The Tragedy of the Commons: By Garrett Hardin

Throughout history there have been many examples of tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commons is when people in a certain area over exploit a common resource which leads toa higher problem. Tragedy of the commons normally happens when people get greedy and get more than they really need. For example, if one farmer is public grazing area were to add a cow over the limit the field can sustain it won’t do much damage but if the other farmers also add another cow to the field it could end up harming it to the point where it is no longer usable.This comes to show that if even a single person becomes greedy it could ruin so many things for other people. Ideas will be pulled out from Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” to be used in this essay.

Garrett Hardin published in Psychology Today in September 1974. This passage is an excerpt from his popular paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” as a warning that overpopulation was dangerous due to how limited Earth’s resources are. This theory is reflected in Hardin’s thesis that the rich should do nothing to help the people of poor nations and turn away those trying to come in. Hardin used the imagery of a lifeboat almost filled in a sea full of drowning people to pose and answer a single question, “what should the lifeboat passengers do?” (290). Hardin's answer was to defend the boat against all trying to board. If anyone felt guilty about this course of action they should feel free to swap places with a drowning man and give them their

At first Hardin’s ethics seem rude and selfish, but as you continue reading he makes it clear this may be the only way to save our world and have it become a better place. For instance, "on the average poor countries undergo a 2.5 percent increase in population each year; rich countries, about 0.8 percent. If the poor countries received no food from the out side, the rate of their population growth […]" (Hardin 4). Hardin continues his piece explaining why rich countries should not help poorer countries that are in need. He believes a poor country that needs support needs to learn the hard way, even if that means losing resources or people. His words like "rich countries", "no food" shows the use of a metaphor that Hardin is able to paint a visual illustration of his argument to his audience. This helps influence and persuade his readers because they are able to grasp the whole concept of Hardin’s argument. Hardin also spoke in his essay using the repetition of the words "we" and "us" is a language factor that persuades the audience to accept Hardin’s ideas because it implicates that he and his audience is of equal status. Here, the ethics he reveals in his essay have good reasoning. Helping someone in need has always been a moral in someone’s life. But now, Hardin proposes a new ethic, "lifeboat ethics". Singer, on the other hand, often refers to the fact that nearly one-third of Americans spend their income on luxuries that they “desire” instead of donating the

Coming from an uncultivated society, such as the one that brought farming and ranching to the settlement of North America, humans have retained some sensitivity to environmental issues as they derived their livelihood directly from the land. But with the advance to an urban or metropolitan society, there has been a major disconnect between humanity and nature. Today’s urban society is provided with mowed parks, paved playgrounds, plush automobiles to move the public around on asphalt roads, housing with automatically regulated heat and cooling, and supermarkets with shopping carts and baskets, in which people can gather their food supplies from orderly shelves and freezers. Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” term suggests that humans stop treating the land as a mere object or a resource, like how the world does today. For Leopold, land is not merely soil, like the public would think of today; land is a fountain of energy, flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.

In Garrett Hardin’s essay “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” Hardin asks readers if every person on earth has an equal share of resources and then argues why he takes the position against helping the poor. Hardin uses the metaphor of a lifeboat that is almost filled to capacity, floating in an ocean where the “poor of the world” are overboard. This metaphor appeals greatly to one of humanities greatest instincts, survival. The main focus of Hardin’s essay and metaphor is to strip all morals, take the fault from the rich nations and place the responsibilities and blame on the poor. There are a few rebels who seem to think that the blame and responsibilities are incorrectly placed. One of these rebels is Alan Durning who presents his argument in his essay “Asking How Much is Enough.” Durning argues that overpopulation does not threaten the world’s resources. He believes the real culprit is overconsumption by the rich. Joseph K. Skinner is another rebel who argues against Hardin in his essay “Big Mac and the Tropical Forests.” Skinner argues that wealthy nations, including the United States, are responsible for the world’s resource problem because they use poor nations as main producers of goods they expend. The arguments made in the essays’ by Durning and Skinner make readers alert of Hardin’s rhetorical strategies and how he uses his

The tragedy of the commons is a pretty basic concept. So essentially, this theory states that people will use a shared resource to their own self-interests and ultimately “consume” the resource until its value is diminished (Brander, 2014).

