> someone who causes harm to other people without any benefit or causing harm to themselves.
Everyone is guilty of doing this from time to time. Collectively we are doing plenty of harm to the environment and we lack the will or the wherewithal to stop. It is a pretty universal behavioral pattern.
That's an interesting point. This was written before climate change was a major concern, and maybe in the mean time it's become harder to engage in "intelligent behavior" (i.e. actions which benefit ourselves and others).
I would say, though, that in almost all cases, emitting CO2 is more like bandit behavior than stupid behavior. If I drive 100 miles in my car, I probably benefit from that a lot more than the harm I cause directly to myself by emitting that CO2, which is almost certainly negligible.
You could make the case that it's B2 Bandit behavior (harm caused to everyone collectively is greater than the benefit to myself), but that would depend on why I made the car trip and how much benefit I got.
One could make the case that with climate change, human civilization as a whole is suffering because individually we're mostly engaging in B2 behavior. You might say that humanity is acting stupidly, but that would require us to define who the "other" is: non-human life? People who haven't been born yet? Space aliens?
Tragedy of the commons [0] is a tragedy precisely because it is not stupid for each individual player to take more than sustainable from the common environment.
It is only in aggregate, and possibly after the player's lifetime, when the negative consequences arrive.
