[MUSIC] Hello, welcome to How to Change the World. A class with a bold title and a challenging series of assignments and a great ambition. To work together to see what we can do to instigate positive change around the world. This course has its origins in a collaboration with the Social Good Summit. You can read more about the partners for that summit on the Coursera syllabus page. But I was interested in participating in this because I've done some online teaching with Coursera before. Although my teaching is in the realm of history, philosophy and literature. I'm the President of Wesleyan University and I do a lot of teaching in history and philosophy. When I heard about the Social Good Summit I began to think about how the work I do as a teacher and the work we do at Wesleyan might be connected more directly to actions people could take in the world that had to do with some of the most pressing global challenges. And so, talking with our partners at the 92nd Street Y, and at Mashable, the United Nations Foundation, and the Gates Foundation, and Ericsson, and several other partners, we decided to try to create, out of the Social Good Summit a massive open online course that would introduce students to some of the great players in the world around these issues of poverty, climate change, healthcare, women and activism, education and social change. Some of the people doing very interesting things out in the world today, we have some videos about them, or talking with them and, also to provide some basic information in regard to these key themes. So, I am studying with you. Unlike the other course I give where I am actually talking about my considered views on the topic of the modern and the post-modern, that I've been working on for a long time, in this class, I will be studying along with you. I will be doing the reading, talking to major figures in the field, introducing you and and learning myself about some of the things we might do to make a positive difference. So it's exciting for me because I feel although I am the professor in this class. I'm your guide in this arena. I'm also a student in this class, learning with you as we go along. This is a long tradition at Wesleyan, where I, where I was a student many years ago, and I'm, as we've said now, the president we believe that active learning is something that professors do and not just the students do. So it's a real treat for me to be learning with you. The subject of the, of the, of the course is obviously very pressing. Because we have some of these really enormous challenges. But in our first week we are going to try to talk conceptually about what our social good is, how to define it, how do we think about goods that are non-exclusive, goods that can't be sold, goods that aren't easily or perhaps can't be privatized, goods that are social, that is they belong to us in common, rather than goods that are private. And we'll talk to different people about how those kinds of goods those kinds of values, those kinds of properties, those kinds of resources, can be sustainably used. Can be used with justice. Can be put into the service of humanity rather than into the for, the disservice of humanity. So our task this week Is to really think conceptually about what a non-exclusive good is, or what a social good is. And, so it's a little bit more theoretical than some of the other readings we'll do and other assignments we'll do. Now just one more word about the structure of the course. We will, each week have three, subthemes. What do we know? Why should we care? And the third one, what can we do? And, so we'll try to give that, both factual and conceptual information in the what do we know the stream? And then talk about what is at stake in the issue, and what is gripping for us humanly and why we should care. And in the third stream what are some of the things one can do, either as individuals, or in groups. And we'll give assignments in this MOOC that will instigate, I hope, some collaboration and instigate actions, not on behalf of a particular political party or particular ideology, but actions that would have an effect on the problems we've identified in that weeks work. We start this week with what is a social good, and we're going to go back decades to work by Garrett Hardin. a, he was a, wrote a very influential piece in Science Magazine which was called The Tragedy of the Commons, and I thought this would be a good place to start because Garrett Hardin identified a significant gain game theory or economic or formal problem about what happens when people are sharing a resource, but are motivated by self interest. What happens, he says, is a tragedy. What happens is a tragedy. So when Harden started his work on the Tragedy of the Commons, we are in the mid 1960's, publishes the article in 1968 and for him the, the, the, the, the overriding issue is population growth. He just really thought that the planet could sustain a certain number of people. And we were in danger, because of population growth, of exceeding the number of people that the planet could sustain. And he wondered whether there were mechanisms for controlling population growth that would be acceptable to people. Or whether there was a, an inexorable tragedy in the making. Something that would necessarily result in in disaster for many people because of the tendencies that could not be stopped in population growth. And so this is again in, in the late nine, in the late 1960's. And what, what Hardin wanted to emphasize and I'll just give you a quote from, from the essay. The population problem, he wrote, has no technical solution. It requires a fundamental extension of morality. That's, I think, very interesting. Don't you think? A fundamental extension of morality. So it's not just about more food. It's not just about better