This book makes a strong distinction between the Tragedy of the Commons and The Tragedy of Common Sense Morality.
Tragedy of the Commons
Selfishness leads individuals to make decisions that go against the best interest of the group, showed in simplified examples such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is generally solved by following Moral conducts, most of which likely evolved precisely to solve these problems.
Tragedy of Common Sense Morality
With globalisation, different cultures came together and often clashed in terms of moral beliefs:
- On the topic of abortion, the right to freedom ( pro-choice ) vs the right to life ( pro-life )
- On the topic of wealth, the right to survive ( UBI ) vs the right to property ( capitalism/“meritocracy” ) The Tragedy of Common Sense Morality is expressed by an inability or refusal to accept that different cultures have equally valid but different moral compasses.
Solution
In a vacuum, all fundamental rights are good: The ideals of having a right to freedom and a right to life are both something we should strive for. The problematic, and I would dare say interesting debate, is what to do when these beliefs clash. For this, Joshua Green suggests two key steps:
- Accepting the possibility of our own Moral Compass failing. 99% of the time, and in our day to day, we can and should follow our Moral Compass: it leads us to do good for our communities and society. The key moment to reconsider this is when our Moral Compass clashes with someone else’s. Then it is time to take a step back, and reflect on where our values come from, and inspect them without making calls to Fundamental Rights. The example above hopefully shows that claiming a “Fundamental Right to Freedom” or a “Fundamental Right to Life” is a conversation stopper on the topic On Abortion, since we can’t satisfy both rights simultaneously.
- Once we accept the above, we can start to look at options and compare: What does a pro-life world look like, and what does a pro-choice world look like? Which would I rather live in. We can see this example applied On Abortion and On Universal Basic Income.