Science 13 December 1968: Vol. 162. no. 3859, pp. 1243 - 1248

DOI: 10.1126/science.162.3859.1243 http://www.sciencemag.org /cgi/content/full/162/3859/1243



## Articles

The Tragedy of the Commons

Garrett Hardin

The population problem has no technical soluti on; it requires a fundame ntal extension in morality.

The author is professor of biology, University of California, Santa Barbara. This article is based on a presidential address presented before the m eeting of the Pacific Di vision of the American

Association for the Advancement of Science at Utah State University, Logan, 25 June 1968.

At the end of a thoughtful article on the futu re of nuclear war, Wiesner and York ( 1 ) concluded

that: "Both sides in the arms race are ... confronted by th e dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decrea sing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that

this dilemma has no technical solution . If the great powers con tinue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation."

I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the problem. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the pr oblem under discussion has a

technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natu ral sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human

values or ideas of morality.

In our day (though not in earlier times) technica l solutions are always welcome. Because of previous failures in prophecy, it takes courage to assert that a desired technical solution is not possible. Wiesner and York exhibited this courage; publishing in a science journal, they insisted that the solution to the problem was not to be found in the natu ral sciences. They cautiously qualified their statement with the phrase, "I t is our considered professional judgment... ." Whether they were right or not is not the concern of the present article. Ra ther, the concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problem s which can be called "no technical solution problems," and, more speci fically, with the identification and discussion of one of these.

It is easy to show that the cla ss is not a null class. Recall the ga me of tick-tack-toe. Consider the problem, "How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?" It is well known that I cannot, if I assume (in keeping with the conven tions of game theory) that my opponent understands the gameperfectly. Put another way, there is no "technical solution" to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word "w in." I can hit my opponent over the head; or I can drug him; or I can falsify the records. Every way in which I "win" involves, in some sense, an

abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course, openly abandon the game--refuse to play it. This is what most adults do.)

The class of "No technical solution problems" has members. My thesis is that the "population problem," as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally

conceived needs some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem--technologically. I try to show here that the solution they s eek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical

way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.



### What Shall We Maximize?

Population, as Malthus said, natura lly tends to grow "geometrically," or, as we would now say, exponentially. In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease. Is ours a finite world?

A fair defense can be put forward for the view th at the world is infinite; or that we do not know that it is not. But, in terms of the practical problems that we must face in the next few generations

with the foreseeable t echnology, it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery if we do not, during the immediate future, assume that the world available to the terrestrial human population is finite. "Space" is no escape ( 2 ).

A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, popul ation growth must eventually equal zero. (The case of perpetual wide fluctuations a bove and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed.) Wh en this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? Specifically, can Bentham's goal of "the greatest good for th e greatest number " be realized?

No --for two reasons, each sufficient by itself. Th e first is a theoretical one. It is not mathematically possible to maximize for two (or more) variables at the same time. This was clearly stated by von Neumann and Morgenstern ( 3 ), but the principle is implicit in the theory of partial differential equations, dating back at least to D' Alembert (1717-1783).

The second reason springs directly from biological facts. To live , any organism must have a source of energy (for example, food). This energy is utilized for two purposes: mere maintenance and work. For man, maintenance of life requires about 1600 kilocalories a day ("maintenance calories"). Anything that he does over and above merely staying alive will be defined as work, and is supported by "work calories" which he take s in. Work calories are used not only for what we call work in common speech; they are also required for all forms of enjoyment, from swimming and automobile racing to playing music and writing poe try. If our goal is to maximize population it is obvious what we mu st do: We must make the work calories per person approach as close to zero as possible. No gourmet meals, no vacations, no s ports, no music, no literature,no art. ... I think that everyone will grant, without argument or proof, that maximizing population does not maximize goods. Bentham's goal is impossible.

In reaching this conclusion I have made the usua l assumption that it is the acquisition of energy that is the problem. The appearance of atomic energy has led some to question this assumption. However, given an infinite source of energy, population growth still produces an inescapable problem. The problem of the acquisition of energy is replaced by the problem of its dissipation,

as J. H. Fremlin has so wittily shown ( 4 ). The arithmetic signs in the analysis are, as it were, reversed; but Bentham's goal is still unobtainable.