transportation. It's not just about controlling waste or pollution, it's about a fundamental extension of morality. People have to change, Hardin thought, in order to get out of the vise grips of this dilemma. What is the dilemma he identified? It, it's, it's pretty simple and I mean there's some animated clips actually, on Youtube that we will give you links for that you can actually see this played out graphically, but it's pretty simple. Imagine Hardin says, a pastureland where the, a community has rights to come and have their livestock graze on this pasture land. Everybody comes with their cow and according to the notion of individual motivation that Harden traces back to Adam Smith, among others, each person with his cow is actually motivated, has an interest in bringing another cow. So if I think that Jerry over there is bringing three cows and I only have one cow, I'm thinking, well gee, isn't it in my interest to get the most out of this pasture land to bring as many cows, if not more cows, than Jerry? So I, I go back an I find a way to get another cow. I bring the other cow. Jerry's looking over at me. Hey, what, that guy Ross bringing extra cows? I should bring an extra cow. Now somebody comes along probably at this point an says, hey, we've got too many cows on this darn pasture land. But, what Harden points out is, if we are motivated by individual interest, individual self-interest we will continue to try to get as many cows on our, that pasture land as possible. With of course, the predictable result that eventually we will destroy the pasture land that is sustaining, that had been sustaining all of us. And that this as long as we're motivated by self-interest, that this is going to end up tragically. Because we will, we will destroy the resource that we are competing about. The competition for resources will destroy the resources as long as there's no regulation on the amount of use of those resources, and Harden thinks that this will require significant changes to how we behave and how we're motivated or how we're regulated, I suppose I should say. In order to avoid this tragedy. So just to give you again, some quotations from the reading. He's going back to Adam Smith, and the notion of individual interest in capitalism. And Hardin writes, if it is correct that we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If this is not correct, we need to examine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible. In other words, we have to control how many children we have, how many cows we bring to the pasture. Otherwise, we are going to create disaster. But in fact, given Smith's presuppositions which Harden tends to share, Harden tends to share, given those presuppositions we will, through our freedoms, create disaster. Now, you can think of this in population growth or fecundity. You can think of it with pasture land. Obviously you can think of it in terms of fishing. You know if we all start fishing as much as possible because of our own self interest, eventually we will destroy the, the species of fish that we are trying to use as a resource. And, of course, the, the, perhaps the most dramatic resource on our horizon that we have been destroying in this way is the atmosphere. That is by dumping carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere in order to pursue self-interest, we are destroying the very resource that keep us, keeps us alive. This is why he calls it a tragedy. He quotes William Foster Lloyd. The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness, Lloyd wrote in the eighteenth century. traged-, the essence of tragedy resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. I, I think that's a, isn't that a great phrase. The solemnity of the remorseless working of things and I, I, when I read that I thought gosh, this is in 1968, but doesn't it sounds so much like the rhetoric you hear around climate change today that is. There's nothing we can do about it, we're just, you know, there's no chance of changing, because, because, you often hear in this rhetoric, if even if I change in my country, let's say the United States, another country is dumping all kinds of carbon in it and profiting and developing from it. Developing countries say to the developed world, well you guys have been dumping stuff into the atmosphere for a hundred years. Now you want us to control it when we need to dump stuff into the atmosphere to have economic development. Because nobody wants to be the, the, the fool who stops bringing the cow to the pasture, right? While everyone else is profiting. Nobody wants to be the fool who stops economic development in order to preserve the atmosphere if everybody else is dumping into the atmosphere anyway. This is the remorseless working of things that destroys the very resources that we are trying to exploit. And Hardin thought that remorseless working of things makes for a tragedy. So, he, he goes on here in really prescient ways in this short essay, to talk about how, almost biologically, almost biologically, we deny this. We are we are prone to say, well, the pasture will not run out, you know, that quickly, or people are lying about the pasture running out. I can bring my cow, it's OK. The climate isn't really changing. Poverty isn't getting worse because of demog-, population growth. We deny these things because it's easier to continue going along with our self interests, or what seems to be our self interest than to recognize a long term problem. Natural selection he writes, favors the forces of psychological denial. Isn't that interesting? Natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial because as an individual, if I deny there's a problem I continue to profit as an individual. For, at least, for a while. At least for a while. And before there's a lot of pressure