Thanks for the kind words- Feeling's mutual, or I wouldn't have replied
As far as the discussion is concerned, I think I agree with everything you've since posted. It's figuring out the result of that that I'm struggling with a bit. Bear with me for a moment, I'm probably going to repeat myself but slightly differently.

There needs to be a goal that each individual has. For the sake of the discussion, I'd like to assume it's painting pictures. Individuals strive to be able to paint pictures. Hopefully what this goal is in your mind shouldn't change the following, but if it does, obviously just sing out.

Now, if Jim does all the things he needs to do to put food on his table, he has what we'll say is an average amount of time to paint pictures in his day.

If Jim steals from me in a society where nobody else steals, he can put food on his table more quickly, and thus has a large amount of time in which he can paint pictures.

That, however, is unsustainable, and leads to the situation in which everybody's stealing, Jim still has to put food on his table but also has to protect against thieves, so he has a small amount of time to paint pictures.

Jim's interest is painting pictures. We can see that the way Jim is going to be able to paint the most pictures in his life is if he abides by Option A. But in the short-term, Jim is going to be very tempted by Option B, because it will give him a larger amount of time to paint pictures.

And this is surely what you meant with regards to the river and educating people of the true consequences of their actions. That if Jim truly understood that option B would deteriorate into option C, the least desirable for him, then he would see that the choice which best served his interests is not Option B, but Option A.


Okay, I think it's clear we both agree on the above. So one solution to the temptation of Option B is the law, which exists to combat this short-sightedness which would lead to the choosing of short-term-good-,-long-term-bad options. And an alternative is educating people so they understand the long-term consequences of their actions, so they know that Option B is negative for them, rather than positive.

So I guess the issues now are:

1) Can that level of comprehension actually be accomplished? I understand that my university classes are beneficial to me, but when I wake up on a cold winter's morning it's disappointingly often that the temptation to stay in bed wins.

2) What of choices where the long-term consequences don't affect the individual. In your river example, if we imagine the river to be the only source of the town's drinking water, and the level of pollution to be enough that the water would remain drinkable for longer than Jim's lifetime but shortly after that would become unusable, thus killing the future inhabitants of the town. (This example is slightly flawed because their comes a point where the continued pollution is being done by people who will be affected by it, and being long-term-thinkers they'll stop. However it's probably not too hard to imagine something this generation could do, like cutting down every forest, which would be done solely by us, wouldn't damage us in our lifetime, but would have a profound negative effect x years down the track). How long-term are the consequences we need to take into account? Only ones which could affect us? Affect our offspring? Affect the offspring of our species, life on our planet, etc. etc.

I'll leave it there for now as I don't want to ramble on for thousands of words when you might have a point regarding something in the first sentence which would send the discussion somewhere else!