The optimum population is, then, le ss than the maximum. The diffi culty of defining the optimum is enormous; so far as I know, no one has seriously tackled this problem. Reaching an acceptable and stable solution will surely re quire more than one generation of hard analytical work--and much persuasion.

We want the maximum good per pe rson; but what is good? To one person it is wilderness, to another it is ski lodges for thousands. To one it is estuaries to nour ish ducks for hunters to shoot; to another it is factory land. Comparing one good with another is, we usually say, impossible because goods are incommensurable. Incommensurables cannot be compared.

Theoretically this may be true; but in real lif e incommensurables are commensurable. Only a criterion of judgment and a system of weighting are needed. In natu re the criterion is survival. Is it better for a species to be small and hideable, or large and powerful? Na tural selection

commensurates the incommensurables. The compromise achieved depends on a natural weighting of the values of the variables.

Man must imitate this process. There is no doubt that in fact he alrea dy does, but unconsciously.

It is when the hidden decisions are made explicit that the argu ments begin. The problem for the years ahead is to work out an acceptable theory of weighting. Synergistic effects, nonlinear variation, and difficulties in discounting the future make the intellectual problem difficult, but not (in principle) insoluble.

Has any cultural group solved this practical probl em at the present time, even on an intuitive level? One simple fact proves that none has: there is no pr osperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero. Any people that has intuitively identified its optimum point will soon reach it, after which its gr owth rate becomes and remains

zero.

Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum. However, by any reasonable standards, the most rapidl y growing populations on earth today are (in general) the mo st miserable. This association (which need not be invariable) casts doubt on the optimistic assumption that the positive growth rate of a population is evidence that

it has yet to reach its optimum.

We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcize the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical de mography. In economic affairs, TheWealth of Nations (1776) popularized the "invisible hand," the idea that an individual who "intends only his own gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote . . . the public interest" ( 5 ). Adam Smith did not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did any

of his followers. But he contributed to a dominant tendency of t hought that has ever since

interfered with positive action based on rationa l analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the conti nuance of our present policy of laissez-faire in reproduction. If it is correct we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If the assu mption is not correct, we need to reexamine our

individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible.



### Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons

The rebuttal to the invisible hand in population control is to be f ound in a scenario first sketched in a little-known pamphlet (6) in 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852). We may well call it "the tragedy of the commons," using the word "tragedy" as the philosopher Whitehead used it ( 7 ): "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things." He then goes on to say, "This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the

drama."

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly

generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximi ze his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal , the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-maki ng herdsman is only a fraction of 1.

Adding together the component pa rtial utilities, the rational herd sman concludes that the only

sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd

without limit--in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, eachpursuing his own best interest in a society that believe s in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Some would say that this is a pl atitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of years ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial ( 8 ). The individual

benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.

Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.

A simple incident that occurred a few years ago in Leominster, Massachusetts, shows how perishable the knowledge is. During the Christmas shopping season the parking meters

downtown were covered with plastic bags that bore tags reading: "Do not open until after Christmas. Free parking courtesy of the mayor and city council." In other words, facing the prospect of an increased demand for already scarce space. the city fathers reinstituted the system of the commons. (Cynically, we suspect that they gained more votes than they lost by this retrogressive act.)

In an approximate way, the logic of the commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private pr operty in real estate. But it is understood mostly only in special cases which are not sufficiently generalized. Even at this late date, cattlemen leasing national land on the western ranges dem onstrate no more than an

ambivalent understanding, in constantly pre ssuring federal authorities to increase the head count to the point wher e overgrazing produces erosion and weed-dominance. Likewise, the oceans of

the world continue to suffer from the surv ival of the philosophy of the commons. Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the "freedom of the seas." Professing to

believe in the "inexhaustible resources of the oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction ( 9 ).

The National Parks present anothe r instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit. The parks themse lves are limited in extent--there is only one Yosemite Valley--whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the parks as

commons or they will be of no value to anyone.

