Lifeboat Ethics Rhetorical Analysis

Ethos, pathos and logos are the three rhetorical appeals that I use everyday. I used it in many discussions with my mom, arguments with my siblings, or just simply as asking my friend to go out at night. Since the used of it is not mentioned frequently, people often don’t know the meaning of tools and whether they had used it or not. Rhetorical tools are used in an argument, especially when you try to persuade someone with the opposite view or someone who is still shilly-shally about the issue. After the first journal I wrote, I had discover more about how to use those tools and how to evaluate it. In “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the poor” authored by Garrett Hardin, he had successfully used the three rhetorical tools in the

A paragraph that displayed pathos is in “Adrift in a Moral Sea” section; Hardin used “we” in the first sentence to makes the reader feel sympathy with the circumstance. He goes on with the assumption: “We 50 people on the lifeboat. The lifeboat capacity is 60 spots, there are 100 people swim in the water and begging for admission to join the lifeboat. So which 10 do we let in? If we let all of them in and making the total of 150, the boat swamp, everyone drowns” The question here is made for the rich nations, and by using pathos in the sentence, I felt sad and worry at the same time; sad for the poor people of how much they had to suffer, worry for us because if we decide to help all of them, no one will be survive. Pathos also displayed in the “Overloading the Environment” section, Hardine’s point shows that “the population in India is 600 million, and increase 15 million each year. Every new life will put an additional burden on the environment, every Indian life saved through medical and nutritional assistance program diminishes the quality of life for those who remain, and for the next generation, as their current growth rate threatens, will future generations of Indians thank us for hastening the destruction of their environment? Will our good intentions be sufficient excuse for the consequence of our actions?” Hardine had done a great job by making us feel bad and question ourself about

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. In “Learning the hard way” and “ Population control the crude way”, Hardine pointed out a reason that make poor nations can’t become better. The U.S and other rich nations deposited food into the World Food Bank, the poor nations will withdraw the food from it; since the food always “available”, the poor nations will not learn to improve their