The “it is what it is” attitude is used to excuse a lot of suffering in the world.
It’s not even true, either. We can’t always control things at an individual level, but at a societal level we can. It isn’t a coincidence that there are enough doctors (but not too many). It’s a massive collection of self-correcting mechanisms like salaries that adjust with demand, control over the number of graduating med students, and so on.
The number of pebbles on the beach doesn’t self-regulate, either. Maybe there are enough pebbles until the day that the gravel company comes in with some dump trucks and hauls them off. Do we just say “it is what it is”?
Society can’t and shouldn’t regulate everything, but when there are obvious mechanisms for abuse, it should at least be considered.
I don’t think it’s a problem for loose fossils on the foreshore. Digging in cliffs and excavating etc probably already is a controlled activity. People picking up sharks teeth on the beach? Making that a licensed activity just means fossil merchants will profit from putting the fossils in the hands of the people who would have picked them up for free.
No, it’s perfectly possible to regulate commercial/large-scale exploitation of a resource without also stopping private, individual small-scale use of the same resource. For example in the UK, it’s permitted for individuals to forage on public land for fungi for personal use, and at the same time, commercial collection requires a licence.
My question was rhetorical, of course. Of course it’s possible to write effective regulation, which might include carve-outs for personal use. What we don’t do is go in with the attitude that “it is what it is” and presume that whatever outcome we get is the only possible outcome; or what when we observe a healthy system, that it must have gotten that way naturally instead of being the work of numerous forces keeping things running smoothly.
I’m not saying there should be no regulations in the world. In fact, I would like to see many more and tighter regulations than we currently have, from gun control to overfishing bluefin tuna. These (and many more) are serious problems that have a logical and doable solution without resorting to “what if everybody did it.”
If depleting pebbles on the beach is a serious problem, the “what if everybody did it” argument isn’t a logical argument, because everybody doesn’t or would take pebbles from the beach, (nor will everybody over fish blue-fin tuna, misuse guns, or anything else).
The “what if everybody did it argument” is a weak argument because it could never be true. It’s a false premise. If there’s a problem, any problem, use the “not everybody needs to do it” argument for things that need regulating for the common good.
I used “it is what it is” with regard to the way jobs and production of goods have evolved and distributed over time. You don’t need the argument of “what if everybody” wants to be a doctor, or a plumber, or a whatever, because not everybody would want to be or consume any one thing in particular. Supply and demand does a pretty good job assuring jobs and goods are distributed fairly evenly and for the betterment of society (not perfectly, but nothing is).
For a variety of reasons, the distribution of jobs and production have evolved to meet the needs and demands of society without being over-regulated. We’re recipients of how society has evolved over time to meet our needs, hence it is what it is. That isn’t to imply that things that need regulation should not be regulated. Just use an effective argument.
My point isn’t really to defend “what if everyone did it”, but rather just that “it is what it is” is a bad way to argue against it.
The number of doctors doesn’t need government regulation because other regulating factors, including supply-and-demand forces, are adequate. You or I may not care about the details of these forces, but they are still present. They may not be present in all situations.
“What if everyone wanted to be a doctor” could be a problem if those forces were somehow not present. What if the government decided to give a doctor’s job, with a doctor’s salary, to anyone that desired it, regardless of training or competence or anything else? A “what if everyone” would be a serious problem in that case.
In the case of the beach, there are natural forces that reduce the level of abuse, as long as we are careful about limiting the scope. Beaches have limited capacity; rocks are not particularly valuable; and so on. But we should not blindly assume these forces are present in all analogous situations. With poorly crafted regulation, we might well have individuals show up in their pickup trucks to haul off rocks for their backyard. Any carveouts for personal use should be thought through–allow the child picking up a memento, but not people hauling off cubic meters of the stuff.
Take crowd-crushing as an example. If human behavior compels everyone always to rush into enclosures and cause fatal crushes, I believe society long ago would have stopped making enclosures from which people could not escape en mass. We wouldn’t miss these enclosures today because for us they never existed. We’d have a different type of architectural model for enclosing people.
Given that humans have actually died as a result of being crushed by crowds indoors, and regulations on occupancy limits and fire exits were developed in response, I’m wondering whether
A) you don’t realize/don’t believe that these regulations have saved lives, and think we’re all just magically self-regulating (naive)
B) you believe that, if there ever was a problem with crowds, we could somehow invent a solution that would circumvent the whole concept of “indoors” without anyone freezing to death or suffering any other adverse event that “indoors” was created to prevent (even more naive), or
C) you understand that, without occupancy limits etc., people would die terrible, preventable deaths, but you just don’t care; you think we’d get used to that, and that world would be preferable to one with occupancy limits (indifferent).
No, of course I don’t believe crowd crushing isn’t a serious problem that can and should be regulated. I don’t know how you could draw that conclusion from what I wrote. Actually, I would love to see hyper-regulation of crowds at all high volume venues. Those crushing deaths are horrible and preventable.
My point was that if crowd crushing and panic was a ubiquitous human compulsion of everybody (I.e.“if everybody did it”) from the time of antiquity, then that model of human enclosure would never have taken hold (because ancient architects would have noticed everybody in their buildings were being crushed to death).
