuition that we shouldn’t use the commons for the excessive dumping of litter or toxic waste. Consider, then, the mission of the Peregrine lander. The Moon might be global commons – there for the enjoyment of all. But it is also finite. The deposition of human remains there utilizes – and potentially spoils – a portion of that commons, however small. In doing so, it leaves less for others to enjoy, thus potentially violating the Lockean proviso.

But there’s room for disagreement with this idea. While finite, the Moon is still pretty big. Perhaps it’s true that we can deposit our remains there while still leaving enough space (no pun intended) for everyone else to do likewise. Perhaps every last person on the planet could make the Moon their final resting place, without removing the ability of others to do likewise.

But this is where things get tricky. It’s easy to think of commons – and how they are to be shared – purely in terms of those of us who currently exist. But commons are more complicated than this. Typically, they are temporally extended – they exist from generation to generation. This means that we’re not simply required to leave as much and as good for everyone else currently able to enjoy the commons – but also for all of those who will come to enjoy those same commons in the future. This is why we might consider it unfair to fell and mill an entire forest and split the proceeds equally among the current generation of a community. While every member of that community might’ve received their “fair share,” they’ve acted in a way that deprives future generations from enjoying that same resource.

This is the concern of intergenerational justice – and it features predominantly in many discussions of environmental ethics. Whether it be creating an inhospitably warm climate, eradicating a species, or befouling water and soil with harmful pollutants, there are all sorts of actions that prevent future generations from the proper use and enjoyment of the commons. And something similar might be happening here with the Moon. We must be careful that our use now of the Moon doesn’t prevent our descendants from enjoying this global common in the future. If we litter our nearest celestial body with human and animal remains (or all other manner of waste, space debris, and – as was proposed at one point – nuclear fallout) we might risk doing precisely this.

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What Toilet Paper Can Teach Us About Climate Change

photograph of empty toilet paper rolls stacked

One of the stranger parts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been people’s sudden obsession with bathroom sanitation. While there was never any pandemic-related disruption to the supply chain, nor the risk of even the strongest lockdown measures in place preventing people from buying essential groceries, many found themselves overcome by a desperate need to panic-buy vast quantities of toilet paper. Ultimately, this created a self-fulfilling prophecy in which paranoid hoarding led to the very shortage that had been feared. A similar scenario played out earlier this year when a cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline led to gasoline shortages throughout the East Coast. Panic-buying ensued once again, with individuals stockpiling vast quantities of fuel and further exacerbating an already struggling supply line.

Many of us might have the intuition that hoarding of this kind is wrong. But why? There are many ways we might try to determine the moral rightness or wrongness of an action. One of the simplest is to see whether it causes harm to others. But that’s not hugely helpful here. Suppose I hold a one-hour exam information session for my class of sixty students. In order to be fair, each student is given one minute in which to ask any questions they might have. Suppose, then, that one student ignores this guideline, and instead monopolizes a total of two minutes for her queries. It seems wrong of her to do this. But why? It’s not clear that her actions harm her fellow classmates. The extra minute she takes only subtracts slightly more than a second from each of their times – hardly enough to make an appreciable difference.

One way of explaining the wrongness of this student’s action is instead to claim that she is taking more than her fair share. We often find ourselves having to divide a finite resource amongst some group of individuals: time in a meeting, pizza amongst friends, holidays between family members. And in each of these scenarios there is, presumably, a fair way of making that division – one that gives full consideration to the interests of all individuals concerned. Once that allocation has been made, exceeding your fair share is wrong, regardless of whether it results in actual harm to others. This is precisely the kind of approach we might take toward food in a famine and water in a drought – and it explains what’s wrong about taking more than your fair share of toilet paper during a pandemic, too.

For many, the fair share approach may be so obvious as to appear trivial. But it can help inform our approach to far more complicated problems – like climate change. In 2011, nearly all countries agreed to limit the global average temperature rise to no more than 2°C compared to preindustrial levels – the maximum global temperature rise we can tolerate while avoiding the most catastrophic effect of climate changes. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, achieving this with a probability of >66% would require us to keep our global carbon expenditure below 2900GtCO2. As at the time of writing, only 605GtCO2 remains. Divided equally amongst the 7.9 billion population of earth, this comes out at a lifetime carbon allowance of 76.6 tonnes of CO2 per person — or around 0.9 tonnes per year over an 85-year lifespan.

