Comment by lo_zamoyski
1 day ago
There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well.
But I would make the following clarifications:
1. A private entity is still the steward of the resource and therefore the resource figures into the aims, goals, and constraints of the private entity.
2. The common good is itself under the stewardship of the state, as its function is guardian of the common good.
3. The common good is the default (by natural law) and prior to the private good. The latter is instituted in positive law for the sake of the former by, e.g., reducing conflict over goods.
> There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well.
I think it's both simpler and deeper than that.
Governments and corporations don't exist in nature. Those are just human constructs, mutually-recursive shared beliefs that emulate agents following some rules, as long as you don't think too hard about this.
"Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem. The name itself might've been coined with some specific scenarios in mind, but for the phenomenon itself, it doesn't matter what kind of entities exploit the "commons"; the "private" vs. "public" distinction itself is neither a sharp divide, nor does it exist in nature. All that matters is that there's some resource used by several independent parties, and each of them finds it more beneficial to defect than to cooperate.
In a way, it's basically a 3+-player prisonner's dilemma. The solution is the same, too: introducing a party that forces all other parties to cooperate. That can be a private or public or any other kind of org taking ownership of the commons and enforcing quotas, or in case of prisonners, a mob boss ready to shoot anyone who defects.
It was not my intent to be exhaustive, but to make a few points that left it up to the reader to relate them appropriately to your post in order to enrich thinking about the subject.
But it appears we cannot avoid getting into the weeds a bit…
> Governments and corporations don't exist in nature.
This is not as simple as you seem to think.
The claim “don’t exist in nature” is vague, because the word “nature” in common speech is vague. What is “natural”? Is a beehive “natural” Is a house “natural”? Is synthetic water “natural”? (I claim that the concept of “nature” concerns what it means to be some kind of thing. Perhaps polystyrene has never existed before human beings synthesized it, but it has a nature, that is, it means something to be polystyrene. And it is in the nature of human beings to make materials and artifacts, i.e., to produce technology ordered toward the human good.)
So, what is government? Well, it is an authority whose central purpose is to function as the guardian and steward of the common good. I claim that parenthood is the primordial form of human government and the family as the primordial form of the state. We are intrinsically social and political animals; legitimate societies exist only when joined by a common good. This is real and part of human nature. The capacity to deviate from human nature does not disprove the norm inherent to it.
Now, procedurally we could institute various particular and concrete arrangements through which government is actualized. We could institute a republican form of government or a monarchy, for example. These are historically conditioned. But in all cases, there is a government. Government qua government is not some arbitrary “construct”, but something proper to all forms and levels of human society.
> "Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem.
We can talk about coordination once we establish the ends for which such coordination is needed, but there is something more fundamental that must be said about the framing of the problem of the “tragedy”. The framing does not presume a notion of human beings as moral agents and political and social creatures. In other words, it begins with a highly individualist, homo economicus view of human nature as rationally egoist and oriented toward maximizing utility, full stop. But I claim that is not in accord with human nature and thus the human good, even if people can fall into such pathological patterns of behavior (especially in a culture that routinely reinforces that norm).
As I wrote, human beings are inherently social animals. We cannot flourish outside of societies. A commons that suffers this sort of unhinged extraction is an example of a moral and a political failure. Why? Because it is unjust, intemperate, and a lack of solidarity to maximize resource extraction in that manner. So the tragedy is a matter of a) the moral failure of the users of that resource, and b) the failure of an authority to regulate its use. The typical solution that’s proposed is either privatization or centralization, but both solutions presuppose the false anthropology of homo economicus. (I am not claiming that privatization does not have a place, only that the dichotomy is false.)
Now, I did say that the case with something like github is analogical, because functionally, it is like a common resource, just like how social media functions like a public square in some respects. But analogy is not univocity. Github is not strictly speaking a common good, nor is social media strictly a public square, because in both cases, a private company manages them. And typically, private goods are managed for private benefit, even if they are morally bound not to harm the common good.
That intent, that purpose, is central to determining whether something is public or private, because something public has the common benefit as its aim, while something private has private benefit as its aim.