Global warming and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

You and your partner in crime are in custody. You are kept in separate cells and cannot talk with each other. Of course, you both will try to minimize your sentence if convicted, and the sentence of each of you will depend on whether or not you confess and gives evidence against your partner. If both of you deny and keep silent about the other, each of you will get a sentence of two years in prison for some minor crimes. If both of you confess and testify against the other, each of you will get 10 years. If you confess and testify against your partner and the latter denies and keeps silent about you, you’ll get one year and your partner will get a sentence of 20 years; and the other way round. See this schema:

                                  

Your possible sentences are first in each cell and the related possible sentences of your partner are second.

The best for both of you is to deny your involvement in the crime if the other does as well, but how do you know that the other will deny? For if one confesses and gives evidence against the other, while the other denies, the former will be better off. We call this problem the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

There are many versions of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. One version is the Tragedy of the Commons, first presented by Garrett Hardin in 1968. It runs as follows: As happened and still happens in many parts of the world, herdsmen often pasture their herds on the common grounds of the community. If every herdsman increases his herd, at a certain moment the commons will have reached their maximum capacity for grazing. However, “as a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize 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?’ ... The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another….” (Hardin, p. 169). Now it is so that the effect of adding one animal on the quality of the pasture lands will be so small, that nobody will notice it. Moreover, the costs of the damage of each animal added will be shared by all herdsmen, while the gains will go to the owner of the added animal. Usually these gains are higher than the additional costs (for the owner!). Therefore it will be rational for each herdsman to add livestock to his herd beyond the capacity that the commons can bear. This will go on till the system crashes and each herdsman earns less than he got before the commons had reached their maximum capacity.

This is what we see now – so Hardin warns us (p. 169) – in the problem of global pollution and, as I want to add – for when Hardin wrote his article, it was not yet a topic – in the problem of global warming (which actually is a pollution problem). But the Tragedy of the Commons doesn’t only point out the essence of the problem of global warming, but also why a solution is so difficult. For in the short run, it is you who profits by your pollution that contributes to the global warning, but the costs go to everybody. And why wouldn’t you go on producing pollution then? For if you stop doing so and others continue, you are the loser and these others gain (at least in the short run). So the Tragedy of the Commons is a kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Hardin saw two solutions for the problem: privatization or a kind of central authority. However, privatization is not possible: you can subdivide the commons but not pollution, for wind and water will bring it to your neighbour. And I don’t see that there’ll ever be a kind of central world authority that will be more powerful than the now powerless United Nations. Rational cooperation on a moral base between the countries seems to be the only option, but how will it happen given the weak results of the past international conferences on global warming? Less developed countries will put the blame on the rich countries and say that they first must catch up. Even if this problem will be solved, the central problem of the Tragedy of the Commons, namely the dilemma of the conflict between individual and collective rationality, is still there. At least in the short run (and maybe in the long run as well), individually each person will profit by not ending his polluting practices.There are no sanctions, and moreover much pollution by an individual country, let alone by an individual person, has no immediate appreciable effect on the total pollution. And why wouldn’t you cheat, if others cheat as well (or so you think)? As Maclean states in the article that brought me to this blog: “If no one else surrenders his rights, you would be foolish to do so; and if everyone else surrenders his rights, you can gain further advantage by refusing to surrender yours”. (p. 225). It’s Hobbes’ dilemma without the possibility of Hobbes’ solution: Leviathan. But if the global pollution cannot be stopped, who will stop the global warming?

Sources

- Hardin, Garrett, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) in Ekistics, Vol. 27, No. 160, ECOSYSTEMS: man and nature (MARCH 1969), pp. 168-170.

- Maclean, Douglas, “Prisoner’s Dilemmas, intergenerational asymmetry, and climate chance ethics”, in Martin Peterson (ed.), The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015; pp. 219-242.

- Peterson, Martin, “Introduction”, in The Prisoner’s Dilemma (see above); pp. 1-15.

