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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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By challenging common assumptions and being ethical he effectively claims that the solution to solving these global hunger problems is foreign assistance. Paarlberg shows Pathos, Ethos and Logos through the thought of unravelling worldwide starvation by being realistic of the view on pre-industrial food and farming. Pathos is clearly evident in Paarlberg’s article through the presentation of the food insecurity problem in Africa and Asia. He uses impassioned words as an attempt to reach out to his target audience on a more emotional level by agitating and drawing sympathy of whole food shoppers and policy makers. Paarlberg employs Pathos during the article when he says, “The majority of truly undernourished people -- 62 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization -- live in either Africa or South Asia, and most are small farmers or rural landless laborers living in the countryside of Africa and South Asia” (page 611-12).

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Hardin wants his audience to see his rationale, which forms the basis of his argument behind not helping the poor. It is impossible for the reader to draw the line as well as pick and choose between who he or she wants to save or let drown. This goes back to reinforce Hardin’s argument because affluent nations cannot simply select one impoverished nation they want to support and ignore all over nations facing the same economic instability. Instead, they must provide consistent aid to every nation; however, doing so is financially taxing, taking a toll on their own economic

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He accredits the equality of wealth and how the “the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged” (Lines 6-7). Status equality is a trait that still continues to thrive in American values, as many programs aim to improve impoverished living while imposing larger taxes on the wealthy to fund these programs. Around the nation, individuals with a small yearly income can benefit from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides nutrition assistance to families who don’t make enough money to purchase necessary foods. Paine’s description shows how the poor are not entirely neglected, as America has continuously supported them in various ways. Wealthy Americans display their concern for the poor, as they use their wealth to support relief projects for territories that are devastated by a natural disaster.

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Hardin strongly appeals to logos to show his readers that rich countries like the United States shouldn’t help poor countries because it would continue the growth rate of poor countries and will leave future generations with a poor quality of life. One way he does this is by using statistics. While discussing at the beginning the metaphor of lifeboats and explaining the gap between the population of rich countries compared to poor countries Hardin says, “On average poor countries undergo a population a 2.5 increase in population each year; rich countries about 0.8 percent” (par. 28). This is effective because it is makes the reader realize that poor countries are taking over population wise; therefore, are in need of more resources than we are. That means that if we want to help poor countries we have to share with them, but

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Carelessly, the working middle and the high class people always forget about what the poor working class has to do in life to survive. In a passage from the novel, The Working Poor Invisible In America, David Shipler compares the poor working class wages to the amount of food they are able to buy. Shipler is able to creatively inform the audience using description, exemplification, and cause and effect what the life a poor working class citizen does everyday.     David Shipler shapes an image in the minds of all of his readers with his selective word choice. As a result of not having the money to pay for food, parents are forced to let their children starve, and as a result those children start looking “listless”.

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Garret Hardin and Walter Benjamin wrote essays called “Lifeboat Ethics” and “Challenge to the Eco-Doomsters. Both authers present different points of view when it comes to immigration, foriegn aid, and population. Hardin is opposed to immigration and compares the United States to a lifeboat that can only hold so many people before it sinks. He belives if we keep letting people in to the country we will overcrowded and everyone who is already here will be effected. He says the country is a “commons”, and can hold only so many people.

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After analyzing these works it is evident Swift has the more effective piece. His use of a more emotional based persuasion method keeps the reader s attention. This helps in persuading them to look at the real meaning of the piece. Hardin seemed more cold and uncaring as if the poor doesn’t matter. Using Pathos, Logos, and Ethos to analyze the effectiveness of the proposals helps the reader to better understand the

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In this paper I will be arguing against Peter Singer’s views on poverty, which he expresses in his paper “The Singer Solution to World Poverty”. Singer argues that all people with wealth surplus to their essential needs are morally obligated to prevent the suffering of those in dire situations. I will argue that you can not hold people morally obligated to prevent the suffering of others, and that people can only be held morally obligated to prevent suffering that they themselves caused. To begin, we will look at Singers beliefs and arguments regarding poverty and the responsibility of people to help those in need. Singer’s first arguments revolves around a girl named Dora, who is a retired schoolteacher, who is barely making a living writing

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During the Great Depression, many people were desperate for a job, food, shelter, and security, all of which are standards expected in the modern world. However, in the midst of an economic crisis, the people who had stability despised those who could not achieve a steady way of life. Farmers who hoarded the food that could keep people alive would not help those in need. By selfishly withholding aid, the farmers failed humanity in a way, “that topples all our success,” showing that what they did was not right (Steinbeck 349). When faced with the injustice of people being too poor to afford what they need to survive, those who had resources were morally obligated to help feed those

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Hardine declared the metaphor “spaceship” can be dangerous when used by misguided idealists, sharing our resources with uncontrolled immigration and foreign aid would consider to be the ethics of a lifeboat. He gave a logical reasoning about if we help all the swimmer to get on the boat, the boat will drown and we all die. Also “when we let an extra 10 into our lifeboat, we will have lost our “safety factor”, this is true, if we don’t leave space for safety factor, even us can face some catastrophic consequences. He said “since the world’s resources are dwindling , the difference in prosperity between the rich and the poor can only increase”, the poor nations reproductive rate is a lot greater than the rich, and so helping the poor probably will lead to more poor people. In “the tragedy of commons” , he concluded “only the replacement of the system of the commons with a responsible system of control will save the land, air, water and ocean fisheries” which an accurate statement for “commons” can be diminish overtime if no one take the responsibility to care for it.

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