Property and Hunger and Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor

World Hunger

School Lunches - White trays with five individually sized compartments, filled with whatever mystery meat, or previously defrosted sides came off the truck that month, accompanied with a carton of milk; where in most cases chocolate milk, which means the sugar content is higher. For a staggering number of children in the public school system this maybe their only meal for the day. When discussing world hunger, one need not look at commercials of a far away place for malnourished, large abdomen children, just have to look down to see America’s future, wasting away. How does one combat a subset of a nation’s population, more importantly a population with no political voice or property? Child poverty is an issue best dealt with the moral justifications and analyses in Amartya Sen’s article “Property and Hunger” and undermines the ethics in Garrett Hardin’s “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case against helping the poor”

In Hardin’s article he brings up several contentions about giving any assistance to poorer nations, and has no qualms inadvertently starving to death entire groups of people that won’t succumb to population control. His justifications for such inaction is an all or nothing mentality that strives from the inequalities in man; he calls this the tragedy of the commons; the example given is a pasture shared by herdsman can survive if all willingly and voluntarily restrain themselves from overusing it, but one bad apple is all it takes to poison the well and leave the pasture barren. This logic refers back to Plato’s The Myth of Gyges, a story thats recounts the tale of a king who only rose to power because given the power of anonymity; he committed atrocities because, as Glaucon recounts “...all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice...”, and in this way a herdsman will always sway from the pack to get ahead. While in applied ethics the darkness of humanity should always be taken into account, when applying this to children it lacks an inert internal support. To the point where it’s sickening to think that Hardin wouldn’t support a government funded free lunch program in public school because there are profiteers around every corner ready to take advantage, when it ultimately does feed the poorest of poor, those who cannot grasp or change their current predicament, the children.

Sen on the other hand argues for an institutionalization of the moral right not to be hungry, and brings to light that not being hungry also includes not being malnourished.