What shall we do? We have several options. We might sell them off as private property. We might keep them as public property, but allocate the right to enter them. The allocation might be on the basis of wealth, by the use of an auction system. It might be on the basis of merit, as defined by some agreed-upon standards. It might be by lottery. Or it might be on a first-come,

first-served basis, administered to long queue s. These, I think, are all the reasonable possibilities. They are all objectionable. But we must choose--or acquiesce in the destruction of the commons

that we call our National Parks.



### PollutionIn a reverse way, the tragedy of the commons rea ppears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons, but of pu tting something in--sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air, and distracting and unpl easant advertising signs into the line of sight. Th e calculations of utility are

much the same as before. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.

Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.

The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutant s than to discharge them

untreated. We have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution. Th e owner of a factory on the bank of a stream-- whose property extends to the middle of the stream, often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right to muddy the waters flowing past hi s door. The law, always behind the times, requires elaborate stitchi ng and fitting to adapt it to this newly perceived aspect of the commons.

The pollution problem is a consequence of popul ation. It did not much matter how a lonely American frontiersman disposed of his waste. "Flowing water purif ies itself every 10 miles," my grandfather used to say, and the myth was near enough to the truth when he was a boy, for there were not too many people. But as population became denser, the na tural chemical and biological recycling processes became overl oaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.



### How To Legislate Temperance?

Analysis of the pollution problem as a function of population density uncovers a not generally recognized principle of morality, namely: the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed ( 10 ). Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable. A hundred and fifty years ago a plainsman could kill an American bison, cut out only the tongue for his dinner, and discard the rest of the animal. He was not in any important sense being wasteful. Today, with only a few thousand bison left, we would be appalled at such behavior.

In passing, it is worth noting that the morality of an act cannot be determined from a photograph.

One does not know whether a man killing an elephant or setting fire to the grassland is harming

others until one knows the tota l system in which his act appears. "One picture is worth a thousand words," said an ancient Chinese; but it may take 10,000 words to validate it. It is as tempting to ecologists as it is to reformers in general to try to persuade others by way of the photographic shortcut. But the essense of an argument cannot be photographed: it must be presented rationally--in words.That morality is system-sensitive escaped the atte ntion of most codifiers of ethics in the past.

"Thou shalt not . . ." is the form of traditional ethical directives which make no allowance for particular circumstances. The laws of our society follow the pattern of ancient ethics, and therefore are poorly suited to governing a complex, crowded, changeable world. Our epicyclic solution is to augment statutor y law with administrative law. Since it is practically impossible to spell out all the conditions under which it is safe to burn tras h in the back yard or to run an automobile without smog-control, by law we delegate the details to bureaus. The result is administrative law, which is rightly feared for an ancient reason-- Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?--

"Who shall watch the watchers themselves?" John Adams said that we must have "a government of laws and not men." Bureau administrators, trying to evaluate the morality of acts in the total

system, are singularly liable to corrupti on, producing a government by men, not laws.

Prohibition is easy to legislate (though not neces sarily to enforce); but how do we legislate temperance? Experience indicates that it can be accomplished be st through the mediation of

administrative law. We limit possibilities unnece ssarily if we suppose that the sentiment of Quis

custodiet denies us the use of administrative law. We should rather retain the phrase as a perpetual reminder of fearful dangers we cannot a void. The great challenge facing us now is to

invent the corrective feedbacks that are needed to keep custodians honest. We must find ways to legitimate the needed authority of both the custodian s and the corrective feedbacks.



### Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable

The tragedy of the commons is involved in population problems in another way. In a world governed solely by the principle of "dog eat dog"--if indeed there ever was such a world--how

many children a family had would not be a matter of public concern. Parents who bred too exuberantly would leave fewer descendants, not more, because they would be unable to care adequately for their children. David Lack and othe rs have found that such a negative feedback demonstrably controls th e fecundity of birds ( 11 ). But men are not birds, and have not acted like them for millenniums, at least.

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the ch ildren of improvident parents starved to death; if

, thus, overbreeding brought its own "punishment" to the germ line--

then there would be no public intere st in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state ( 12 ), and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the fa mily, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement ( 13 )? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the worl d into a tragic course of action.

Unfortunately this is just the course of action th at is being pursued by th e United Nations. In late 1967, some 30 nations agreed to the following ( 14 ):The Universal Declaration of Human Rights descri bes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the fam ily itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.

