Criticism of Hardin's lifeboat ethics

btu2012 · Last edited by btu2012 on Tue Dec 04, 2007 6:09 am; edited 2 times in total

The posters on this site have been told repeatedly that a certain interpretation of Hardin's "life-boat ethics" represents the absolute and ultimate ethical truth which ought to be embraced by any environmentally-aware person. We have also been told repeatedly that raising any doubts or questions about a certain interpretation of lifeboat ethics amounts to irrational attachment to "full belly notions" and to an "unintelligent devotion to political correctness, human rights and the sanctity of human life". We have also been told that "Carrying capacity must veto all concerns, ethical or otherwise", and even that "Carrying capacity must veto reasoned conclusions", and we have been repeatedly challenged to "debate the merits" of this particular position, something which supposedly "nobody has even tried". Finally, we have been told that we must "cut the rope", "increase human death rates" and other such euphemisms to the effect that we ought to adopt policies leading to the demise of billions, and that anyone who raises doubts about such positions is "in denial", "full of hubris", "doesn't get it" and other expressions to the same effect.

I would like to open a thread dedicated to debating the issue of whether Hardin's life-boat ethics is an ethically consistent position, and whether it is practicable. The thread also intends to place this particular ethical proposal into its proper context, not only within the field of Ethics but also within academic Ecology.

I would like to start by making a few observations:

1. Hardin's work on the "tragedy of the commons" is in fact quite controversial both within academic Ecological Science and within the context of Ethics.

2. His "lifeboat ethics", which has been presented to us as the only possible conclusion and even as "reality itself", is in fact seriously problematic and has been criticized from multiple perspectives.

3. One of the major criticisms concerns the near impossibility to operationalize such ethics due to the lack of sufficient information.

4. Another major criticism involves the social aspects of such a proposal, which is overly simplistic because it is based on applying ecological reasoning about animal populations to human beings, who form very complex and dynamical social structures.

5. Among the many issues ignored by that proposal is the ability of human groups to checkmate each other through large scale war (extensive organized violence supported by specialized technology). This factor is completely absent in animal populations.

6. Absolutist devotion to "lifeboat ethics" at the expense of other ethical concerns is self-defeating and logically inconsistent.

Btu
_________________
only the paranoid survive

thuja

OK BTU- I'm on board and have a few comments-

As we discussed in the previous HOF thread- MQ and others developed the idea that the carrying capcity is all important and that ethical decisions must not override the essential need to protect the carrying capacity.

Like you said- there are essential practical problems with implementing population "destruction" via increasing the death rate. He created a scenario that may work when you are talking about a few people but becomes absolutely unwieldy when you are talking about massive populations. So there is a practical issue...

Then there is the matter of ethics...how can any nation or political body sanely endorse the mass killing, enforced starvation, etc of certain groups of people without embracing a fascistic, genocidal mentality counter to any norms of morality?

Now...at the same time...I see that we as nations of people, embrace policies that obliquely cause the killing, starvation and destruction of hundreds of millions of people. Expensive health insurance insures that a segment of the poor die from lack of medical care. INternational "Donor fatigue" means that cretain nations don't receive aid during times of catastrophe, thus leading to the deaths of millions. Money isn't spent on disease prevention in African countries. Wars in the name of freedom kill massive segments of Middle Eastern people. On and on.

Its not direct, but policies with nice sounding names lead to increasing the death rate.

But I agree with you that it is impossible to create a senbsible and practical situation in which nations embrace increasing death rates. It is not practical and creates worse problems than what it proposes to solve.

dohboi · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Dec 05, 2005 Posts: 1472

thuja wrote, in response to a question on life boat ethics:

"I'm on board."

LOL. If this was an intentional pun, it was brilliant. It not, it still was brilliant, but perhaps at a subconscious level?

Hasn't Hardin refuted his own "tragedy of the commons" thing? It takes a very narrow, economics model of the essential human which does not fit the average actual human (unless they're economists!) or history very well.

Jack · Dark Lord Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 5123

thuja

Yes but we were talking about the lofty principle of population control for the sake of presevring carrying capacity. Do you really believe that a nation would develop a genocidal strategy towards populations based on such a lofty principle as preserving carrying capacity? And Jack- perhaps you support that- but I think less, shall we say, sociopathic people would find embracing genocide as a strategy for preserving CC as somewhat....distasteful.

btu2012

Jack · Dark Lord Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 5123

btu2012 · Last edited by btu2012 on Tue Nov 20, 2007 4:28 pm; edited 1 time in total

Jack · Dark Lord Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 5123

dohboi · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Dec 05, 2005 Posts: 1472

I didn't read all of the posts in the related HOF thread, so maybe this was already covered.