The intention paradox

You have a desire to achieve a certain goal, or you want to have something, or you have another desire like that. If the desire is really effective and not simply a vague wish, we say that you have an intention. Then you make a plan of action how to attain your goal and you perform the action or actions as planned. For instance, you get the desire to go to a concert tomorrow evening. So you look on the Internet for the programs of several concert halls in your town and in the towns nearby. You make your choice and buy your ticket online and tomorrow evening you go. This is a simple example of what happens when you have an intention and you have the chance to fulfil it and often it works fundamentally this way, also in more complicated cases like when you want to make a tour through South America. I could call it the direct way to fulfil an intention.

Take now this well-known case, described for the first time by Roderick Chisholm: Carl intends to kill his rich uncle because he wants to inherit his fortune. He believes that his uncle is at home and drives towards his house in order to execute his intention there. This agitates him that much that he drives recklessly. On the way he hits and kills a pedestrian, who happens to be his uncle. Therefore we can say that in an indirect way Carl’s intention made him kill his uncle. An intriguing question then is, of course, whether Carl is also responsible for the killing of his uncle, in view of his intention, for it may be so that at the moment of the accident Carl didn’t break any traffic rule and that the pedestrian (his uncle) suddenly crossed the road. I’ll bypass this problem, for here I want to raise another question. When we have an intention, it can be fulfilled in a direct or in an indirect way, as we just have seen. However, is it possible that an intention we have can be fulfilled only when we don’t have it or when we drop it? I think that such intentions exist. Emotions are a case in point, for, to take an example, we can never be happy unless we refrain from trying to be so. Then the intention has become its own paradox: Sometimes we get things we intended to get just because we didn’t intend them.

Self-censorship

My blog last week was a clear case of self-censorship. Or rather, not the blog itself was, but I had self-censured the photo: I had uploaded another photo than I actually wanted to do, because I feared that it would be removed by some social media because it showed a nude female body. Or to be more exact, it showed a nude female shop-window dummy (placed as trash in the street). My fear that this would happen was not without reason, for I know that a photo of a 40,000 years old (!) rather abstract female figurine had been removed by Facebook simply for the reason that it was nude. And a museum in Antwerp, Belgium, warns that pictures with paintings by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) taken in the museum and uploaded to Facebook may be removed because they show nude women. Since I wanted to share my blog on several social media and since then automatically the photo of the blog is shown, I decided to change the image for this blog, even though the new photo was “more awful” than the original one. By doing so I self-censured my blog.

When we talk about censorship, we probably think in the first place of journalists and writers who are not allowed to publish their articles and books in dictatorial or authoritarian countries. However, a by far more common phenomenon is self-censorship. Here I’ll ignore psychological forms of self-censure, which involve that people don’t freely express their opinions because of the possible negative reactions of others, even if they are their equals. I have rather a kind of self-censorship in mind in a more or less institutionalized setting, like worded in this definition: “[T]he act of censoring yourself because you fear that governments, firms or institutions will find something you want to say objectionable, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient. It applies to person communications, news, social media, art, literature, film and entertainment. Self censorship may create an environment of fear that suppresses economic activity, culture, political freedom and social processes.” (https://simplicable.com/new/self-censorship) Now it is so that in my case I didn’t fear the social media. I changed the photo, since it would have no sense to announce my new blog, if this announcement would soon be deleted. But what difference does it make? The effect is the same: I censured myself.

