Garret Hardin's Lifeboat Metaphors To Help Other Countries

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Garret Hardin uses a “lifeboat” metaphor that argues against helping other countries. Garret not only discourages providing food and relief to other countries, he even says that it is erroneous to do so. Hardin said all wealthy nations and their people are in a lifeboat; these lifeboats can only carry and provide for a limited number of people. All the other people of the world, immigrants, the starving, they are all in the water trying not to drown. If we let too many of these people into our lifeboat, the boat will sink and we will all drown.

Hardin suggests is that we provide aid to a few people, and simply ignore the rest. Just forgetting an important fact that there are thousands of people starving to death each day. According to Hinman,

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