Syllabus

Short Course Description

"Who owns the Commons?" The concept of "the commons" first appeared in the environmental debate as an answer to questions of the origin of our ecological crisis. According to biologist Garrett Hardin, the environmental crisis is inevitable because natural resources are managed as common resources ("the tragedy of the commons"). Proposals to "solve" the tragedy through privatization (or State or international governance) were described by critics and historians as creating a different social "tragedy": of "enclosure", the expropriation of the rights of individuals, groups and nations thereby generating economic and social inequalities. Private property is based on exclusion, and thus is contrary to common property ? ?the commons?. This concept serves both as a new framework for discussion of environmental and ecological justice and as an attempt to redraw the map of relations between market and global economy, society and the environment.
These themes recur in other related fields, including the discourse on copyright and intellectual property in the digital and intellectual spheres, especially in the context of globalization, international trade agreements, industrial vs. ecological agriculture, the Internet, open source software, copyright, patents and scientific research, etc. The "melodrama" of the commons includes the tragedy of the anticommons (in scientific research), the comedy of the commons (creating non-market affluence שפע within society), and more.
The discussion on the Commons will be integrated with the concept of Bioethics, commonly understood as the field that deals with ethical questions related to the biomedical sciences and research. Originally, the term Bioethics appeared in the writings of Van Rensselaer Potter, who saw in Aldo Leopold and deep ecology the appropriate models for medical and professional ethics in the field of life sciences, and especially emphasized environmental aspects, which today are almost completely absent from the bioethical discourse. Currently, due to new policies in the fields of climate, the environment and public health, bioethical considerations become critical in many controversies concerning management of the commons and commons-based human rights.
Therefore, the course will review the beginnings of bioethics, the main ideas in the field today, the dilemmas that appear as a result of the relative neglect of environmental aspects (and the attitude towards nature in general) in bioethics, which the bioethicist Peter Whitehouse called the "eco-medical disconnection syndrome". For this reason, we will consider (eco-centric) Ecologism as an ideology and as an alternative to the dominant world view, and as a perspective from which we examine bioethics, the commons and human rights, especially in the context of the commons of science and Ecological Justice (versus environmental justice). Methodologically, topics discussed in the seminar will be viewed from the perspective of argumentation theory and controversy analysis (Prof. Marcelo Dascal).