1. MIT271: Technology & Human Values
January 29
Privacy and the Commons:
Computers and Population

2. Administration: Final study question:
What sorts of harm may pornography cause that makes criminal the production and distribution of materials classified as obscene? Why, in addition, is the possession of child pornography criminal? Why is possession especially a problem with the growth of the internet?
Webpage is up and has everything you need for the test:

3. Computers and privacy Major ethical conflict is between:
Privacy: personal data, communications, ideas, errors
Publicity: concerning the need to limit “the digital divide”: computer access and literacy increase existing social divisions

4. Garrett Hardin: The Tragedy of the Commons
Endless increase in human population
Cannot be solved by technology
Can be solved only by relinquishing the freedom to breed

5. Technical solution requires:
“a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences”
“little or nothing n the way of change in human values or morality”
(page 285)

6. The population problem
Population grows exponentially/geometrically
Finite world can support a finite population. So, population growth must eventually by zero.

7. The moral problem: maximizing utility
Utilitarianism: Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
Utility =df the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people

8. Zero population growth ≠ maximum utility
If the optimum level of population is the maximum population.
(a) Not mathematically possible to maximize for two independent variables.
(b) Maximizing population requires bare maintenance of human life, and limiting activities that provide people pleasure

9. Evaluating population size
What else might determine the optimum level of population?
For other species: natural selection
No examples of stable and prosperous human populations
The “invisible hand” (nature?) is merely an article of faith, not a reasonable expectation; and is rebutted by …

10. The tragedy of the commons
In general:
Each individual seeks to maximize self-interest
People share limited resources in common
People tend to maximize individual utility at the expense of general utility
In the case of population: pollution [ecology?] leads to need for new property rights [ negative freedom]

11. Options for achieving moderation
Education / propaganda
Must be universal, or individual populations will eliminate themselves
Tendency to produce pathological anxiety
Mutual coercion mutually agreed upon
E.g., taxes
Private property: enclosed farmland, hunting and fishing areas, sewage, … other pollution?
“injustice is preferable to total ruin”

12. What is the greatest problem with Hardin’s position?
Are his assumptions warranted?
Are his assumptions adequate to support his claims about the limits of technology?
Are his assumptions adequate to support the limitation of human freedom to breed?

13. Frankenfood
Biotechnology might serve to expand our food supply (almost) indefinitely?
Opposition to GM foods may be motivated by:
Fear?
Anti-capitalist sympathies?
Anti-GM popular in Europe