Garrett Hardin Lifeboat Ethics The Case Against Helping The Poor Summary

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In Garrett Hardin’s “ Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor,” Hardin argues that we should not aid the poor because there is only a limited amount of resources available, and it can become a threat to everyone if the population growth of the poor keeps increasing and if our limited resources keep decreasing. Hardin cleverly uses a lifeboat metaphor to set up his argument by putting the reader into a life or death situation. He places the rich people inside of the boat which only has a limited amount of space and the poor are placed outside of the lifeboat stranded in the water. Hardin convinces readers that the only way for survival is if the rich let the poor suffer. However, in Alan Durning’s “Asking How Much Is Enough,” Durning states that the real reason why our resources keep dwindling is because the rich are carelessly over consuming them. Unlike Hardin, Durning includes three world classes the rich, the middle, and the poor. Durning brings in the middle class which gives the reader a more realistic picture to realize that the overconsumption of the rich is just making the poor, poorer. Hardin fails to even mention the middle class or overconsumption because he only wants the reader to focus on the overpopulation of the poor. Durning exposes Hardin’s rhetoric by stating that the rich are the ones who are carelessly over consuming their own resources and how Hardin falsely demonizes the poor by making it easier to blame them for abusing our limited resources.
In Hardin’s lifeboat metaphor there are 50 rich people inside a lifeboat with a total capacity of 60 people and 100 poor people swimming in the water which represents rich nations versus poor nations (508). Hardin says, suppose, if we ignore the limited cap...

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...t’s simply just thin air. The real problem is that the rich are much more wasteful and they will never be satisfied because their wants are limitless and that’s why “there is no such thing as enough” (408). Hardin believe that one space for the rich is equal to one space for the poor but in Durning’s argument of overconsumption he makes one realize that the rich overconsume much more than the poor. Americans will constantly keep overconsuming for their own selfish desires. However, the poor just want a small portion of what the rich have because they want a minimal amount to just survive. The poor have to “slash and burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America” to find resources for them to get by another day (405). Clearly Americans are the ones constantly wasting their limited resources and watching others in need suffer so ultimately they are the threat.

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