In reading Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons,” and through my participation in the Kivulini Simulation lab completed in class, my knowledge and understanding of the psychological factors that contribute to the logic behind the decisions made by humans that negatively impact the planet we inhabit have significantly expanded. Many of these decisions are made out of ignorance, while others are made despite knowledge of the harm that results from them. There are some ways that I can apply this knowledge to my life in order to contribute to the effort to preserve this planet in the hopes of allowing it to sustain future generations.

Hardin proves this by saying "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" (177).

In the article “ Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”, Garrett Hardin (1974) argues that wealthy people should not be responsible for the poor and that the consequences of feeding the poor are detrimental to the environment and to the society as a whole. Hardin was a well known philosopher and ecologist. He earned his bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1936 and also earned his doctorate degree in microbiology from Stanford University in 1941 (Garrett Hardin, n.d.). The main issue that he tackled was human overpopulation and one of the books that he wrote that analyzed this issue was called ‘How Global Population Growth Threatens Widespread Social Disorder’(1992). Because the author has a sufficient

To break down Hardin’s approach, he critiques multiple approaches to this problem of ensuring economic will being for everyone. First, he mentions the Marxist and Christian approaches which would lead to complete social justice, but also complete catastrophe, since the lifeboat in his example would drown due to overcapacity

When dealing with a common stock within a society, one would assume that taking from the commons would leave other people worse off than they were before. However, this is not the case according to John Locke. In the beginning of Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), he acknowledges that all men are “equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life liberty or possessions” (§ 6). This raises the question of whether taking from the commons harms another person’s interest or not. According to Locke, the common stock is everything that “God, as King David says (Psalm 115:16), ‘has given the earth to the children of men’” (§ 25). Locke argues that taking from the commons would not affect the other people in society negatively, but it would instead enhance the value of the commons themselves. Locke utilizes the abundancy of the commons and the theory that applying one’s labor to an object taken from the commons raises the value of the common stock.

Analysis of ethical issue In his 1949 publication titled, “The Land Ethic”, Aldo Leopold argued that the land ethic expanded the boundaries of the community to also include water, soils, plant and animals. In the process, the land ethic shifts the position of Homo sapiens from being a conqueror to being a citizen of the land community. The relationship that people develop with land in utilizing the Yellowstone National Park would raise concern in the context of Leopold’s view regarding the link between land and people (Leopold). The management of pack usage and preference often raise ethical concerns.

Garrett Hardin was a controversial ecologist who believed that overpopulation was going to bring a downfall to a world of limited resources. Each nation was compared to a lifeboat with the rich being inside the boat and the poor in the water, drowning (Hardin, 561). He wrote the “Lifeboat Ethics” in 1974 when Ethiopia was having a starvation problem. Hardin’s opinion about the situation was that sending aid to Ethiopia was only making the problem worse and by feeding the people would aid overpopulation; the root to the problem. Hardin’s thesis developed from the notion that the rich should do nothing to help the poor. He believed that one

These social dilemmas are related to common-pool resources. The problem of free riding can be an issue. . There has to be governance of common pool resources. If, for example collective action was man’s natural instinct then

“The Tragedy of the Commons” written by Garret Hardin explains how the human population is degrading the environment. When Hardin refers to commons he is talking about a resource that is owned by no one and used by a group of people. Some examples of commons include the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the oceans we fish. The tragedy is that people don’t look at the bigger picture; the over use of commons for our own personal benefit leads to the destruction or extinction of these commons. For example if one fisherman wants to fish the oceans as much as possible that’s fine, but now imagine if every fisherman wants to fish the oceans as much as they can, this is one example of a common being destroyed by the human population. The