Lifeboat Ethics

To Save or Not to Save Garrett Hardin presents several ideals on whether the poor should be saved or not through his article of “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor”. Hardin was an ecologist who wrote several articles on overpopulation. Throughout the article Hardin talked about how the poor could be saved by the rich by using the different ethnics of life. Although he tells the possible ways to saving the poor, he fails to give his stance on how he would save them. The world is divided into two sections: the rich and the poor, “two thirds of them are desperately poor, and only one third are comparatively rich…” (290) Garrett Hardin uses the “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor” to illustrate whether the poor should be saved by the

These are examples within the essay that do not get much explanation and leaves some readers confused for a bit. When he speaks of the safety factor of the boat and explains how if the space goes unused from others than they can use it as storage space or other things, what are those other items going to be? Are there other resources in the boat? If so, would that not take up room for those other ten people to get in? We know what the carrying capacity is as far as people for the lifeboat, but is there a weight factor to it also? Everyone on that boat is not the same age. Some would die soon because of several different reasons (age, food, resources, etc.). As far as other parties boarding the boat it should be the ones left in the water, “…we shall have to be constantly on guard against other boarding parties” (291). If the other boarding parties are from other boats, they should not have a reason to join other boats unless they are after more resources because they ran through theirs so