TT`s Lost in Tokyo : yandle

Bruce Yandle on the tragedy of the commons, evolution of cooperation & property, and the struggle against government theft

TokyoTom — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:45:00 GMT

I`ve often referred to Bruce Yandle, a "free-market environmentalist" who is dean emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Clemson University`s College of Business & Behavior Sciences, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Mercatus Center, a faculty member with George Mason University's Capitol Hill Campus, and a Senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (a free-market environmentalism think tank which has great links to his many works).

I`d like to draw attention attention to one short paper by Yandle which I find insightful in providing a perspective on the evolution of prperty rights and problems with resource management which arise from government owenership, even as he has short-shrifted the importance of community property mechanisms, which Nobel Prize-winner Elinor Ostrom has so extensively researched and documented (as I keep noting).

Yandle`s paper, The Commons: Tragedy or Triumph?, was published by the Foundation for Economic Education in its April 1999 online edition of Freeman. Here are portions I`d like to highlight:

The feeder is a commons, but not just for hummingbirds. Bees are attracted to it as well, and oddly enough, they can drive off the larger hummingbirds. So even if the dominant bird is able to deflect competition from other members of the species, that is not enough to protect the nectar, and the defense itself is costly in energy burned. The feeder contents are never secure.

Hummingbirds have no way to stake a claim to the feeder. So far as we can tell, hummingbird communities have no constitution that reflects socially evolved rules for establishing a social order. Most likely, a long process of adaptation and selection has generated a hummingbird capable of living in a world where nourishment is a common-access resource, a commons. Hummingbirds live a life of flight, engaging in a constant search for nourishment to feed their high-energy lives and, at times, fighting for temporary control over valuable resources.

Human Commons

We all know the tragedy of the commons story. Wonderfully written by Garrett Hardin in 1968, the highly stylized rendering is about a pasture devoid of rules, customs, or norms for sharing.^[1] It is open to all comers. In this never-never-land, shepherds logically add sheep to their flocks as long as doing so adds an increment of gain for the particular flock. Uncoordinated in their effort, and unaware of the effects of their individual actions on others, the unconcerned shepherds collectively destroy the pasture. What could be a story of plenty, if only the shepherds understood, turns into a story of poverty. The passive shepherds are like hummingbirds. [Yandle has this wrong; Hardin posits competing shepherds who don`t talk w/ each other,and so look after only their narrow self-interests.]

As Hardin artistically puts it: “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, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in freedom of the commons.”

Garrett Hardin’s words beautifully bundle aspects of an endless human struggle to form communities, accumulate wealth, and improve well-being. With that phrase—tragedy of the commons—the essence of the challenge hits us squarely between the eyes: When there are no property rights—formal or informal—that limit use of a scarce natural resource, human action leads inevitably to untimely resource depletion and destruction.

But people are not hummingbirds. People can build institutions that take the edge off frantic commons behavior. People have unwritten and written constitutions that help to establish social order. People can and do accumulate wealth. People communicate, invent lines of kinship, and develop customs, traditions, and rules of law that limit anti-social behavior. People define, enforce, and trade property rights. People can and do avoid the tragedy of the commons. Indeed, instead of living with tragedies, people triumph over the commons. But the triumphs are never perfect or complete. There is always another commons to manage.

The Ascent of Man

I wish to put forward the notion that encounters with the commons form the fundamental stimulus that yields, instead of tragedy, what we today call civilization. The ascent of man from a primitive existence with no wealth accumulation to life as we know it is fundamentally a story about triumph over, not tragedy of, the commons. Let me explain.

Our very existence as human beings is defined by evolved institutions for avoiding tragedies. We have names, which serve the economic purpose of identifying us as parties to contracts and agreements. Those names, first and last, form webs of communication that reduce the social cost of assigning responsibilities and liabilities. They enhance truth-telling and promise-keeping; they raise the cost of engaging in anti-social behavior. They limit a tragedy of the commons.

We have abstract symbols of ownership—deeds, titles, and contracts—that define spheres of autonomous behavior. We speak of our homes, our cars, our clothes, our families, and our pasture. Even language has evolved to provide a possessive form that accommodates triumph over the commons.

We write and observe contracts, wills, and marriage agreements that define relationships, identify turf, and conserve wealth. We accept evolved bodies of law and law-enforcement activities to assure the integrity of our agreements. We carry papers that enable us to acquire property, extinguish debt, cross borders, drive vehicles, and communicate effectively with strangers. And we have locks, keys, walls, fences, brands, and encryption devices, all this in an effort to avoid a tragedy of the commons.

Property rights define who we are and what we have. Property rights guard others from our unwanted advances and prevent us from contributing to a tragedy of their commons.

Avoiding a tragedy of the commons is costly. The benefits must be large. ...

The tragedy is found where for reasons having to do with power, intolerance, or cost, human beings have not yet defined private property rights. Or, as we shall see, where evolving property rights encouraged by man the institution builder have been destroyed. What was once a triumph can become a tragedy. ...

What about fisheries? How can we avoid a tragedy of the commons there? Long before the Europeans arrived on the scene in the Pacific Northwest, Native Americans had figured it out. Small tribes in what is now Washington State had salmon fishing rights. Don Leal tells us that “in some cases, the tribe owned the rights; in others, families or individuals or a combination owned the rights.”^[5]

And what happened when the Europeans arrived? You guessed it. Leal tells the story this way: “Instead of recognizing the well-defined and enforced fishing rights, the U.S. government allowed newcomers to place nets across the mouth of the Columbia. This quickly depleted salmon runs, so traps and weirs were banned—only to be replaced by purse seine boats powered by internal combustion engines. The race to catch salmon moved to open waters. Ironically, from the country where private property is considered sacrosanct came a socialistic legal system driven by politics and military power.”^[6] What had been private property was turned into a commons. What had been an institution-builder triumph became a political tragedy. ...

For centuries before anyone in the United States thought much about environmental quality, our common law defined and protected the environmental rights of ordinary people.^[10] Enforced by judges in courts across the land, common law protected the right of downstream property owners to receive water and air in undiminished quality for reasonable use. At common law, rivers could not be treated as open sewers if doing so imposed costs on downstream rightholders. Industrial plants could not blow smoke and emissions onto the land and property of ordinary people. The record is filled with cases, here and in Canada, decided under English common-law traditions: where farmers sued industrial plants and won; where citizens of one state sued polluters in another state, and won; and where common-law judges ordered polluters to clean up or shut down. There are also cases where this did not happen, where judges turned away from property-rights enforcement and behaved as policy makers. But when the judges got it wrong, their decisions affected a small number of people, not an entire nation. [I note Walter Block disagrees strongly and views this change in common law as leading to the rampant pollution that set the stage for federal legislation.] This, of course, changed with the advent of legislation.