Of course, it might be the case that a fair share isn’t necessarily an equal share. Another way of dividing up the carbon budget might be to instead require a proportional reduction in carbon emissions by all emitters. Put another way, this requires that everyone’s emissions peak around 2020, drop 50% by 2045, and fall below zero by 2075. The problematic side of this approach is that it allows historically high emitters to continue to emit at a much greater rate than many others around the world. As such, it provides a far more generous carbon budget for those living in a country like the U.S. According to Carbon Brief, a child born in the U.S. in 2017 will – on this approach – have a lifetime carbon budget of 450 tonnes of CO2, or 5.3 tonnes per year over an 85-year lifespan. By contrast, a child born in the same year in Bangladesh will receive only 4 tonnes of CO2, or 0.05 tonnes per year.

Of course, other factors may come into play in determining what a ‘fair share’ of carbon emissions is for each individual. One such factor is need. Suppose, for example, that I live in a part of the country where the only electricity production I have access to is derived from a coal-fired power plant. In such a case, I might necessitate a higher budget than someone who lives in a location with renewable energy options.

But the precise method by which we determine a fair share of carbon emissions is largely academic. This is because – even on the most generous allocation – we are all still horribly over-budget. In 2019 (the most recent year for which data is available), the per capita carbon emissions of a U.S. citizen was around 16 tonnes of CO2. Ultimately, this means that there is a moral imperative on each of us to do all we can to reduce our future emissions in any way possible. Some actions – like recycling and patronizing public transport – may be easy, but other changes (like the one I suggested in a previous article) may require much greater sacrifice. But without these changes, we – like those who hoarded toilet paper and gasoline – will continue to take far more than our fair share, and subsequently treat others unfairly in the process.

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Ongoing American Exceptionalism: To Infinity and Beyond

photograph of American flag planted on Moon with Astronaut staring off into space

On April 7th, the Trump administration released an executive order declaring that the USA doesn’t understand space or the moon to be under international jurisdiction, but rather a domain for particular countries to pursue their own interests. The order states, “Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space.”

There are 108 signatories for the “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies,” the main document outlining law in space. This document is now a precedent for treating space continuously with international law: no particular government has authority unless there is a particular interaction with data transmission between citizens, for example, that clearly falls under the jurisdiction of a particular nation. For instance, in 2019, Anne McClain, a US astronaut allegedly signed into Former Air Force intelligence officer Summer Worden’s bank account without Worden’s permission. Worden filed an identity theft charge against McClain. Because the data connection, bank, and citizens were all under the purview of the US, it was determined to fall under U.S. law.

Unless circumstances as particular as these arise, however, corporations, states, and entities in space are meant to operate under a set of regulations that broadly set out international regulations. This is for practical reasons as much as anything else:

“When there’s a hurricane, earthquake or other disaster, Harrington said that multiple countries with remote-sensing satellites — including the U.S., Japan, South Africa, Russia and the European Union — are part of a disaster charter. Whomever had a satellite passing over the disaster-ridden region before, after and during the event has agreed to share data to mitigate damage, saving lives and property.”

Trump’s executive order breaks with the international push for cooperation and neutrality in pursuing space exploration. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, as well as NASA, have repeatedly emphasized that international cooperation is crucial for pursuing space exploration.

Trump has been enthusiastic about expanding American power into space, as his ambition for developing a Space Force has shown in the past year. His enthusiasm for expanding mining rights and removing mining regulation on Earth make this also a natural expansion of his previous zeal. However, similar to his propagation of the Space Force, it remains unclear what, if any, interest or action will follow from this declaration of Trumpian interest.

