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Garrett Hardin Lifeboat Ethics Summary

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Lifeboat Ethics In “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor,” Garrett Hardin addresses the issue of global equal right to an equal share of resources and proposes a wide range of solutions to reveal the feasibility of various proposals that include government policies, sharing, foreign aid, and immigration. Overall, Hardin suggests in his argument to Americans that humanity rides on “the ethics of a lifeboat, harsh though they may be” (Hardin). Through the classification of all nations into two groups, rich or poor, Hardin presents the problem of the use of the world’s resources by all people. As a simple representation of this issue, he compares one third of the world’s nations to a lifeboat full of rich people and two thirds of the world’s nation to the ocean full of poor people. Through the depiction of the rich lifeboats and poor people “adrift in a moral sea,” Hardin equates the urgency of survival at sea to the problem of overpopulation and hunger in the real world (Hardin). Today natural resources are decreasing, causing resource inequality between rich and …show more content…

Starting with two opposing arguments he identifies “the Christian ideal of being ‘our brother’s keeper’” and “the Marxist ideal of ‘to each according to his needs.’” These two arguments are both representations of “complete justice, complete catastrophe” as they offer two extreme solutions in which nobody benefits. Hardin then goes on to explore proposals of sharing, world food banks, learning from experiences, planning ahead, population control, improving technology, providing advice, and unrestricted immigration (Hardin). Unfortunately all of these solutions have many flaws and are not feasible to implement because they cause more problems than they are able to solve. All of these flaws lead to tragedy for humanity and greater inequality for all

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