Prior to the passage of federal pollution-control statutes, every major city in the United States had taken steps to define public property rights to air quality. Many states, including California, had taken a river-basin approach to the management of water quality, this in addition to the use of common law. Multi-state compacts were forming. By the 1960s, environmental quality was improving rapidly in many locations. The property rights institution builders were on their way to avoiding a tragedy of the commons. Common law was converting the commons to private property.

This was changed with the passage of federal legislation that effectively nationalized air and water quality in the United States. What was becoming private property was made public property, almost a commons. The new system of command-and-control regulation allowed polluters to operate legally if they had a permit. With permits in hand, new polluters could enter already crowded river basins. The new regime provided political access to industries and municipalities that hoped to postpone the day of reckoning in common law courts. ...

This work sheds light on mankind’s struggle to avoid the tragedy of the commons. It tells us that at very low levels of income, what might be called stage one, human beings cannot afford to do much about property-rights enforcement and the commons. They live in a world where custom and tradition sustain them. As incomes rise and losses from the commons expand, stage two is entered. Fences go up, and rules are set for protecting the commons. Finally, in stage three, markets evolve along with rules of law that define spheres of private and public action. Private rights replace public control, and the triumph replaces the tragedy of the commons. [Yandle ignores government mismanagement here, and how Western markets and Westernized leaders have seamrollered native institutions.]

Life for mankind began on a commons where tragedies were commonplace and the incentive to improve was powerful. Out of the struggle to survive and accumulate wealth evolved markets, property rights, and the rule of law—a triumph on the commons.

But just as bees compete with hummingbirds in the struggle to control access to nectar, institution builders who seek to support markets and property rights compete with others who seek to redistribute wealth. Actions to redistribute wealth blunt the incentive to protect property rights and create wealth. This converts triumph to tragedy.

Callahan finally speaks: but are external, "objective moral truths" needed for a community to enforce shared rules?

TokyoTom — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:20:00 GMT

[Well, the Mises server just swallowed my first attempt at this post, so the reader will just have to suffer this sketchier one.]

I have been chasing both Gene Callahan and Bob Murphy to try to get them to spell out what they mean when they assert that there is an "objective moral order" in the universe; until recently Bob has been by far the most congenial, as well as evidencing more interest in discussing the subject, but he has just thrown in the towel for the time being, after conceding that "to say morality is objective doesn't necessarily mean that 'the same rules' apply to everybody" and that he has no good answers my questions as to whether the objective moral order applies to all creatures and to all men regardless of age, gender and mental development.

On the other hand, I have agreed that man has an exquisite moral sense, and have argued that our moral sense and capacity are something that we acquired via the process of evolution, as an aid to intra-group cooperation and conflict with out-groups. Similar arguments have been made

- by Bruce Yandle,

- by Roy Rappaport (former head of the American Anthropology Assn.) in his book "Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity" (which I have discussed here) and

- by David Sloan Wilson in his book "Darwin`s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society".

However, Bob did point to a related post by Gene Callahan in which Gene essentially argued that the "objective" moral truths rules that are embedded in the structure of the universe apply only to those creatures able to perceive the rules. In other words, not to ants - and perhaps not to other life forms or to humans whose age and mental development leave them incapable of perceiving the rules.

I have received no response from Gene on my posts here (perhaps he hasn`t yet perceived them), but he did start to provide a little meat in a rather long threadjack at a totally unrelated blog post by Bob (TokyoTom Moving the Goalposts? - regarding my comments on the rush to sell poorly-understood science in the political marketplace).

Since it`s a topic of interest but I don`t wish to continue the threadjack (and it`s difficult to follow there, given unrelated comments, and contains largely irrelevant ad homs/replies), I take the liberty of excerpting relevant portions here, and I respond further below.

1. From Bob`s thread (unedited, with emphasis added):

Gene:

As you assert, right and wrong are all just subjective opinion, so, if I can profit from these impacts, why should I care? By your own principles, the fate f those poor schucks in Sri Lanka should mean nothing to me.

TT:

Again you misunderstand my principles. But the glory of the world, of course, is that you get to base your behavior on your own principles (and objective truths as you perceive them), not mine, as well as on any moral pressure you might feel from the broader community in which you dwell.

Gene:

I am not saying you actually think it is merely a subjective matter whether or not millions die in a man-made tsunami, etc. In fact, you correctly think that such a thing is objectively wrong. For the third time, I will say that what I am saying in posts like this is not what I think your views are, but what by logic you ought to think, given your rejection of objective moral truths. I am pointing out that you're position is inconsistent, and therefore incoherent: You claim not to believe in objective moral truth, and yet you make arguments that depend on the existence of what you deny.

TT:

- I have not so much "claim[ed] not to believe in objective moral truth" as to note that G.C. has singularly failed to explain what he means by his statement or to offer any support to for. Proof of this is not only in GC`s threads, but in the fact that Bob felt the need to re-open the subject himself.

- If I "make arguments that depend on the existence of what I deny", then G.C. has failed to show it.

First, I have made it clear that not only to I believe that the material universe (of matter and energy) objectively exists, but that I believe that it has an underlying structure that we can strive to understand (and express mathematically) even as our understanding (and descriptions) of it will always be incomplete. Thus, an algorithm may or may not be an accurate description of the structure of the universe. In any case, the objective existence of a poorly-understood structure to the universe offers no support for the proposition that there is a moral order to the universe.

Further, G.C.　has argued that there is an object moral structure to the universe; I have argued that man has an exquisite inherited moral sense, and that we inherited this moral sense via evolution over eons because it provided benefits by allowing enhanced intra-group cooperation and reducing tragedies of the commons.

Accepting that man has a moral nature which is genetically based (but that is expressed differently in each individual and culture, and that is largely applied to in-group transactions but applied much more lightly in interactions with those outside our groups) does NOT depend on arguments that there is any universal moral order, applicable outside of man to all of Creation (or to such of Creation as may be conscious).

Sorry, but my arguments simply do NOT "depend on the existence of what I deny" - including arguments over whether or not G.C. has "behaved badly", or arguments that man ought not to engage in actions that directly or indirectly harm others. Such things may be measured and tested based strictly on a study of human nature (which is objectively different from other animals and has an objective genetic base).

Gene:

"I have argued that man has an exquisite inherited moral sense, and that we inherited this moral sense via evolution over eons because it provided benefits by allowing enhanced intra-group cooperation and reducing tragedies of the commons."

And so what? Either "enhanced intra-group cooperation" and "reducing tragedies of the commons" are objectively good things (and you've given up moral subjectivism), or you've gotten precisely nowhere.

