Analyzing the Lifeboat Essay

Overpopulation without Limits in Hardin's "Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor" In this article, written by Garrett Hardin. He explains his different view on how to truly help the poor. Hardin starts his article with the use of a metaphor, referring to the Earth as a spaceship. "A true spaceship would have to be under the control of a captain, and Earth certainly has no captain" he says. This led him to the idea that if we divide the world into rich nations and poor nations, "each rich nation can be seen as a lifeboat." Hardin continues his article by asking us to imagine ourselves in a lifeboat. Where there is room for sixty people on the boat, but there are only fifty sitting in there at the time. Near them are one-hundred others swimming in the water they represent the poor countries. He argues that we should not help the poor people," If we let an extra 10 into our lifeboat we will have lost our safety factor." At first Hardin's ethics seem rude and selfish, but us we continue reading he makes it clear this may be the only way to save our world and have it become a better place. Hardin continues explaining why rich countries should not help poor countries that are in need. He believes a poor country that needs support needs to learn the hard way, even if that means losing resources or people. The ethic that reveals has good reasoning. Helping someone in need has always been a moral in someone's life. But now, Hardin purposes a new ethic, the lifeboat ethic, with which he is simply only trying to provide a solution to our worldly problem. However, with the lifeboat metaphor Hardin is not only talking about the limits in the space, he is also talking about the overpopulation that do not respect the limits.

Hardin states, "we must recognize the limited capacity of a lifeboat if we let too many people on the boat swamps, everyone drowns". He claims there is only one solution, one lifeboat with room for only a few. The difference between the spaceship ethic, which is where we should share resources because all needs and shares are equal, and the lifeboat ethic, we should not share our resources and using this ethic we should not help the poor. He argues because of limited resources, tragedy of commons and no true world government to control reproduction and use of available resources, we should govern by the ethics of lifeboat. The author goes on to compare statistics of population increase in smaller countries and the amount of resources used, "we must recognize needs are determined by population size..." growth in the population converts natural resources into pollutants, this will only make the problem worse. Hardin believed if we let the population increase without educating the people to preserve their resources the problems would not diminish. Further on the author gives the statistic, "a total of $7.9 billion in taxes was spent