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Lifeboat Ethics Essay

735 Words3 Pages

Lifeboat Ethics critique
Khalil Abouhassan
60035

Life boat ethics is an essay published in 1974 in Psychology Today which is a metaphor for food distribution. Hardin has wrote much more books , articles , and journeys beside lifeboat ethics such as Promethean Ethics , Living Within Limits , and Exploring new ethics for survival, the author claims that the food distribution in the world is a moral issue considering both the wealthy and the poor people all around the world. He uses life boat ethics to question policies such as food banks and immigration.

Garrett Hardin was an ecologist who were much warned about the human overpopulation and its results .Hardin received a B.S. in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1936 and a PhD in …show more content…

One of the examples of “the tragedy of the commons” is the food bank which is an international depository of food reserves where people give money to feed the hungry people. Hardin claims that giving money to food banks will keep the hunger cycle going over and over because the population in the poor countries increase by 2.5 percent while the rich ones increase by 0.8 only, so as they grow more the need more food, the author states that in the long run it will increase the need rather than decrease it. Hardin then uses the counter argument to convince the audience by stating that the world food bank appeals powerfully to our humanitarian impulses, and some people defended that food for peace program. Hardin replies that defenders rarely mentioned its importance to any special interest but only on its humanitarian effects, and we should not be strictly against a humanitarian program but we must ask if its benefits do more than harm.

Hardin explained his viewpoints stating facts about how defenders benefit from the food banks. The words that Hardin used in stating the facts where pretty good to make people believe him, but he used some emotional appeals throughout his article like ethos by including quantitative data such as 0.8

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