Having a leader that is out of touch with the reasoning behind the policies is dangerous and can have lasting impact on not only our nation’s progress but the necessary cooperative efforts of the international community. When one powerful nation withdraws efforts, the rest of a coalition suffers. This is one way to harm a community—not by sanctioning, attacking, or aiming malice directly towards other nations or actors, but by neglecting to take their interests into considerations in one’s own pursuits. Neglect in such circumstances is a form of disrespect. It also is not in the USA’s best interests, for, as experts agree, the successful pursuit of progress in space will necessarily be a joint effort, relying on the very nations Trump continues to ignore in the here and now.

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Collective Action and Climate Change: Consumption, Defection, and Motivation

photograph of dry, cracked earth with grass growing on a few individual pieces

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.

Last month, the United Nations held talks regarding international climate agreements in hopes to abate and adapt to the changes to our global environment due to the industrialization and emissions by humans. With the president of the United States vocally skeptical about the moral imperative to action, other countries have been considering defection from previous joint commitments. If the United States continues to consume resources at its current rate, the United Nations’ climate goals will not be possible. This is a feature of climate change agreements: they impact nations differently, irrespective of any country’s particular contribution to the problem. Thus, tied up with the responsibility to commit to taking action is the question of whether there should be different burdens depending on the level of industrialization and development (i.e., consumption) of the nation in question.

Environmental ethicist Martino Traxler distinguishes between two approaches in assigning the duties and burdens for responding to climate change. The first approach would be “just”, in that it takes into consideration the historical context in which we now find ourselves, as well as the power/structure dynamics at play. For instance, placing identical duties on all countries to reduce energy consumption equally doesn’t attend to countries’ differing ability to pay, varying causal contributions to the current state of things, and the extent to which various countries have unequally benefited from previous policies and activities that were environmentally damaging. For instance, some developing nations are improving economically by taking advantage of some less-clean technologies, and it is arguably hypocritical for developed nations with a history of colonialism, imperialism, or military interference/manipulation to intervene at this stage and charge the developing nations with the responsibility to reduce their pollution. Such a policy would slow the progress toward leveling the international playing field. Countries that are developing now and changing the shape of their economies in order to grow out of poverty may have greater claim to use resources that have damaging effects on the environment than countries that have put the globe in a place of climate crisis while at the same time creating conditions for global poverty that allowing the use of environment-damaging resources would go some distance to alleviate.

Thus, some examples just approaches to alleviating the impact of climate change would be to make:

  1. Benefiters pay (in proportion to benefits)
  2. Polluters pay (in proportion to responsibility)
  3. Richest pay (in proportion to their ability)

This would distribute burdens unevenly internationally, and typically nations that have more industrialized infrastructure would bear heavier burdens than those nations that are in the process of building their economies. This can be concerning for the most-developed nations and the nations that have experienced the most power and privilege historically. For nations that already have systems of infrastructure that involve emitting greenhouse gases, for instance, committing to being more environmentally responsible according to the just approach can amount to committing to a strikingly different way of life. Some still may recall George H. W. Bush’s declaration at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that “The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.” In 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, delegates noted that a child born in the developed world consumes 30 to 50 times as much water as one born in the developing world, emphasizing the different relations to resource consumption depending on the ways of life established in one’s society.

These features highlight how a “just” approach to burden sharing may disincentivize the richest, most internationally powerful nations from agreeing to combating climate change. The alternative approach style is a “fair” model of burden allocation, which has each nation share evenly in the responsibility to remain in a safe zone of resource consumption and emission standards. The fair approach presents a clean slate and looks forward, rather than backward at the contextual perspective of the just approach. The approach is fair in the sense that there is even distribution of responsibility, but most find the just approach more appropriate. Are there reasons why we might find the fair model appealing? The breakdown at the UN last month suggests several reasons why.

