Some social mechanisms distil social good out of individual selfish decisions (e.g. Adam Smith’s free market system), as if by an unseen hand. Other social mechanisms distil dilemmas and tragedies out of individual selfish decisions (e.g. Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, Tragedy of the Commons), as if by an unseen fist. In both cases, the consequences are unintended, even counter-intuitive. The individual, as Economic Man or Rational Player (maximizer of individual gain) is just minding his own business, without intending to benefit or hurt anyone.

Why the difference between the Unseen Hand and the Unseen Fist? Perhaps because the free market deals with private goods and the Tragedy of the Commons with public goods. Garrett Hardin suggests that the public pasture should be privatized to prevent overgrazing, i.e. individual parcels of land should be given to individual cattle owners. The opposite (socialist) remedy is to constitute a planning authority to regulate the use of the pasture. Both methods prevent the Tragedy. The Common, which originally belonged to no one, is converted either to belonging to many separately or to everyone in common. Originally no one was responsible for managing the resource; everyone opted to be a “free rider”; now there is either individual or common responsibility and stewardship. Either way, capitalist or socialist, removes the Unseen Fist, converting it either to the Unseen Hand or to the Common Heritage of Mankind.

But some public goods cannot be privatized, e.g. provision of clean air and water. In that case of “true” or narrowly defined public goods, only the second solution is possible. True public goods are those to which there necessarily exists unrestricted access once they are produced, by everyone, whether they contributed to their production or not; which cannot be appropriated by anyone or divided into individual parcels.

Tragedy of the Commons is essentially an n-person Prisoner’s Dilemma game, in that the pay-off for unilateral (individual) non-cooperation is high, but in multilateral non-cooperation all do more poorly than in multilateral cooperation, and the unilateral cooperator is the worst off. But multilateral cooperation is not self-enforcing; in fact it is not a “natural” equilibrium solution of the game at all (multilateral non-cooperation is). So multilateral cooperation must be enforced; either by a binding contract, or by external sanctions (“side-payments”), or by people acting unselfishly, following various moral rules: the Golden Rule of Jesus, the Categorical Imperative of Kant, the General Will of Rousseau, the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number of J.S. Mill, Sarvodaya in India’s Gandhian tradition, or “What we desire for ourselves, we desire for all” of Canada’s own J.S. Woodsworth. There is no shortage of ethical paradigms; they exist in all cultures and all philosophical traditions, because overcoming Unseen Fist mechanisms is and has always been the central problems in ethics and politics, indeed in all social life.

As models of man, Economic Man and Rational Player have to yield, in public goods situations, to Conscious Moral Agent. Since many public goods are now global in scope (e.g. climate change), the planning authority will have to be global, because nations too can no longer be permitted to be selfish utility maximizers. The alternative, a Global Tragedy of the Commons, is too painful to contemplate.