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What Do I Owe to People and Planet?

Many of us see the plight of Syrians and others from war-torn areas of the Middle East and elsewhere, wondering what, if anything, we should do to help them. How much effort should I put into helping people who are subject to racial or religious prejudice in our own country? What responsibilities should I undertake to curb global warming and environmental degradation?


In each case, I could devote my entire life to these matters – protest racism, raise money for displaced persons, lobby the government for greater help to the American poor and the world’s refugees, take public transportation when available, become a vegetarian, etc. But this would make me miserable, and it doesn’t seem fair that I should take on so much.


How much should I do, then? If I do nothing, I must accept that others who enjoy my level of affluence are also absolved of responsibility, even though collectively we could avert much human suffering and environmental degradation. That doesn’t seem fair to people who are poorer than me or to future inhabitants of the earth.


I suggest a middle course for people like me, who aren’t disposed to activism or self-sacrifice. It’s a middle road between doing nothing and devoting one’s life to good causes. It’s called the Principle of Anticipatory Cooperation (PAC), which calls on all of us to contribute less to problems and more to solutions than our social and economic peers.


If you reject heroically bicycling through summer heat and winter snow storms, you could use a relatively fuel-efficient vehicle. But how fuel efficient? If your peers, people of your income living in your area, drive cars that average 20 m.p.h., use a car that averages 30 m.p.h. Then stay ahead of what’s done on average by others. As average car fuel efficiency improves to 30 m.p.h., use one that gets 40 m.p.h.


Some people in the community are active in religious and civic organization, working at food banks or tutoring children who are falling behind in school. Others are more involved in political activity, writing letters, lobbying representatives, and joining rallies. If you are one of these people, and live among others who volunteer on average 3 hours per week, you can contribute more than average by doing 4 hours per week of such work. If you aren’t an activist, you can contribute money to support what activists are doing, more money than people of your income and wealth contribute on average.


There’s no certainty that enough others will respond to your actions so as to constitute a collective effort large enough to make a large-scale difference. But there’s reason to think it will. Human beings are social animals who are influenced by what others do even when they don’t realize it. Studies show that when one person in a small working group goes on a successful diet, peers in the office tend to lose weight as well.


What’s more, when you buy a more fuel efficient car, you create demand for it which sends a signal to manufacturers that they should make more of them. When they make more, economies of scale often reduce the price, so the cars become more affordable for others. If you take public transportation when it’s available, you send a signal that more such transportation is valued by the public. If you volunteer at a soup kitchen, your actions bespeak your values more clearly than any speech, and this augments their social influence.


As the social norm moves closer to what you’re doing, you can increase your actions that help people and planet because the social atmosphere and physical accommodations will have altered so as to make such actions easier. You’ll have more camaraderie at the soup kitchen and more public transportation. So you can do more without greater sacrifice. Also, you’ll be demonstrating that a normal life can be lived more nearly within environmental limits and with greater attention to the needs of the poor, thereby reducing fear among others that such actions require too much sacrifice.


Many of these actions, such as tutoring school children, will almost certainly help particular people even if they’re not part of a collective effort that brings about large-scale change. But don’t discount the power of a good example. In any case, you shouldn’t want any single individual, even someone as good-hearted as yourself, to have overwhelming influence on society, as this would impair the individual freedom we value.


Additional consolation for your inability to change the world should come from the satisfaction of living with greater integrity – reducing the extent to which you are part of what you consider problems and increasing the extent to which you are part of their solution. You will have found a middle ground between being a selfish jerk and a miserable martyr.

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