Let's say in the remote Amazon some group has evolved so that THEIR "exquisite moral sense" requires the smashing in of the infant's skulls of whatever other tribe they meet. Then, through some fluke, they wind up in Tokyo and go on a skull-smashing rampage. Hey, well, that's just the way their moral sense evolved, hey? You, by your own premises, are in absolutely no position to tell them what they are doing is wrong. In fact, since obviously my behaviour is a result of my evolutionary past, then if I am being "rude" to you, well, that's just MY "exquisite moral sense," isn't it? Who are you to go saying my moral sense is wrong and yours is right, when clearly both are the product of the same evolutionary process!

So, although I realize that you do not understand that you pre-suppose that which you deny, you do. (In fact, we should suspect that anyone making such an error will pretty much always fail to recognize that they are making it, since no one can consciously embrace incoherence.)

2. My further comments:

Ironically, it is Gene who is pre-supposing what my presuppositions and my objectives are.

First, I can argue (though I haven`t made such a case) that it would be wrong if millions die in a man-made tsunami, without "think[ing] that such a thing is objectively wrong," based on a moral code external to man. Rather, I can simply rely on my own values and those of the communities of which I am a member.

Likewise, I need not (and do not) make any arguments that either "enhanced intra-group cooperation" and "reducing tragedies of the commons" are "objectively good things"; I need merely to observe scientifically that man, like his cousin critters, has evolved, that he has a moral sense akin to, but more more highly developed than, patterns of reciprocal behavior in other animals (while more genetically identical communities of social insects cooperate even more closely), and to suppose that this moral sense of right and wrong and the related predilection towards the social development of norms and rules were evolutionarily ADVANTAGEOUS, by enhancing group cohesion while moderating internal frictions and behaviors that were costly to the group as a whole, better enabling the group to take advantage of resources in the environment and respond to challenges, including challenges by out-groups.

Gene suggests one must have "objective truths" to get somewhere, but that just tells us the HE has an agenda for man; rather than particularly trying to get SOMEWHERE I`m just applyng an evolutionary approach to figure out how we got HERE.

It`s a shame I lost my previous post on this, but I think it pretty clear that our "exquisite moral sense" is both highly developed and very two-faced (highly selective would be a more gentle expression): we act one way to members of our group (based on highly developed codes and bonding rituals that became religions as our groups grew larger), but generally act as if we have little or no obligations to outsiders, to whom we might very well be downright suspicious and hostile. Why would that be? Maybe because, like the chimpanzee bands that so famously disillusioned Jane Goodall, we`ve been engaged in murderous competition with rival bands from time immemorial.

While it`s possible to argue that man`s deliberate struggle through history has been one of extending the limits of those whom we need to be decent to from a small circle to all of mankind (or further, to pets, other animals, etc.) - and there have certainly been individuals who have made conscious efforts to do so - one may also see the "progress" in this direction as being the simple consequence of Darwinian struggles between different human groups and societies, with the societies that more successfully united their own peoples, seized opportunities and vanquished other groups (through a combination of defeat, elimination and inclusion). Religions and our moral sense have clear served as both weapons and tools in this process; the gods have served on both sides of most conflicts, at least until one won, frequently by putting the heathen to the sword. Thus, "moral progress" has frequently been bought by brutal blood-soaked violence in which the victors routinely failed to pay much attention to the morality of their own conduct toward the other - as has always been our nature.

Forced change can be seen in both in the US. Civil War in the case of slavery and in this anecdoctal quote regarding British attempts to stamp out the Hindi practice of ritual immolation of the wives of a deceased husband in India:

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

Very seldom has such forced change been primarily motivated by a desire to bring about moral progress.

Persuasion and mass moral suasion can often work, as can be seen in the cases of ML King and the civil rights movement, as well as Ghandi`s efforts, particular when public opinion was mobilized. Gene has argued for this himself; while those arguing for change of course may feel united by religion and may employ appeals to the shared beliefs of others, no external "objective" moral order is needed for moral suasion to work.

Gene conjures up an Amazonian skull-smashing tribe at loose in Tokyo, but why look so far? The Japanese and the rest of the "modern" slaughters millions of unborn infants annually (and particularly females in China, India and the Middle East). The difference, of course, is that we are just doing it to ourselves, rather than having it inflicted on us by outsiders.

Gene is right to note that my rather cold-eyed observations about our remarkably self-serving moral sense might leave me in "absolutely no position to tell [Amazonian skull-smashers rampaging in Tokyo] what they are doing is wrong," but so what? Gene is simply asking the wrong question. The Japanese do not need "objective" external moral standards to deal with such behavior; they need simply to STOP it. And make no doubt about; stop it they would FIRST, and then ask questions, and perhaps later, if time and a surviving Amazonian or two permits, they might attempt a discussion on moral issues. This of course is true of every community when faced with an attack; banding together in self-defense is virtually instinctive.

Gene might posit other, stickier situations, of which we face a bottomless pit. We have our tribal need for close groups, but have on large parts of the planet blessedly stilled the fraternal slaughter between rival societies. In larger societies, we face stresses between our attenuated bonds to others and our wish for close communities. On one front the religious bonds that united particular societies have frayed, but our urge for uniting bonds of ritual and belief remain, while on another we`ve managed to stir up more religious fundamentalism and distrust at home and abroad.

In all this, the desire for an objective set of universally binding moral rules that is floating around in the universe just waiting for everyone to become enlightened and to voluntarily submit to them is quite understandable, but obviously pie in the sky. I suggest that we try to work instead in understanding our own nature better and work at trying to persuade each other and to lessen tensions that may become murderous.

P.S. Gene`s error can be seen further in his comments about rude behavior. He thinks that taking a cultural, evolutionary view leaves one without a basis for criticism, so therefore I must unintentionally be relying on objective, external standards to criticize him. He`s got it precisely wrong - while clearly we ARE both "the product of the same evolutionary process", my appeal is not to objective external standards, but to shared COMMUNITY standards (that can be objectively described). Further, by publicly arguing my position, I hope to marshal public support of the kind that he has himself usefully pointed out.

The questions are simply whether Gene and I actually share ANY communal bonds and obligations, what those obligations are, how they apply in this instance, and whether Gene cares what anyone else thinks.

What is ironic is to see someone like Gene who so clearly wants to see a better world take the position that "objective" moral standards permit such lack of concern for how he treats others and how such treatment is perceived. But an evolutionary thinker would simply see it as more evidence for the remarkable moral flexibility that the Creator has endowed us with.

[Update] Bob Murphy & Gene Callahan flesh out the "objective" moral order: it applies only to those able to perceive it?

TokyoTom — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:58:00 GMT

[Update: Bob Murphy sends in an email comment, copied (in relevant part) at the bottom of this post.]

