Tragedy of the Commons Essays

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

“Tragedy of the Commons” means is a situation within a shared-resource structure where people act by themself without thinking about the common good used by others by depleting that resource through their action because of their own selfish gain.

      Logos is the logic, internal consistency, and clarity of the argument and it is split into claims, reasons, grounds, warrants, backing, and qualifiers. Hardin begins his essay by establishing his main claim, which is the idea that he believes is the most believable, that the world’s resources cannot be distributed equally, and any attempts to equally distribute current resources will ruin them. He does this by using the metaphor of the earth and its resources as a lifeboat. Only so many people may fit on this lifeboat, just as so many people may have access to the world’s very limited resources, and trying to fit too many people on this lifeboat will sink it. This phenomenon he calls “The Tragedy of the Commons”. He supports this claim with reasons and grounds; reasons being claims which support his initial claim, and grounds being supporting evidence that leads the audience to support the reasons. His warrant, or understood belief, is that spoiling resources and leading the world to ruin is not optimal,

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

Garrett Hardin wrote an essay titled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”. In this essay he spoke of the Earth being similar to a lifeboat in which it has limited capacity and resources. This is a fair assumption, as the Earth does have limited resources and carrying capacity. He mentions that we are “adrift in a moral sea” saying that in today’s world it is morally abhorrent to not help a person in need but that we should do what we have to in order to survive ourselves. Hardin mentions a “tragedy of the commons” he states that if a pasture were to become a commons it would only take one person to not show restraint to ruin the system and cause mass suffering. He uses the world’s air and water as an example claiming that they

The tragedy of the commons was written by Garret Hardin. Hardin argued that unregulated exploitation would cause environmental depletion.

Another problem with public goods is the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons occurs when individual people or parties disregard the well-being of the society in pursuing personal gains. When every country tries to gain the most benefits from abusing the climate, the demand will rapidly consume the supply of the resource, due to the country not

Garrett Hardin developed the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons. The basic concept is a giant pasture that is for everyone to have a piece of land and for the herdsman to have as many cattle a possible to sustain the land. This land should be able to maintain itself for quite a long time because of cattle dying as well as the population staying relatively stable. But at some point the population will begin growing and the herdsman will want to maximize their profits by having more cattle, which in return the land cannot sustain. The herdsman receives all the profit from adding one more animal to the pasture so the herdsman will eventually begin adding more cattle, but the overgrazing caused by that added animal will destroy the land

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

The classic essay Tragedy of the Commons describes the dilemma society faces when the interests of a group conflicts with the interests of individuals (Hardin, 1968). The example presented is that of a group of cattle ranchers commingling their cattle in a common pasture. At full capacity, each cattle owner still has an incentive to include additional cattle, since the slight decrease in overall yield per animal is offset by the additional animal. Unfortunately, this overgrazing inevitably leads to failure of the commons. The community goal of maximizing food production can only be achieved by placing controls on the interests of the individual cattle ranchers in favor of those of the community (Hardin, 1968). This paper is

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

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

From the article of “Reclaiming the Commons” By Naomi Klein, Klein defines The Commons is “the spirit they share is a radical reclaiming of The Commons” (Klein, 2001, p.82). In other words, the common is a public space where people go. People can gather together to talk and have meetings. An example of the commons is “used to see fights as saving a nation, now I see it as saving democracy” (Klein, 2001, p.83). In other words, The Commons has to do with anything like the cultural, social, and natural materials. It is all public and not private to the society. The Commons implication is nothing is private in the society because everything becomes public for the society to know what is going on such as the news and media of other people. The significance

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

Few decades ago, clean water was “commons” (Hardin, 1968) to us. It was a natural resource shared by everyone and not owned by anyone. This “commons” was taken for granted to the extent that people exploit clean water without considering its finiteness. Resorts and factories dumped wastewater and ruined nearby rivers and oceans. People carelessly littered garbage and substituted the dirty water with diminishing clean water. They definitely benefited in terms of financial cost and comfort from their negligence. However, those individual interests ended up bringing severe water pollution, attacking our collective interest of public health and well-being. In this vein, water pollution is undeniably the “Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin, 1968). Following these dire circumstances, water purification techniques and systems have been further developed and become widespread. Yet, the technical measurements have not quite fundamentally solved the problem. What is needed at this point is people’s will and practical action to improve the environment. However, merely hoping and encouraging people to do so are not enough. In order to have a steady support from people, we need a practical device for a “mutual coercion” (Hardin, 1968) to earn consent to coercion necessary to amend the situation. In this paper, I am going to address the technical and individual effort for water pollution and its limitation, and suggest a way to complement this limitation through a device on an institutional