It is painful to have to deny categorically the validity of this right; denying it, one feels as

uncomfortable as a resident of Salem, Massachusetts, who de nied the reality of witches in the 17th century. At the present time, in liberal quarters, something like a taboo acts to inhibit

criticism of the United Nations. There is a feeling that the United Nations is "our last and best hope," that we shouldn't find fault with it; we shouldn't play into the hands of the archconservatives. However, let us not forget what Robert Louis Stevenso n said: "The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy." If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even though it is promoted by the United Nations. We should also join with Kingsley Davis ( 15 ) in attempting to get Planned Parenthood-World Populat ion to see the error of its ways in embracing the same tragic ideal.



### Conscience Is Self-Eliminating

It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of manki nd in the long run by an appeal

to conscience. Charles Galton Darwin made this point when he spoke on the centennial of the publication of his grandfather's great book. The argument is straightforward and Darwinian.

People vary. Confronted with appeals to lim it breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The difference will be accentuated, generation by generation.

In C. G. Darwin's words: "It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo contracipiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo progenitivus " ( 16 ).

The argument assumes that conscience or the desire for children (no matter which) is hereditary-- but hereditary only in the most general formal sense. The result will be the same whether the attitude is transmitted through germ cells, or exosomatically, to use A. J. Lotka's term. (If one denies the latter possibility as well as the former, then what's the point of education?) The argument has here been stated in the context of the population problem, but it applies equally well to any instance in which society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good--by means of his conscience. To make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works toward the elimination of conscience from the race.



### Pathogenic Effects of Conscience

The long-term disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn it; but has serious short-term disadvantages as well. If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist "in the name of conscience," what are we saying to him? What does he hear? --not only at themoment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely

the words we used but also the nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: (i) (intended communication) "I f you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acti ng like a responsible citizen"; (ii) (the unintended communication) "If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who

can be shamed into standing aside while the re st of us exploit the commons."

Everyman then is caught in what Bateson has ca lled a "double bind." Bateson and his co-workers have made a plausible case for viewing the double bind as an important causative factor in the genesis of schizophrenia ( 17 ). The double bind may not always be so damaging, but it always endangers the mental health of anyone to whom it is applied. "A bad conscience," said Nietzsche,

"is a kind of illness."

To conjure up a conscience in others is temp ting to anyone who wishes to extend his control beyond the legal limits. Leaders at the highest level succumb to this temptation. Has any

President during the past generation failed to call on labor unions to moderate voluntarily their demands for higher wages, or to steel companies to honor voluntary guidelines on prices? I can

recall none. The rhetoric used on such occasions is designed to produce feelings of guilt in

noncooperators.

For centuries it was assumed without proof th at guilt was a valuable, perhaps even an indispensable, ingred ient of the civilized life. Now, in this post -Freudian world, we doubt it.

Paul Goodman speaks from the modern point of view when he says: "No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention

to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties" ( 18 ).

One does not have to be a professi onal psychiatrist to see the cons equences of anxiety. We in the Western world are just emerging from a dreadful two-centuries-long Dark Ages of Eros that was sustained partly by prohibition laws , but perhaps more effectively by the anxiety-generating

mechanism of education. Alex Comfort has told the story well in The Anxiety Makers ( 19 ); it is

not a pretty one.

Since proof is difficult, we may even concede th at the results of anxiet y may sometimes, from certain points of view, be desirable. The larger question we should as k is whether, as a matter of policy, we should ever encourage the use of a technique the tendency (if not the intention) of which is psychologically pathogenic. We hear much talk these days of responsible parenthood; the coupled words are incorporated into the tit les of some organizations devoted to birth control. Some people have proposed massive propaganda campaigns to instill re sponsibility into the nation's (or the world's) breeders. But what is th e meaning of the word responsibility in this context? Is it not merely a synonym for the word conscience? When we use the word responsibility in the ab sence of substantial sanctions are we not trying to browbeat a free man in

a commons into acting against his own inte rest? Responsibility is a verbal counterfeit for a

substantial quid pro quo . It is an attempt to get something for nothing.If the word responsibility is to be used at all, I suggest that it be in the sense Charles Frankel uses it ( 20 ). "Responsibility," says this philosopher, "is the product of definite social arrangements."