on the pasture, I can keep doing it, I can keep exploiting it. It's only when there's a lot more people dumping a lot more stuff or having more and more animals graze in that pasture. Only when it builds up to a critical point does this natural selection towards denial become very, very counter-productive. The individual, Hardin wrote, benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, suffers. It, it, It's really interesting, I think, the individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth. So people say, well I'm not going to recycling it's such a pain. I'm not going to cutback on my energy use. Why should I cut back? The other people aren't cutting back. Right, you've heard that, all, how many times have you heard that? Why should I do something about poverty, when all these other people aren't doing anything about poverty? Why should I do something about healthcare when other people are not, doing something about healthcare for the poor? As an individual, it looks like I'm profiting. And so, as an individual, the product of natural selection we, we tend to deny the long term consequences of our action. There are really two possibilities to deal with this tragedy of the commons and, and Hardin acknowledges both of them. One is private ownership and the other is some kind of public ownership. The people who really think that the moral of the story is that you should have less government think that the, only through private ownership, if somebody owns the pasture, they're going to try to take care of it's long term health. And only if somebody really owns it will they be responsible for its long-term hearth, health and make sure, for example, you ration use of the pasture. The problem with this is that private owners don't often look at a very, very long time horizon and it's in their individual interest to exploit it before they sell it. And so that may not work so well, the second option is some kind of government ownership. Well government ownership can seem tyrannical, and furthermore government ownership is usually overseen by bureucrats who have no individual's interest in optimizing the performance of the resource they are paid to protect. [BLANK_AUDIO] So, I'm here with Professor Donald Moon of the Government Department at Wesleyan University. We're going to be talking this morning about, what is a social good? The, class here, how to change the world, comes out of the social good summit, that, took place in New York in the early fall and we want to talk this morning a little bit about the concept of social good, how it's related to private good, common good, terms that have a long history in political theory and philosophy. And Professor Moon teaches courses in political theory here at Wesleyan. And thank you for joining me this morning. >> It's my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. >> So I thought we'd start off with this idea of social good and its contrast with private good and its connection to notions like common good. These terms go back a long way in political theory, don't they? >> Oh, for sure. I mean, you can find them in the first great classic of political philosophy, Plato's Republic, where there's it opens with this question about whether justice is a private good for the powerful or whether it's actually a genuine social good. And the whole point of Socrates' work in The Republic is to show us that there's a, a, that if we understand our own private good properly, we will also understand that this is a social good. It's a virtue. >> And this is one of the themes of this class, especially as we start off this week, is the, whether there's an inherent tension between self-interest or the, the pursuit of the private good and, and justice and, and the polar good and. And in the history of political theory, who would be the standard bearer for the, the emphasis on the private or individual self interest, and who would be, let's say, one of the standard bearers for the communitarian, or the social dimension? >> Yeah, well, I mean we've, I think Hobbes is probably the person to start with, though Mandeville's Fable of the Bees is a wonderful one, >> Tell us a little bit about, the, the, for folks in this class who haven't done any political theory, tell us a little bit about The Fable of the Bees, as, if one could do that in a nutshell. >> [LAUGH] In a nutshell. Well the the, the idea that Vanderbilt puts forward is the idea that if each person is pursuing his or her own private interest they will have an incentive to discover or learn what other people's interests are, so that they can provide them with goods and services that they will pay them for. And so, the suggestion that he's making, that's formalized in Adam Smith's idea of the invisible hand, is that by each person pursuing their own interests, they will act in ways that will generate the greatest good for the, for the society as a whole. >> So that's another way of getting to that sweet spot where the self interest is going to coincide with the common interest. >> Right. >> And, and so, and you mentioned Hobbes as being another standard bearer for the, for the self-interest part? >> Right. Although Hobbs is, focuses in particular on the problem of security. >> Right. >> And security is a social good. >> Yes. >> Because you know, we have to buy our security together, so to speak. [LAUGH] >> Yes. In a world where people are roughly equal. I mean, if you're extraordinarily powerful, you might be able to be secure, but of course everybody else's debt is totally insecure. [LAUGH] >> Yeah. >> In a world where you have to sleep once in a while you can't guarantee that you will be able to protect yourself against others, and therefore, the only way you can provide security for yourself is through some kind of social organization. [BLANK AUDIO]