I`ve addressed here on five different threads the question of whether there is an "objective moral order", which Gene Callahan broached in a May blog post. I`ve commented here mainly because I find the subject interesting, but the subsequent discussions at Gene Callahan`s blog and at Bob Murphy`s blog to be rather unproductive, if not frustrating and disappointing. However, I note that Bob Murphy, bless his soul, has kindly emailed me a comment for me to post on one of my recent threads, in which Bob refers to a recent relevant comment elsewhere by Gene.

Allow me to repost here Bob Murphy`s comment, and my response, but first here`s some context from the post that Bob Murphy is responding to:

1. Me:

While I certainly agree that man has an exquisite moral sense, my own view is that that sense and capacity are something that we acquired via the process of evolution, as an aid to intra-group cooperation,

- as Bruce Yandle has suggested,

- as argued by Roy Rappaport (former head of the American Anthropology Assn.) in his book "Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity" (which I have discussed here) and - as I have recently discovered -

- as David Sloan Wilson has argued in his book "Darwin`s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society".

I note that the NYT has recently run a series of posts on related topics.

In my view, our moral sense, rituals and "sacred postulates" (later, religions) have played a central role in the evolution of man as a social animal, by providing a fundamental way of ordering the world, the group`s role in it, and the individual`s role in the group - thereby abating commons problems both within and created by the group. The religious lies at the root of our human nature, even as its inviolable, sacred truths continue to fall by the wayside during the long march of culture and science out of the Garden of Eden. While we certainly have made progress (partly with the aid of "universal" religions) in expanding the boundaries of our groups, we very much remain group, tribal animals, fiercely attentive to rival groups and who is within or outside our group, and this tribal nature is clearly at work in our cognition (our penchant for finding enemies, including those who have different religious beliefs that ours).

But I didn`t really kick off this discussion - why are Callahan and Murphy so reticent to describe what it is they think they mean when they assert that there are "objective moral truths" and an "objective moral order"? (I can understand why I seem to have earned the clear hostility of one them; after all I have proven by my persistence and/or thickheadedness to be, if not an "enemy", then in any case not one of the august clear-sighted.)

Here are a few questions I left with them at Bob`s most recent post:

- Are those who believe that there is an objective "moral" order asserting that, for every being - regardless of species - that there is a uniform, objective moral order in the universe? Or is the argument that there is an object moral order only for conscious and self-aware beings, and none for organisms that are not conscious, or are conscious but not self-aware?

- Or is the argument that the "objective" moral order exists only for humans, and perhaps someday can be identified and located in universally shared mental processes, based on brain activity and arising from shared genes? Will such objective moral order still exist if all mankind ceases to exist?

- Or is the objective moral order one that exists for some humans, but not all - depending on physical development of the brain as we mature (with the development of some being impaired via genetic or other defect)?

- Is the human "objective" moral order universal, for all individuals - of whatever, gender or age - across all history?

- Is an objective moral order something real that can be tested for despite the inability of a particular observer to perceive directly - like beings that can`t directly perceive light (or like us who can`t personally physically observe much of what technology allows us to)?

- And if the objective moral order is a part of the universe, can we apply the scientific method to confirm its existence of and explore its parameters, and to explain (and test) it with "laws"?

- What are some of the parameters and laws governing the moral order?

2. Bob Murphy`s comments: (emphasis added)

On the general issue of "are morals objective for everyone?" I refer to this excellent discussion by Gene Callahan:

www.gene-callahan.org/.../freedoms-just-another-word-for.html

[Here is Gene`s relevant comment:

"Something that is correct only 'to' someone is subjectively, not objectively, correct. What 'objective' means is precisely 'to any and all possible perceivers.' And, of course, it is simply a further muddle to introduce beings incapable of perceiving the objective item in question, as if that raised doubts about its objective status. 'Would this be objectively correct for ants?' makes no more sense than 'Is it objectively true for ants that Mars has two moons?' It is objectively true, not 'for' anyone, that Mars has two moons, and it is also objectively true that ants are a kind of being that cannot peer through telescopes or count to two. It is objectively true that murder is wrong, and if ants were the sort of being capable of murder, which they are not (as far as we know!), it would be wrong for them to commit murders."]

When I say that I think morality is objective, what I mean is that a statement such as "it is better to kiss an infant than to drown it" is a different type of thing from the statement "chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla." The latter is clearly stating a subjective preference, whereas the former is (I claim) reflecting an objective truth about reality.

Note that to say morality is objective doesn't necessarily mean that 'the same rules' apply to everybody, at least not in the sense that I think you mean. It might not be immoral for Eskimos to euthanize old people, whereas it could be considered murder in Manhattan. But this doesn't actually prove morality is subjective. By the same token, it's OK for me to eat the food in my fridge. But if somebody else wandered into my house and did the 'same thing,' it would be theft.

I'm a Christian so if you ask me for a list of these rules, a good start is the Ten Commandments. And then if you want to know how to apply these rules, I'd tell you to read the gospels and study the life of Jesus.

As far as your specific questions, I don't want to bother trying to answer them. I admit I can't give you great answers on some. But to me, that doesn't show that morality is subjective after all. There are plenty of non-material things (like mathematics etc.) that are rock-solid objectively true. So I think our difference here is much deeper than an issue of mere morality. I think you are a materialist and I'm not, which is influencing our discussion on morality.

3. My response: (emphasis added)

Bob, thanks for troubling to visit and read, but your comments are obviously a disappointment - as you`ve simply done none of the heavy lifting that you have implied by insisting on various occasions that there is an "objective" moral order.

All that you`ve done here is to make a very weak argument that MAN has a moral sense regarding how we treat others. But this is not only obvious, it is also something that I have asserted all along. While it tells us something I agree is objectively true generally about man - something that I have made various attempts to explore here and to sketch out on your blog and Gene`s - it tells us essentially nothing about an objective moral order to the universe, that is applicable to other life forms, and that will survive mankind if we were all ever to perish.

I`m afraid I have to disagree with you about Gene`s post, which in fact illustrates the weakness of his position regarding "objective truth". While he suggests that by "objectively correct" we mean something that is correct for `any and all possible perceivers' (so far, so good), he then presents the example of ants, for whom he asserts it would be wrong for them to commit murder IF THEY WERE CAPABLE of committing murder. But he`s failed to notice that he`s not only begged the question about what we mean by saying that "it is objectively true that murder is wrong", but he`s suggested that because ants lack a capacity to perceive moral strictures against murder, they are unable to commit it. By doing so, he`s just invited in all of the questions that I`ve outlined above [in item 1 here], plus questions of culture and exigency that you have pointed out by your reference to Eskimos. Can any animals or life forms other than man commit murder? Do moral restrictions against murder require some threshold level of self-reflection, intellectual capacity, typical social structure, physical and social maturity, or upbringing?