Notice that Frankel calls for soci al arrangements--not propaganda.



### Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed upon

The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort. Consider bank-robbing. The man who takes money from a bank acts as if the bank

were a commons. How do we prevent such action? Certainly not by trying to control his behavior solely by a verbal appeal to his sense of responsibility. Rather than rely on propaganda we follow

Frankel's lead and insist that a bank is not a commons; we seek the definite social arrangements that will keep it from becoming a commons. That we thereby infringe on the freedom of wouldbe robbers we neither deny nor regret.

The morality of bank-robbing is particularly ea sy to understand because we accept complete prohibition of this activity. We are willing to say "Thou shalt not rob banks," without providing for exceptions. But temperance al so can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device. To keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters for short periods, and traffic fine s for longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive for him to do so. Not prohibition, but carefully biased options are what we offer him. A Madison Avenue man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of the word coercion.

Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now, bu t it need not forever be so. As with the fourletter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without apology or embarrassmen t. To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions of distant and irresponsible bureaucrats; but this is not a necessary part of its meaning. The only

kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.

To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it. Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless. We institute and (grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices to esca pe the horror of the commons.

An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be pr eferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically traine d biologist I deny that

it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be di fferences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly corre lated with biological inheritance--that those w ho are biologically more

fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of "like father, like son" implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate

intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust--but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, th at anyone has invented a bettersystem. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable

to total ruin.

It is one of the peculiaritie s of the warfare between reform and the status quo that it is thoughtlessly governed by a double standard. Whenever a reform measure is proposed it is often

defeated when its opponents triumphantly discover a flaw in it. As Kingsley Davis has pointed out ( 21 ), worshippers of the status quo sometimes imply that no reform is possible without unanimous agreement, an implication contrary to histor ical fact. As nearly as I can make out, automatic rejection of proposed reforms is based on one of two unconscious assumptions: (i) that the status quo is perfect; or (ii) that the choice we face is between reform and no action; if the proposed reform is imperfect, we presumably should take no action at all, while we wait for a perfect proposal.

But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action. It also produces evils. Once we are aware that the status quo is action, we can then compare its discoverable advantages and disadvantages with the predicted advantages and disadvantages of the proposed reform, discounting as best we can for our lack of experi ence. On the basis of such a comparison, we can make a rational decision whic h will not involve the unworkable assumption that only perfect systems are tolerable.



### Recognition of Necessity

Perhaps the simplest summary of this analysis of man's population pr oblems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditi ons of low-population density. As the human population has increa sed, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after

another.

First we abandoned the commons in food gathering, enclosing farm land and restricting pastures and hunting and fishing areas. These restrictions are still not complete throughout the world.

Somewhat later we saw that the commons as a pl ace for waste disposal would also have to be

abandoned. Restrictions on the disposal of domestic sewage are widely accepted in the Western world; we are still struggling to close the commons to pollution by automobiles, factories, insecticide sprayers, fertilizing operations, and atomic energy installations.

In a still more embryonic state is our recogniti on of the evils of the commons in matters of pleasure. There is almost no restriction on the propagation of sound waves in the public medium. The shopping public is assaulte d with mindless music, without its consent. Our government is paying out billions of dollars to create supersonic transpor t which will disturb 50,000 people for every one person who is whisked from coast to coast 3 hours faster. Advertisers muddy the

airwaves of radio and television and pollute the view of travelers. We are a long way from outlawing the commons in matters of pleasur e. Is this because our Puritan inheritance makes us view pleasure as something of a sin, and pain (that is, the pollution of advertising) as the sign of

virtue?Every new enclosure of the commons involves th e infringement of somebody's personal liberty. Infringements made in the distant past are accepted because no contemporary complains of a

loss. It is the newly proposed infrin gements that we vigorously oppose; cries of "rights" and

"freedom" fill the air. But what does "freedom" mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Indi viduals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals. I believe it was Hegel who said, "Freedom is the recognition of necessity."

The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for

the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.

The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. "Freedom is the re cognition of necessity"--and it is the

role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.



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