Today I’ve run across an interesting case that seems to illustrate the little vortex mentioned in the previous post. The gist is summarized reasonably well by the subtitle, “The man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe—plus his argument was wrong”. This is a criticism of the concept of the tragedy of the commons as a way of understanding human social dynamics. The criticism of Hardin and his specific presentation of the concept isn’t of any real interest to me. I’m sure I’d heard Hardin’s name before this article, but if you’d asked me yesterday who he was I could not have told you a single thing about him. The particular article of his that led to the tragedy of the commons entering mainstream thought, likewise, I may well have encountered in some fashion but have no memory of. I’m certainly aware of the tragedy of the commons, though, and have devoted some real attention to it. The opinions I have on that matter may well be incorrect, but I do have opinions and can articulate something about them. So this gives us kind of an interesting context, in which the author of the article, Matto Mildenberger, is trying to say something about a concept that is of some interest to me by criticizing a particular person and essay that aren’t.

There’s a contrast here between the concept as concept and the concept as the result of a particular sequence of events that led it to have a place in my mind and the minds of others. Suppose, like me until reading this article, you had no conscious awareness of that particular sequence of events. Was the concept in your mind tainted by its origin, when the origin was not in your mind? I don’t think so.

Suppose commutativity was discovered by someone with morally abhorrent views of one kind or another. Given the prevalence of morally abhorrent views in most of human history, there’s a pretty good chance that this truly is the case. You, knowing nothing of this, employ the concept with only some understanding of its logical foundation and practical utility in mathematics. There certainly is some historical sequence of events that led to the concept arising and being adopted. In this hypothetical situation, a relationship between commutativity and moral abhorrence is a historical fact but you probably wouldn’t say that it commutativity is mathematically wrong. It has a logical foundation is in some sense independent of its historical origin. Put another way, if a murderer hands you an apple, it’s still an apple.

In this article about the tragedy of the commons, the link between the concept and Hardin’s racism is factual in one sense, but performative in another. We never reject an idea because a racist came up with it, but we may well reject an idea if we know that a racist came up with it. There is a historical sequence of events that runs parallel to the moral evaluation in our minds. If we aren’t aware of the historical sequence of events, our moral evaluation will not run parallel to it. Once that moral evaluation does enter our minds we want to say that it already existed, was already true in some sense, independently of our being aware of it. Both the moral evaluation and our intuition that the moral evaluation was already true are created not by the facts of the situation but by, in this particular case, Mildenberger.