So there IS an objective moral order, but it only applies to those able to perceive it? This is both a very modest position, as well as one that oddly smacks of belief in Leprechauns.

Rather than arguing that still undefined but "objective" moral rules are embedded in the structure of the universe but have only limited application, isn`t it easier to acknowledge that man has a moral sense, observe that it enhances our ability to cooperate, observe that other animals also exhibit patterns of reciprocal behavior and posit that our moral sense is something that we have evolved, as it enhanced our ability to survive and procreate?

# re: Evolution, religion and our insistence on a still undefined "objective" moral order

[Remove this Comment] Tuesday, September 08, 2009 4:27 AM by TokyoTom

By the way, I note that fellow Community blogger lilburne and I agree generally about morality*

"There is a burgeoning school of thought in evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences (led by Marc Hauser and Steven Pinker) which contends that morality is not just cultural artifice, but that it is an intrinsic feature of the human mind which evolved over the countless millennia of humans living together."

mises.org/.../245211.aspx

If anyone is still reading, let me note that I posted a week or so ago further thoughts on the evolution of moral codes and why we fight over them (rarely applying to those outside our group the same moral standards that we apply to those within our groups).

[Update:] Further email comment from Bob Murphy (posted with approval):

I'm going to have to punt on this debate for now. If you agree that
"Bob should not kill an infant" has a truth value more significant
than "Bob should not wear a dress to work" than I'm happy. I think
maybe when I say "morality is objective" you are interpreting it to
mean something more than what I do mean. After all, you are saying
moral rules apply to all humans, so I don't know what our difference
is at this point. I thought originally you were saying you were a
moral relativist.

A few simple thoughts on the evolution of moral codes, and why we fight over them (and religion, liberty and the state)

TokyoTom — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:14:00 GMT

A recent post on the Mises Daily pages on the "Religious Roots of Liberty" by the late Congregationalist minister Rev. Edmund Optiz (1914-2006) (originially published in The Freeman, February 1955) provides an opportunity to restate and discuss some of the thoughts I`ve been working though on evolution, group dynamics, religion and on the assertions of some that there is an "objective moral order".

It seems like quite a bit to chew, I know, but I dared (with the modesty and boldness of the inexpert, of course) to venture a few thoughts.

I copy below some of my comments and related dialogue on the comment thread (minor edits):

TokyoTom
I see I`m late to this discussion, but I`ll note I was thinking related thoughts and just put up a blog post on the subject of evolution, group dynamics, religion and an "objective moral order" of the type that Gene Callahan and Bob Murphy assert but won`t trouble themselves to spell out; it`s here for those interested:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/08/28/fun-with-self-deception-those-who-espouse-an-quot-objective-quot-moral-order-act-refuse-to-elucidate-or-act-as-if-there-is-none.aspx

Briefly as to this piece by Rev. Optiz: while religion has undeniably played a crucial historical role in organizing Western society, and still plays an important role in the voluntary organization of society and, at times, in opposing state tyranny, we should try to understand the roots of religions, how they have been employed to organize us and how they have been abused to control us and to lead us into conquering and/or slaughtering rival groups, whether "heathen" or merely of a different sect.

Organized religions sprang from less-organized tribal faiths, and, like those faiths, served to improve group cooperation and cohesion. Groups successful in intergroup conflicts - largely by ruthlessly putting to sword those with different gods - brought their religions with them. This was certainly the case of the Hebrews; Christianity spread because an opportunistic Constantine found in it a useful way to enhance his power and to improve the cohesion of his troops and empire. Mohammed likewise saw in his visions and his experience with "people of the Book" a way to expand his own power and to unite Arabs (later Caliphs took this further to build empires).

Rev. Optiz is clearly right that, within religious societies, "the Book" served as a check on unwary secular leaders, who nevertheless always strove to coopt religious leaders. But modern secular society and the US political system are both far away from the Book, whether Biblical prescription or the Constitution. This leaves us vulnerable to the continued growth of the state, and to potential conflict as people look for group protection, inevitably in some in groups that preach exclusion rather than inclusion.
Published: August 28, 2009 11:23 AM

TokyoTom
"tyranny is always a denial — or a misunderstanding — of the mandates of an authority or law higher than man himself." [a quote from Rev.　Optiz]

Sorry, but while I believe in the laws of physics and am aware of the deep evolutionary roots of our need for various but mutually contradictory faiths, I see no "law" higher than man.

Rather, there has always been a tension between the individual, his needs for groups, and the restrictions and demands that others - including the leaders of the groups - wish to impose on him. What we call "tyranny" is simply the condition when individuals (and sub-groups) find the demands of the larger group (and those who marshall force) to be intolerable.
Published: August 28, 2009 11:33 AM

fundamentalistf
TT: " But modern secular society and the US political system are both far away from the Book, whether Biblical prescription or the Constitution. This leaves us vulnerable to the continued growth of the state..."

Very true. That's why we have witnessed the growth of the state correlating with the decline of traditional Christianity in the West. Unfortunately, atheists and agnostics are not siding with freedom; they are overwhelmingly socialist. So far, atheists and agnostics have faile miserably since the enlightenment at establishing freedom.

TT: “While I certainly agree that man has an exquisite moral sense, my own view is that that sense and capacity are something that we acquired via the process of evolution, as an aid to intra-group cooperation…”

So what you’re saying is that random mutations occurred that gave some individuals a moral code which in turn gave them a survival advantage. However, if you want to be scientific about it, you have to have some kind of evidence. Has anyone found the “morality” gene? Where is the evidence that morality has certain groups an advantge over those without the “morality” gene? It seems to me you are swallowing a great deal on pure faith.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume you’re correct that morals are nothing but a random mutation that gave some humans an edge in surviving. Why are we bound to follow today such accidents that gave humans that advantage millions of years ago? That doesn’t mean they’ll give us an advantage today.

Besides, there has been some variation in morality over the centuries. Genghis Khan took great pride in slaughtering every person in a city he conquered and making mountains out of their skulls. Of course, there was the morality of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Is it possible that several different genetic mutations occurred and caused these differing views on morality? If so, that means that our genes can’t claim that Hitler’s genes were immoral; they were just different.

As you can see, claiming genetic status for morality does not help escape the problems involved in moral relativity. If morality isn’t transcendant, that is, doesn’t come from some one with greater authority than man (or in your case an accident inside of man), then everyone is free to choose his own morality, even one that elevate murder to a sacred act.
Published: August 28, 2009 1:37 PM
fundamentalistf
PS,
TT, you'll find the answers to the questions you posted on your blog in the works of natural law philosophers. A good intro is "Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume" by Stephen Buckle.
Published: August 28, 2009 1:40 PM

TokyoTom
Roger, thanks for your comments.