But consider for a moment two methods of population control. One traditional method was infanticide, specifically female infanticide. This approach, widely practice in ancient Europe and many other locals, made a grim kind of logical and ecological sense--

If you kill all but one of the male children (to take an extreme case for illustrative purposes) and leave great numbers of women, the one man (if he's got his mojo workin Wink

) can impregnate a large number of women, and you still can have a large population.

If you kill all but one of the girl children, there is a much smaller biological limit on how many kids she can produce in her life time.

(You can substitute abortion for infanticide, but the fact would remain that a greater number females being aborted would have a larger effect on population reduction than an even handed practice or than one more weighted toward males being aborted.)

(Please don't accuse me of being chauvinist. I am not advocating these repulsive practices, and the studies of them were mostly carried out by feminist scholars who I greatly admire.)

The undervaluing of female life that helped foster these practices runs counter to another strategy of population reduction, the one claimed by the UN to be most effective--the education of girls and the promotion and protection of their rights and welfare.

I prefer (and support) the latter approach for reasons that I hope are obvious, and I think education of girls, along with some trends toward urbanization...have helped dampen the world population curve. But for a livable world, it would be great if there were workable and ethical ways to reduce and reverse pop. growth more quickly. Do folks have any ideas (outside of the draconian measures suggested by Jack, MQ and some others)?

I would also point out that the most rapid population reduction (and I don't mean by Jack's means) is needed in the "first world" or more specifically the top one or two economic quintiles. That's where the vast majority (over 90%) of overuse of the earth's resources is taking place. And obviously dramatic decreases in consumption among this group are necessary, but perhaps not likely.

(Sorry to go on so long.)

EnergyUnlimited · Fusion Joined: May 15, 2006 Posts: 3391

btu2012 · Last edited by btu2012 on Tue Dec 04, 2007 6:31 am; edited 6 times in total

For those who missed them, two of Hardin's most relevant articles on this topic can be read at:

Lifeboat Ethics: The case against helping the poor, Psychology Today, September 1974.
Living on a lifeboat (1974), BioScience, vol 24(10), pp. 561-568.

His article on the tragedy of the commons and some criticism can be found at (in pdf):

Tragedy of the commons and beyond

The original article only (in html):

The tragedy of the commons , Science, December 13, 1968.

His update on the issue:

Extension of the tragedy of the commons, Science 280, 682-683 (1998)

For Herschel Elliott's extension of the tragedy of the commons, see:

A general statement of the tragedy of the commons

A biography can be found at Garrett James Hardin and more information about him is available here.

His complete publication list. Some of this is available online from The Garrett Hardin society.

A book-length critical analysis of the issue of the commons can be found in Whose common future, authored by The Ecologist Magazine, published as paperback in 1993.

Some recent critical appraisals can be found in:

Frank van Laerhoven, Elinor Ostrom,Traditions and Trends in the Study of the Commons, International Journal of the Commons, Vol 1, No 1 (2007)

Immanuel Wallerstein, The Ecology and the Economy: What is Rational?, Paper delivered at Keynote Session of Conference, "World System History and Global Environmental change," Lund, Sweden, 19-22 September 2003 (full text here)

Btu
_________________
only the paranoid survive

btu2012 · Last edited by btu2012 on Tue Nov 20, 2007 5:00 am; edited 8 times in total

dohboi · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Dec 05, 2005 Posts: 1472

btu, it seems to me that I heard somewhere that Hardin has moved away from TTOTC, at least as it was originally stated. Do you know if that is so?

It also seems to me that the actual historical tragedy of the commons in England happened essentially in the opposite way than what Hardin proposed in his more abstract mathematical model (note to MQ and others: making something into an abstract mathematical model does not make it more "scientific" or "real," just more abstract and mathematical).

The commoners (mostly) sustainably grazed their herds on the town commons for many generations in spite of the fact that there were many of them. It was not the large number of users that doomed the commons in England. It was usually the decision of one man who happened to have power over the land and who happened to have a new and developing idea in his head called "classical economics" that said it is rational and appropriate to use up the commons as quickly as possible to make a fast buck.

This is the essential nature of the ongoing tragedy. A relatively small portion of the earths population is doing the lions share of the ecological destruction because they have a story in their heads that says it's ok to do so. Of course that group of exploiters is expanding rapidly as Chindia buys into the same nasty economic assumptions.

btu2012 · Last edited by btu2012 on Tue Nov 20, 2007 12:11 pm; edited 1 time in total