But as society evolved, population grew and very large crowds started attending Justine Bieber concerts (or whoever the current mega-star du jour is), not “everybody”, but “enough” people were sufficient to cause crushing cascades. That type of enclosure is fine for ancient crowds numbering in the hundreds, but not fine for mega-crowds in the tens of thousands. Therefore a new architectural model or better crowd regulation is needed, not because “everybody” pushes and panics, but because “enough” people push and panic to affect everyone. Again, use the logical argument, not the illogical one (“everybody”).
Now, not everyone would be tempted to steal an Ear-Lobed Dog Lichen or a Stinking Hawksbeard, but even if a small percentage of Britons did so, populations might eventually be wiped out. Who knows, without the law, larcenous lichen pilferers might run rampant in the U.K. and your entire ecology could be irreparably damaged.
One factor that has complicated things is the creation of ‘how to’ YouTube videos. Everybody and their sibling can nowadays post a short video showing interesting pastimes, including how to find or create interesting things, and this causes an uptick in that sort of activity.
I’ve recently started enjoying ‘mudlarking’ videos, but I’m sure these videos encourage unlicensed mudlarks to venture on the foreshore and remove important archaeological finds. Note that mudlarks need to be licenced in the Thames, where most of the finds are.
I’m sure that if someone made a YouTube video about collecting pebbles off a particular beach, and how to make decorative garden features from them, there would be a rapid increase in pebble-removal in the following period. Flash crowds are a thing, thanks to social media, even if they don’t necessarily happen instantaneously.
True - I think that actually happened with people asking for free baker’s yeast at the bakery counter in supermarkets - it was always a thing that people could do this - primarily, parents would be tasked with doing it for kids making bread in home economics at school. I actually did it in one of my videos, only to later discover that I was on the tail end of a trend that had caused a lot of supermarkets to stop providing it.
But a mob type response like that is mostly only a problem where a resource is quite limited - like a resource of a single location or a single type of resource in the shops, or an endangered species etc. There was a trend during lockdown to collect beach pebbles and paint them, then place/hide them in public places for people to discover. It was massively popular, but I suspect the actual impact on coastal erosion was too small to measure. I mean, skimming stones is also removing them from the beach, and even walking on the beach displaces things and cannot be argued to have absolutely zero impact. People often think they want an absolute, zero-tolerance implementation of a rule, but really, they do not.
I just take it as a way to remind people that small harms still do add up. It isn’t literally supposed to mean “everybody,” but is more a claim that, if they let you do it, they wouldn’t be able to stop a lot of other people from doing it, and that this would create the problem they are trying to solve.
If you put out some sort of hard limit, then you will have people who will go right up to that limit, even if they previously wouldn’t have bothered at all. So sometimes it just makes sense to make it all illegal, while just having prosecutorial discretion. It’s not like saying it’s illegal stops people from doing it completely–in fact, it may limit it to exactly the level they want.
If taking a pebble is fine, how about a dozen? Or a cup, or a bucket? I think these pebbles would do well in my rock garden, so I fill up a 55 gallon trash can to take back home, and come back next week for more.
It’s not commercial extraction, but it doesn’t take millions of people with that mindset to ruin the beach for everyone else.
So, rather than make a limit, which would actually encourage people to take as much as they can up to that limit, even if they wouldn’t have taken any otherwise, it’s just verboten.
Such regulations are usually not drawn up because everyone is doing it, or out of a concern that everyone may do it. They are drawn up because too many people are doing it right now. The “what if everyone did” is shorthand for those who don’t understand the tragedy of the commons, but it’s not actually what the legislative policy is based on.
But, in line with the OP question (“Not everyone is going to do it, so the ‘what if everyone did it?’ argument is just spurious, isn’t it?”), I, and I assumed others, were taking “what if everyone did it” at face value, as a legitimate, logical argument, not that it is shorthand for something else. Certainly if “what if everybody did it” is shorthand for “if enough people did it” then that change in nomenclature turns a literal interpreted argument (which is illogical) into a shorthanded alternate interpreted argument (which is logical).
Fair enough, but I don’t see the the actual source of who made that argument other than the OP. I agree that it’s not a good argument, and so I don’t think that that was the actual one put forward in developing this legislation.
On its very face, it’s a hyperbole, because there are 7 billion people in the world, and it’s impossible for everyone to do the same thing, and cannot possibly be meant to be used literally, and leads to the very absurdities the OP opines on.
I think it’s the other way around, in which the literal argument is “too many people are doing this thing,” and the interpreted argument is “if everyone did it.”
If the OP wants to demonstrate who it was that made the “if everyone did it” argument, then that would go a great deal to clearing that up. If it’s a passerby explaining to their child why they can’t take home that shiny pebble, that’s one thing. If it is actually the argument made by those pushing for the legislation, that’s a whole different story.
But, there-in lies the rub. You’re talking about Real Life ® (i.e. “developing this legislation”) But, this is the SDMB, where unreal people often discuss theory and illogicality.