That's why we have witnessed the growth of the state correlating with the decline of traditional Christianity in the West.

While I agree about the vulnerability, I wouldn`t lay that as a principal cause for the growth of the Western state, for which I would simply point to a loss of control by Rome and greater technological means for coercion and influence. See Hayek.

atheists and agnostics are not siding with freedom; they are overwhelmingly socialist.

An interesting thought, but who supported all of nonsense of the Bush administrations? And certainly the vast majority of voters wouldn`t touch an atheist with a 10-foot pole. Anyway, what brings you to your conclusion?

So what you’re saying is that random mutations occurred that gave some individuals a moral code which in turn gave them a survival advantage. However, if you want to be scientific about it, you have to have some kind of evidence.

It doesn`t seem you`ve looked at my links; Yandle might make the most agreeable start.

Obviously things are more nuanced than your statement; we are close cousins of highly social animals (bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas) that are highly socialable and display much of the same reciprocal behavior, including the means of enforcing it, and the disparate treatment of those less closely related or familiar and of those entirely outside the group (viz., the other or "enemies").

I`m merely postulating that human groups that proved better at internal cooperation were more likely to be successful when faced with environmental challenges and opportunities, and to pass their genes along, which gave rise to our innate sense of "fairness" and to tribal rules and religions. We clearly have much greater inherent abilities to cooperate; indeed, the relatively longer infancy and childhood of our species requires such cooperation. We are good not only at reading faces and the intentions of others, but signalling our own via various clues - including being unique among mammals in having white sclera, the better to show others what we`re thinking about: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/opinion/13tomasello.html. The fact that we give so much away is a strong indicating that doing so was to our advantage; viz., that we benefit from cooperation.

More proof of course can be easily seen in the fact that societies groups with greater internal cohesion tend to do well in inter-group competion. Such cohesion was foster by religions (which also fostered the formation of larger societies that were better able to engage in specialization), as well as by more basic tribal reactions that put group pressure on dissenting individuals.

Why are we bound to follow today such accidents that gave humans that advantage millions of years ago? That doesn’t mean they’ll give us an advantage today.

We can`t change human nature, but we can be aware of it, and we do, via culture (and formal/informal institutions, such as property) try to channel it productively and to dampen socially costly excesses. Much of this has not been a deliberate process, but simply a process of the survival of successful societies.

there has been some variation in morality over the centuries. Genghis Khan took great pride in slaughtering every person in a city he conquered and making mountains out of their skulls. Of course, there was the morality of Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

A close look at what you call variation in morality seems to me to be purely a cultural advance as societies extends their boundaries by created wider, more inclusive bonds, both through religion and law. But we have ALWAYS treated outsiders differently from insiders; moral codes were group codes that created few if any rights to or responsibilities towards outsiders. Few societies have blinked an eye at the slaughter of those considered to be outsiders; the same can still be seen in our blase lack of concern for the deaths of Iraqis generated by our toppling of Saddam (which has surely been orders of magnitude greater than ours), or for "collateral damage" in our pursuit of those whom we sometimes called "freedom fighters".

Has there been a continued evolution of man in the past few thousand years? Surely; we can see it the spread of lactose tolerance, for example. But as cultural standards are so important to morality, it is impossible for now to tease out a biological evolution in morality.

If so, that means that our genes can’t claim that Hitler’s genes were immoral; they were just different.

This is confused; we all have different genes, and the expressing of those genes (phenotype) is strongly influenced by culture, up-bringing and experience. But we do see generalizable differences in male and female behavior, for example; females had the job of raising children and protecting the hearth, while men and less to risk in struggles for power and more to gain in confronting out-groups.

Thus our societies have always had different moral codes for men and women, and our cold, mass-murdering marauders have always been men.

claiming genetic status for morality does not help escape the problems involved in moral relativity.

Agreed!

If morality isn’t transcendant, that is, doesn’t come from some one with greater authority than man (or in your case an accident inside of man), then everyone is free to choose his own morality, even one that elevate murder to a sacred act.

First, our undeniable reliance on communities for support is not an "accident", but is something that proved powerfully advantageous, just as it remains part of our genetic make up.

Second, certainly in many (if not most), killing outsiders (what we even today loathe to call "murder") has been sanctioned, perhaps even "sanctified" (an certainly the slaughter of outsiders has been frequently blessed by in-group moral/religious authorities) - which of course implies a group ethic and not a purely personal choice.

But of course, the looser societies are, the weaker the formal and informal group sanctions and more individuals are left to their own decisions. Thus, as the state has coopted and supplanted voluntary society, the more "immoral", licentious and selfish behavior that we see.

Finally, in my view morality has never truly been "transcendent", but is derived from a shared inheritance of strong interpersonal cooperation, further shaped by the groups within which we "grow up", which groups all have their own (and mutually contradictory) "sacred postulates".

TT

PS: Thanks for pointing to Buckle; my quick question would be whether "natural law" is something that applies to the behavior of all life forms, or simply man (and would blink out of existence if man were to).

Link to this post.

In the fight over climate policy, Jerry Taylor of Cato tries to stiffen the spines of the purist enviros (in order to limit the "Bootleggers")

TokyoTom — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 05:42:00 GMT

Jerry Taylor of Cato is one careful observer of the carbon follies who sees the handwriting on the wall for some type of carbon pricing system coming from the Congress during the Obama Administration. Strikingly, in an interesting post up at MasterResource...(read more)

Note to William Anderson: Limited liability is a key to understanding the Great American Ponzi scheme

TokyoTom — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 05:15:00 GMT

William Anderson (an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute and economics prof. at Frostburg State University) has a thoughtful New Year's Day post , pointing out how Paul Krugman fails to understand the causes of ouir economic stagnation and financial...(read more)

Op-ed by nuclear physicist on climate change: questions for "skeptics"

TokyoTom — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:28:00 GMT

John P. Holdren , an MIT and Stanford -trained nuclear physicist who is professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and director of Harvard's Woods Hole Research Center , former President...(read more)

T. Boone Pickens accelerates the tragedy of the Western water commons - by connecting thirsty markets to unowned, common-pool resources

TokyoTom — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 01:20:00 GMT

The latest Business W eek magazine sports the headline, "Is Water the New Oil?" and a caricature of T. Boone Pickens . The cover story -" There Will Be Water: T. Boone Pickens thinks water is the new oil—and he's betting $100...(read more)

Climate change damage and property rights: do Lockean principles require Western nations to compensate poorer ones?