Now you can say: “Okay, that may be true, but often we need to restrain ourselves in order to avoid unnecessary conflicts.” That’s right, but it’s different when values like freedom of speech and expression are at stake and that’s often the case when we censure ourselves because we fear the reactions of governments, firms and institutions, even in democratic countries. Then self-censorship becomes dangerous, because it undermines the values we value and should defend. We see this already somewhat in democratic societies but the mechanism is explicitly used in authoritarian and dictatorial states where what citizens do is controlled by fear. In order to demonstrate that the ban to say what is displeasing to the authorities and the ban to express yourself in the way you like must be taken serious, examples are set. People who allegedly don’t comply with the rules are arrested, sentenced, executed or murdered (sometimes under a pretext) or they simply disappear and are never again heard of. Think of the recent murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey. Social media like Facebook can exclude people from their websites, if they don’t follow their rules, even if their rules are not the generally accepted rules; or at least they remove displeasing content, which restrains people to express what they want to express (see the examples above). Since most people want to avoid the nasty consequences if they don’t follow the rules, the result is self-censorship. You can say, of course, why should I need Facebook and other social media? The problem is that in the present world you need them, for otherwise – for instance –  nobody will find your personal website. Then you are free to express yourself, but nobody knows. As a result, self-censorship becomes a kind of thought police, for it doesn’t only limit the expression of certain thoughts but in the end it makes that certain thoughts don’t pop up at all. Just as it is the function of the police not only to catch criminals but also to make that crime doesn’t happen. This is well expressed by a certain psychoanalyst in Montevideo, who had lived during the years of repression and dictatorship in Uruguay in the 1970s and early 1980s. During these years he and his wife kept silent and they were never detained or imprisoned, but “[o]ur own lives became increasingly constricted. The process of self-censorship was incredibly insidious: It wasn’t just that you stopped talking about certain things with other people — you stopped thinking them yourself. Your internal dialogue just dried up.” (https://newrepublic.com/article/140458/beware-self-censorship) Although the consequences of the restrictions of the social media are not that dramatic, any imposed limitation of thinking, by others or by yourself, kills thinking a little bit, anyhow.

Can people be trash?

When reading Anne Applebaum’s book Red famine. Stalin’s War on Ukraine, I came across the following quote from Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman:

“I’m no longer under a spell, I can see now that the kulaks were human beings. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all around me? And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. ‘They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash’ – that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating ...”

Appelbaum’s book treats one of the most miserable periods in the history of the Soviet Union. Here it’s not the place to go into details but in the 1930s Stalin and the leadership of the communist party had decided that agriculture in the Soviet Union had to be collectivized: Individual peasant farmers had to join big cooperative agricultural farms, if not voluntarily then by force. Applebaum describes in her book how this happened in the Ukraine, the major agricultural area of the Soviet Union. There was much opposition in the Ukraine against this collectivization. In order to break the opposition Stalin and the communist leadership decided to kill and to starve out all farmers, peasants and others who opposed the plans. As a result that millions of people died – executed, in prison camps (the “gulag”) or by starvation. In those days the richer farmers and peasants were called “kulaks”, but actually it was so that every opponent and everybody who was against the collectivization was called so. Moreover, in the communist propaganda they weren’t simply seen as people who didn’t agree and didn’t cooperate; no they were considered “trash” or “vermin” and the like.

Now it’s so that the situation described in the book is something of the past, anyway – I hope and assume – for the readers of my blogs, although I don’t want to underestimate the number of regions in the world where people still are treated in such an inhuman way. But you, readers of my blogs living mostly in comfortable circumstances, look around and watch: Isn’t it so that in your immediate environment still many people are seen a little bit as trash or even as vermin? People belonging to other groups, to “lower” groups, to “lower” classes than the one you belong to are too often looked upon with contempt. Actually, as is often thought by the “higher” people (and maybe also by you???), it is that they don’t behave as it should be. Their opinions are not the “right” ones, just because they are “lower”. In fact they are seen a little bit as trash. Especially those people are seen that way who don’t lead a regular life: poor people, street people, tramps, illegal migrants from Africa and the Middle East in Europe and from Latin America in the USA. In their hearts – and sometimes openly as well – many people see them as trash or vermin. Throw them away from your life, tread down on them. Of course, not literally. We are human and civilized and put them in camps or on islands far away or keep a watch on them in another way. We even pay their return home, in case they are immigrants and are prepared to leave. We are human, aren’t we? But in fact, a little bit of the feeling described by Vasily Grossman is still in us.

Source

Anne Applebaum, Red famine. Stalin’s War on Ukraine. London, Penguin Books, 2018; p. 226.

At first I had planned to upload here another photo by way of illustration of this blog (which you can find here on my Dutch photo website: https://henkbijdeweg.nl/foto/214232173_Oud+vuil.html#.W7k_g3kaQkI). Since I am almost sure that this photo will be removed by Facebook and some other websites where I always announce my blogs, I replaced it by the present one. The cynical thing is, of course, is that the present photo is by far more scandalous than the innocent photo that I originally wanted to upload here.