THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT

(by George Grace)

3. Our Fiduciary Responsibility

1. We have a fiduciary responsibility.

Those generations of humans living today have a fiduciary responsibility for the store of natural resources that came with this planet. Much of this store is essential to human life--essential to preserving the species from extinction. Even more of it is required to maintain current human life styles--current "standards of living".(1)

But, as we discussed in "The human predicament" , one thing that's certain is that current life styles can't be maintained indefinitely. It's inevitable that our descendants will at some point be forced to live in a very different manner. The consumption and destruction of each non-renewable resource will ultimately have to cease entirely (at least when that resource has been exhausted if not sooner). And population will ultimately have to stop increasing (and almost surely will have to decrease from even its present level). These things will happen; the question is how painful they will be and who will suffer that pain. We pre-disaster generations are the fiduciaries--the custodians of the resources. But what, exactly, should we be doing?

2. We need to determine just what possible courses of action make sense.

Just identifying and evaluating the possible courses of action is no simple matter. There is, first of all, the problem of the facts--of evaluating the threat, of obtaining the best possible estimates of the consequences of continuing our present practices. This would need to include how and at what rate these practices deplete resources and/or degrade the environment, and what the consequences of each depletion or degradation can be expected to be. Then we need the best possible guesses about the chances of finding replacements for various of them--i.e., substitutes for depleted resources, alternative practices that would have a less deleterious effect on the environment. Getting the best possible estimates must ultimately be a matter of obtaining the advice of the most competent specialists and of having further research carried out.

However, acquiring the knowledge on which decisions need to be based isn't just a matter of acquiring access to facts; it's a matter of acquiring a very complex understanding of how the world works--how everything fits together. Even if the facts were readily available, to absorb and assimilate them sufficiently to use them effectively in decision-making wouldn't be a casual undertaking. But even if the consequences of our actions could be known precisely, how could we determine more precisely just what our fiduciary responsibilities require? In short, what are our moral obligations?

3. We need to decide just what our moral obligations are.

To whom (or what) beyond ourselves do we have responsibilities? Our children? Our grandchildren? The rest of humanity? Other species? And what weighting should be given to the responsibility to each? A major difficulty is that it's not clear where we should look for the answer.(2)

A more practical question is what fiduciary responsibilities we will ultimately choose to accept. It seems unlikely that many of us will be inclined to accept any kind of restraint unless it seems clearly necessary to head off some kind of unfortunate consequences for someone (or something). In fact, empathy would seem to be the crucial consideration: how much empathy we feel for whomever (or whatever) we expect to suffer these unfortunate consequences. What seems likely to count most heavily for most of us is how near at hand the painful consequences are perceived to be--how threatened we are with actually seeing people we know suffer them. (In short, with having to face our victims: with having to know before we die that those people are aware of what we've left in store for them). Anyway, people could be expected, I think, to be willing to sacrifice more for their more immediate descendants--more for their children than for grandchildren, more for grandchildren than for great-grandchildren, etc.

Clearly our policies should be based on a better understanding of both our options and the moral implications of each. But whom should we be turning to? Who is in a position to seek and act on such understanding? And who would be willing?

3. We need some institution to bear the primary responsibility.

Of course, each individual is free to act for him/herself, and some do try to do their part. For example, some recycle, use relatively non-polluting means of transportation, limit the number of their offspring, and otherwise attempt to reduce at least their own contribution to environmental degradation.

A major problem with this as a possible solution is the notorious "tragedy of the commons"(3)--that restraint in the exploitation of common resources is punished, while over-exploitation is rewarded. The punishment for restraint is simply the deprivation of part of the benefits that would derive from seizing a larger share. However, those benefits--the rewards for unbridled exploitation--can be considerable. In the first place, commercial interests obtain enormous material profits by directly extracting such common resources from their natural environment and selling them (either unmodified or in some "processed" form--examples include various minerals, petroleum, natural gas, fish, timber, etc.) as well as by exploiting them less directly in various other ways (such as soil for the production of crops or air and water for waste disposal). But even exploiters with no commercial interests whatever are still rewarded by whatever enjoyment they derive from what they personally consume. In fact, therefore, the rewards for over-exploitation represent a good part of the "consumption" what we're encouraged to think of as central to "quality of life".

Thus, many individuals will see reducing their own consumption as tantamount to sacrificing quality from their lives. Such individuals will understandably be discouraged from exercising restraint while their fellows practice unrestrained exploitation and even flaunt the prodigality of their consumption. It hardly seems surprising, then, that we don't find billions of individuals spontaneously exercising such restraint. In fact, it seems very clear that the needed restraints won't be generally implemented without some kind of serious coordination.

But coordination will also be essential because, as we said above, to gain access to the best information that can be obtained and to assimilate it sufficiently to use it effectively in decision-making isn't a casual undertaking. People with other responsibilities in the world are unlikely, even with the best will, to have sufficient time to assimilate all of the relevant information into what will have to be very complex understanding of how the world works--of how everything fits together. It's obvious that we must look to our institutions both to determine the right policy decisions and to see that they are implemented. But what institutions do we have with the capacity to meet this responsibility?

NOTES

1. We might speak also of the resources necessary to preserve other species from extinction, but it's already become apparent that--in spite of rear-guard actions of environmentalists, these will be sacrificed incrementally to the maintenance of the "living standards" of (ever-increasing numbers of) humans. (Back up)

2. Some would no doubt say that religions are the appropriate institutions to look to for answers, but most of them don't seem to have much relevance-- except maybe in reassuring us that we don't have any responsibilities. Some of the most prominent of them encourage us to see ourselves as a very separate species endowed with an unlimited right to destroy any and all other species whenever that benefits us. Some seem to believe that a divine providence will intervene to provide for the well-being of our species no matter how prodigally we deplete and degrade our habitat and multiply our numbers. In fact, some of them seem opposed to anything that would limit population growth--particularly abortion, but some even oppose any means of birth control. (Back up)

3. Hardin 1968. Briefly, the "tragedy" is that when there are resources that are left available to anyone to use as s/he pleases, those who use more than their share are rewarded. Hardin particularly includes overpopulation as an example of such excessive exploitation of common resources. (Back up)

REFERENCE

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162:1243-1248. (This can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.dieoff.org/page95.htm). (Back up)

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Last updated 24 September 2001