TokyoTom — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:03:00 GMT

Dedicated libertarian law professor Jonathan Adler and longtime libertarian policy analyst Indur Goklany discuss the above issue at in a Roundtable entitled " Climate Change and Property Rights " hosted by Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation...(read more)

Bruce Yandle on "no regrets", free-market approaches to climate change policy

TokyoTom — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:15:00 GMT

...(read more)

Yandle on the Tragedy of the Commons and Environmental Regulation

TokyoTom — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 06:25:00 GMT

The Library of Economics and Liberty has just posted a new hour+ podcast featuring Bruce Yandle.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/10/yandle_on_the_t.html

"Bruce Yandle of Clemson University and George Mason University's Mercatus Center looks at the tragedy of the commons and the various ways that people have avoided the overuse of resources that are held in common. Examples discussed include fisheries, roads, rivers and the air. Yandle talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the historical use of norms, cooperative ventures such as incorporating a river, the common law, and top-down command-and-control regulation to reduce air and water pollution."

Two other interesting podcasts/presentations by Yandle are here:

"Economics and the Environment: Public and Private Choice", http://www.mercatus.org/events/eventID.168/event_detail.asp

"Getting Warmer: Addressing Climate Change and Environmental Policy", http://www.mercatus.org/events/eventID.430/event_detail.asp

And further podcasts can be found here: http://www.mercatus.org/people/id.127,type.3/people_link.asp

Ron Bailey of Reason congratulates Al Gore

TokyoTom — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:33:00 GMT

[updated] A great new post by libertarian Ron Bailey of Reason here:

Congratulations to Al Gore
But be wary of the man's proposed solutions for global warming.
Ronald Bailey | October 12, 2007
http://www.reason.com/news/show/122960.html

1. Here are some excerpts (emphasis added), followed by a copy of my comments over at Reason:

[Gore is] wrong to characterize global warming as a moral and spiritual problem. Man-made global warming is not some kind of environmental sin. It's just another commons problem that has emerged as human civilization continues to develop. Most environmental problems arise in what are called open-access commons. That is, people pollute air and rivers, overfish lakes and oceans, cut down rainforests, and so forth because no one owns those natural resources and therefore no one has an interest in protecting them.

The point is clearest in the case of tropical forests and fisheries. No one owns the forests or fisheries, so anyone may exploit them. No one has an incentive to leave any trees or fish behind because, if they do, someone else will harvest them and get the benefits for themselves. In other words, those who immediately benefit from exploiting the resource do not bear the long-run costs of its ultimate destruction. This mismatch between benefits and costs is a recipe for disaster. Similarly, no one owns the global atmosphere, so there is no incentive for anyone to protect it from various pollutants, including greenhouse gases that tend to raise average global temperatures.

Generally, humanity has solved environmental problems caused by open-access situations by either privatizing the relevant commons or regulating it. ...

As a skeptic of government action, I had hoped that the scientific evidence would lead to the conclusion that global warming would not be much of a problem, so that humanity could avoid the messy and highly politicized process of deciding what to do about it. Although people of good will can still disagree about the scientific evidence for climate change, I now believe that Gore has got it basically right. The balance of the evidence shows that global warming could well be a significant problem over the course of this century. ...

Yale economist William Nordhaus ... calculates that the optimal policy would impose a carbon tax of $34 per metric ton carbon in 2010, with the tax increases gradually reaching $42 per ton in 2015, $90 per ton in 2050, and $207 per ton of carbon in 2100. A $20 per metric ton carbon tax will raise coal prices by $10 per ton, which is about a 40 percent increase over the current price of $25 per ton. A $10 per ton carbon tax translates into a 4 cent per gallon increase in gasoline. A $300 per ton carbon tax would raise gasoline prices by $1.20 per gallon. Following this optimal trajectory would cost $2.2 trillion and reduce climate change damage by $5.2 trillion over the next century. ...

Man-made global warming is an economic and technical problem of the sort that humanity has solved many times. For example, forests are expanding in rich countries because they have well-developed private property rights. Also in rich countries, regulations have helped once polluted rivers and lakes to become clean and have drastically cut air pollution. One of the keys to solving environmental problems is economic growth and wealth. ...

In any case, global warming is not the result of environmental sin; it is the result of human progress creating another commons problem. ... I have no doubt that man-made global warming is an economic and technical problem that an inventive humanity will solve over the course of the 21st century.

Still, congratulations are in order to Al Gore for being recognized by the Nobel committee for his persistence in trying to get humanity to pay attention to this new commons problem.

2. Here is a digest of my comments to Ron:

Basically, a great post, but I've got a few small quibbles.

1. You were right last year when you said that "In the end, the debate over global warming and its obverse, humanity's energy future, is a moral issue."
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/113924.html

2. I share your understanding of the economics and institutional problem and agree that a straightforward explanation of these is important for very many.

3. However, you forget what evolutionary psychology, Ostrom and Yandle have explained to us so well about how our innate moral sense drives and underpins mankind's success as a species by enhancing our ability to cooperate and to overcome commons issues.
Ostrom: http://conservationcommons.org/media/document/docu-wyycyz.pdf
Yandle: http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=4064

Our long history of developed rules and institutions (informal and formal now overlapping) are based on our moral sense and the effectiveness of these rules depends critically on our moral investment in accepting their legitimacy - witness our views on murder, theft, lying and "not playing by the rules" - and in voluntarily complying with them.

Our moral sense reinforces our judgments about when rules/institutions are not working and the need to develop new ones in response to changing circumstances and new problems. When we see a problem that we think requires change, it is unavoidable that we respond to the status quo, the behavior of people within it and the need for change with a moral sense.

This is simply a part of our evolutionary endowment. (Of course, other parts of our endowment accentuate our suspicions of smooth talkers and help us catch free riders and looters and to guard against threats from outsiders.)

4. Accordingly, while it's unclear how deliberate Gore's talk of "a moral and spiritual challenge" and "lifting the global consciousness" is or whether this is a productive approach for some people, I think it is fairly clear that, in order to build consensus for a solution to the climate commons problem (and other difficult commons problems) and to ensure that any agreed solutions are actually implemented, we will need to bring our moral senses to bear.

In other words, it is RIGHT to worry about climate change, but no meaningful/effective "solution" can be reached or implemented unless it is FAIR and the parties involved have sufficient TRUST (backed by information) in each other.