When we face an issue like climate change, nations need to determine how to act together. It’s difficult enough to determine the path for a single country or nation, but collective action like this requires agreement and commitment that structurally resembles classic dilemmas from game theory and economics. Traxler argues that because of these structural similarities, we should opt for fair rather than just allocations. In short, because the cost of the rich countries deferring is so great, we need to construct agreements that don’t over-burden them. As we see this year with countries like China and India hesitating to make commitments to change if the U.S. isn’t on board, Traxler may be onto something. In modeling climate change agreements in terms of incentivizing the related parties to not defer, Traxler is suggesting that we face an international Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a classic problem in game theory. The puzzle arises when what is in the best interest of a collective diverges from what is in the interest of an individual. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is set up as follows: two burglars (or criminals of some sort) are arrested and separated so they cannot coordinate. The authorities are attempting to get a confession from at least one of the burglars to aid in their investigation and conviction. If both burglars remain silent, they will each receive a sentence of 1 year. The authorities are attempting to incentivize cooperating with them because they would get information and successful convictions. However, the information will be most useful if one burglar cooperates and turns on the other, allowing the authorities to “throw the book” at one of them. Therefore, if one of the burglars betrays their comrade and gives information to the authorities while the other remains silent, this would result in the betrayer going free and the silent conspirator getting a 3 year sentence. If both burglars attempt to achieve this end (confessing in hopes that the other remains silent), the authorities have information on both of them and neither can go free. Instead, both will serve 2 years. Each burglar thus faces the decision of whether to cooperate with their conspirator or betray them and confess to the authorities. The possible combinations and outcomes are displayed in the table below.

The reason this poses a game theoretic dilemma is that the ideal outcome for each burglar is to exploit the cooperation of the other (i.e., to betray while the other stays silent). This creates a scenario where what is in the individual’s best interest is at odds with what is in their collective interest; if we consider the burglars together as a group and evaluate what would get the best outcome overall, then they should both remain silent. If, however, the individual aims for his or her best individual outcome, then there is great pressure to defect so as to potentially receive the best individual outcome (go free) and always avoid the worst (3 years).

As individual nations, it is in our best interest to over-consume and hope that the rest of the international community behaves responsibly and attempts to save the planet. That way we enjoy the benefits of our consumption of resources AND the benefits of the rest of the international community’s conservation efforts. BUT! If everyone in the international community behaves this way (parallel to both burglar’s betraying their partnership), we end up in a bad scenario. What is in the interest of the collective is for everyone to cooperate, but individual interests encourages us to over-consume.

The structure of the Prisoner’s Dilemma arises in a few areas of public life, not just among police bargaining with alleged criminals. The key to the dilemma is that what is collectively rational comes apart at times from what is individually rational. This is also the tension in Tragedy of the Commons cases. The Tragedy of the Commons describes cases in economics or scenarios in shared-resources situations where the best thing to do from an individual level is to consume more than others, but this focus on immediate use leads to a situation such that our shared ability to use the resource over time is undermined.

Described by William Forster Lloyd in the 19th century, we could imagine a case of the Tragedy as a river by a village that sustains an ecosystem containing fish. If the village fishes in the river some reasonable amount over time, the river is sufficient to replenish itself and feed the village. So, collectively speaking, it’s rational for the village to maintain fishing levels at this restrained rate. However, at an individual level, each villager is in a position where they have access to a resource that is potential income, and though it undermines the future use of the river and the other villagers’ potential use of the resource, overfishing to get more food and more resources is in the individual’s best interest. Thus in a similar way that the burglars have conflicting strategies in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in shared-resource scenarios, there is tension between individual and collective interests.

In order to avoid countries defecting and not living up to the commitment to abate climate change, we may need to “sweeten the deal” a bit, according to Traxler and not go with the just approach that would perhaps be too burdensome to the richest, most industrialized nations. This would give them fewer reasons to over-consume and ignore the agreements. However, it would also perhaps produce less pressure for the richest and most able countries to aggressively researching “cleaner” alternatives to the technology so that they may continue something like their current ways of life.

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Tragedy of the Commons in Cape Town’s Water Crisis

Cape Town, South Africa is running out of water. In less than 90 days, the city’s reservoirs will be so dry that the water in them will be too silty to be usable. This will be the first time that a major city will run out of water, and the world is watching the city’s attempts to delay what has seemed inevitable for months. Cape Town has faced three years of drought that climatologists have called a “once in a millennium” phenomenon, which, paired with the rapid increase in population, has led to a dire and record-breaking situation.

Continue reading “Tragedy of the Commons in Cape Town’s Water Crisis”