5. You have understated the AGW problem, especially in light of the inertia both in our energy systems and in the climate, the long duration of CO2 and other GHGS, and the rapidity with which the climate is already changing - faster than even this year's IPCC reports: http://www.carbonequity.info/docs/arctic.html

6. It is surprising that in referring to Nordhaus you have not indicated the ways in which it seems clear that Nordhaus has understated the costs and risks of climate change and the utility of acting sooner rather than later, as noted by Weitzman, Sterner & Persson, Quiggin and others, or that by “revenue recycling" as noted by McKitrick we can substantially reduce the costs of carbon abatement policies.
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/Weitzman/papers/JELSternReport.pdf
www.rff.org/Documents/RFF-DP-07-37.pdf
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2006/11/17/stern-on-the-costs-of-climate-change-part-1/
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/co2briefing.pdf

7. You fail to note that while there are real costs to our economies to build climate change institutions, once established in principle any resulting carbon pricing reflects real costs and is not a “cost” to the economy.

8. It is a puzzle that you did not note that the most powerful way to call forth the investment and behavior changes that would help us to “find a cheap, low-carbon source of energy” and to limit GHG emissions would be to find ways that would effectively price GHG emissions.

9. Finally, one further comment on this:

"One of the keys to solving environmental problems is economic growth and wealth. ... So keep in mind that anything that unduly retards economic growth also retards ultimate environmental clean-up, including global warming."

Not sure what you're driving at here.

As far as developing countries go, efforts by Western nations to address climate change are actually net subsidies to them (by dampening Western demand for fossil fuels) and are providing incentives and investment for growth.

And as for Western economies, at least in principle internalizing externalities by enclosing commons (that have provided value which has not been factored into GDP) doesn't retard economic growth, but enables it by forestalling the destruction of resources, permitting greater wealth-generating private transactions and reducing inefficiency.

Too Many or Too Few People? Does the market provide an answer?

TokyoTom — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:49:00 GMT

Dan McLaughlin asks the first of these interesting questions on the Mises blog, http://mises.org/story/2718. The second question is mine, and I addressed it briefly in the blog responses to Dan.

I take the liberty of posting that response here (revised slightly and with a few further comments):

Too many or too few? Good question, Dan. I agree with you that the population question is like any other aspect of the social order: best addressed by the market and by free societies.

There are just a few small problems - even within the developed world (and very clearly outside of it), there are many important resources that are unowned and thus not fully priced in the "market" economy.

Unowned resources include almost all of Nature. Primary productivity (the amount of vegetation produced from photosynthesis) has changed little, so as we use technology and our organizational abilities to divert more and more of it to feed us, this is an inevitable cost to other species, either directly or in the form of altered environments that support less life (and less diversity of life).

In altering our environments to suit us, we are of course no different from other life forms that compete for resources to live and propagate, but with our technical and organizational abilities, mankind has clearly triumphed over the rest of nature (except perhaps evolving microbes, to whom we represent an increasingly large and relatively untapped food source). But at what cost?

Through the centuries we have wiped out many wild systems of food and other resources - because they were never owned, and because our improving technology enabled us to race each other to take the resources before others (or from others, in the case of many native peoples). Not only Jared Diamond`s "guns, germs and steel", but also forms of social organization have played deciding roles in the competition between human societies for survival, growth and dominance. In this regard, societies that recognize and protect property rights and utilize free markets have proven clearly superior in the competition with other societies to obtain and utilize available resources.

But our struggle has been not only to capture resources and to use them before others do, but also to manage and protect them effectively. Evolving ownership systems have been a key means of limiting wasteful "tragedy of the commons" struggles (see Yandle; von Mises), but even where ownership systems have been implemented, we have generally replaced complex natural systems with simpler systems designed solely to feed us (and particularly so where, due to higher consumptive demand, we have replaced common property systems with private property systems (Ostrom)).

Meanwhile, virtually all of the natural world - the world's oceans, atmosphere, tropical reefs, tropical forests and other great commons - remain unowned and thus unmanaged and unregulated (or indigenous occupants have been forced aside). For example, the great cod fishery off of the Grand Banks that fed Europe for centuries has now disappeared, and other fishery stocks worldwide are crashing - to be "replaced" by "farmed" fish that are fed to a substantial degree by catching and grinding up fish stocks that humans prefer not to consume directly, and in part by fish firms that are established by destroying the mangroves that are estuaries to various fisheries. The same is true of the replacement of vast tracts of tropical forests with soybeans or oil palm plantations, with the rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 (and attendant risks to climate) and with the correspondly geolologically rapid increases in ocean acidification (and threats to plankton, corals and shellfish).

While populations in the developed economies are now relatively stable, demand from our markets (as well as the burgeoning developing markets) continues to strip out unowned (or mismanaged "public") resources from the oceans or undeveloped countries, aided by kleptocratic elites who are happy to steal from the peoples they supposedly represent in order to line their own pockets.

As Dan points out, property rights failures in poorer nations contributes to population growth there by delaying the demographic transitions that we have experienced. Developed economies face similar problems with respect to "public", state-owned lands, for which rent-seeking by and sweet deals to insiders are enduring problems and sources of politcal conflict (as markets cannot work to allocate resources).

Dan states that the stunningly rapid growth of human populations from the Renaissance to the present (6+ billion now expected to nearly double again soon) "actually represents the rise of capitalism and capital development ... [and] shows ... the stunning capacity of freedom to provide for the whole world." While partly correct, this misses completely the question of our massive impact, within a very short period of geological time, on the environment in which we evolved over millions of years, the fact this has occurred because clear and enforceable property rights have not been created in many of the resources that have been consumed, and the corollary fact that we continue to lack the ability to manage our impact on our endowment of natural resources.

The market clearly does NOT send accurate pricing signals with respect to goods that are unowned or ineffectively owned; these goods are either unpriced or underpriced, so the effect is overconsumption until the point that the resource is greatly degraded, at which point attention is turned to the next unowned resource. Thus, human populations are responding to rather imperfect market signals. And where resources are unowned, individuals and groups with differing values and desires cannot adjust or realize those desires by means of private, market transactions. As a result, we are seeing a recourse to the public and political arenas - and the inevitable discordant debates - as various parties seek to use either moral suasion or the levers of government (locally, nationally and internationally) to advance what they consider to be their own interests. (Of course, in a "tragedy of the commons" situation, all resource users share an interest is the future availability of a resource; the difficulty is in the prisoners' dilemma negotiations at the primary user level about how to allocate short-term pain in the interest of long-term gains, compounded in the case of multinational resources by rent-seeking with each national participant.)

A cynic may say that our ongoing assault on nature is only "natural", presents no moral or philosophical issues and that we hardly owe any responsibilities to "nature" or even "future generations" - so let's just all keep on partying, consuming for today, and patting ourselves on the back at how marvelous our market systems are. And that we should keep on hurling invective at those evil "enviros" who want to crash the party and drag us all back to the Stone Age.

Perhaps I suffer from a want of sufficient cynicism.