As the creators of their economy, human beings must fix where it is broken for those who are poor. Nelson Mandela described this when he said, “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings” (Mandela). The writers of “Life Boat Ethics” and “A Modest Proposal”, Johnathan Swift and Garrett Hardin, take on the task of forming a solution to helping improve impoverished countries. Swift has an overly optimistic view, whereas Hardin has an unrealistic but applicable approach; however, both writers agree that we simply cannot help everyone and choices must be made concerning the risk of depleted resources, the threat of famine and over population.
In their
Swift believes that the Irish women do not have a sense of self-worth and pride. Due to this the women tend to have children out of wedlock without much support. This usually leads to poverty for their families. Swift believes that “curing the Expenciveness of Pride, Vanity, Idleness, and Gaming in our Women”(Swift 389) will help them learn to make better relationship decisions and the need for outside support will be diminished along with the number of children born into poverty. However, Swift doesn’t highlight how this message will be relayed to women. This idea is teetering on a moral and ethical line. Hardin develops a different solution. He concludes that citizens in poorer countries take the amount of land available for granted. He states that, “one of the major tasks of education today should be the creation of such an acute awareness of the dangers of the commons” (179). Hardin considers the fact that citizens do not see the danger in what overpopulation can do to their land in the long run. Hardin deems it important that well off countries educate the citizens on what happens to land after it has been overworked and ruined by prolonged
... allowing to happen in Ireland with exploitation, poverty, overpopulation and the lack of human rights to the citizens of Ireland. He uses several satirical and persuasive devices in his piece to show the cultural and historical motive behind what was happening in the century. Although his essay was written many years ago, it is one that modern society can come to an understanding with after digging beneath the surface. We are made to feel repulsed by what he writes about because it touches on the political climate and the history that we derived from, allowing us to form our own opinions about what is moral and immoral to propose for the problems over poverty and overpopulation during this period. Although Swift titled his essay A Modest Proposal, it was indeed an immodest proposal that brought to light the dire situations that needed to be addressed and changed.
In “Lifeboat Ethics,” Hardin does not want to share the resources with the impecunious because he sees it as a waste of resources. He sees the poor as a burden and he doesn’t believe that the less-fortunate will ever make a beneficial or valuable use of resources and offers no solutions to help to the poor. Swift has a different approach on the issue in ‘A Modest Proposal,” he believes that the poor can do better things with the resources than the rich can. He suggested two solutions to the British middle class either they pay the Irish for their babies and they cook and eat the infants to
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is an attempt to bring attention to horrible the condition in which the poor or destitute people in Ireland are living in. His argument that children of these improvised people should be sold to “the persons of quality and fortune” (A Modest Proposal) for consumption, is Swift’s gruesome way of saying you might as well eat the babies, if no one is going to actually try to fix the problems of the poor in Ireland.
Swift supports Puchner’s theme of a lack of individuality which conveys how humans are losing their humanity by using Ireland’s economic issue which forces the poor to conform to the idea of selling their babies. Swift’s story, “A Modest Proposal”, is intriguing due to the fact that he uses Irelands misfortune to suggest a way to bounce back from this economic crisis which so happens to be eating kids from poor parents who couldn’t afford to raise it. In “A Modest Proposal” Swift states that “I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for Landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the Parents, seem to have the best Title to the Children” (Swift 33). For Swift growing up in Ireland, he
Swift develops a somber tone throughout the essay that contrasts with a cheery or delightful mood. The introduction of his proposal opens with a somber tone of poverty and disparity that is demonstrated by incorporating language such as “melancholy object” and “helpless infants.” He further demonstrates the poverty and issues by alluding to Barbados, a place where the Irish immigrated due to poverty. The citizens are illustrated to live in famine as stated in “wanting food and raiment for the rest of their lives.” This example illustrates the situation of the people in the country and raises awareness of the despicable situation with such blunt diction. Ironically, the poverty got worse as Swift describes it as a “deplorable state of affairs.” In addition, irony created in this juxtaposition in describing children as a “prodigious number” which elevates their status and leads the tone to be one of del...
During the 1720’s, the Irish people were suffering dearly, due to the oppression by Great Britain. There oppression came in the form of being displaced by wealthy English people who were buying up land in Ireland and then not living there. They would proceed to rent some of their land to the Irish people at extremely high rent, which eventually led to them not being able to pay neither their rent or provide their families with food or clothes. The reason behind Swift’s proposal is simple. He is an Irishman. He has a sense of patriotic duty to attempt to help his fellow Irish people. He wants them to know that it is possible to move forward form poverty and out from under the oppression of the British. He structures his essay through a basic form of presenting an idea and then backing it up with “facts” like the growth in weight of babies or expert accounts on the taste of children from a credible source. Something that Swift just assumes that the audience will take for granted. Additionally he assumes that the audience won’t simply put his article down, taking it as the ramblings of a mad man talking about eating babies like it’s a normal everyday thing.
In Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, he insisted that poor Irish Catholics should participate in outrageous behavior that are similar to eugenics. He proposed that in order for the poverty-stricken Irish Catholics to make money, they should fatten up their infants and sell them as a cuisine. As a result, the mothers can make money and prevent their poor children from growing up as beggars, a criminal, or an inadequate member of society. Swift’s proposal to sell infant flesh as a means of profit for the poor families and a delicacy for the rich ties in with the immorality of eugenics. However, this style of writing that Swift demonstrates is a persona of the overbearing protestants who stereotyped the Irish-Catholics. Swift’s proposal has been known for being based on satire and irony. Therefore, Swift’s intentions of creating this proposal were to underline the importance of treating the poor and homeless no less than human beings. Consequently, Swift would most likely be taken back from the cruel practice of eugenics. Since eugenics is a form of controlling human reproduction it is similar to Swift’s proposal to decrease the number of future beggars and delinquent offspring’s. Additionally, both ideas address financially unstable people as a nuisance to society, which encourages stereotypes. Eugenics and
Hardin presents “lifeboat ethics” which is a metaphor for the gaps between the rich and the poor. Imagine a lifeboat: only a fifty people can fit inside. The people in the boat are the rich while the surrounding sea represents the poor people. The poor being placed in the sea represents them drowning in poverty. About ten more people could possibly fit into the lifeboat, making the maximum capacity of the boat sixty, ignoring the safety factor
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is a shocking satire that discusses the dire poverty in Ireland. It says if one is born poor they will stay that way unless society puts them to use. Children are food to be eaten. In an economic slump children will be used to feed and clothe Ireland’s population. Swift’s purpose for writing A Modest Proposal was to call attention to the exploiting and oppressing by the English to the Irish. He wanted to shock his readers by proposing his “modest” proposal. He presents selling babies as food to reduce overpopulation. This causes the reader to disregard this suggestion. Swift wanted to raise awareness on the issue that was haunting Ireland. Throughout A Modest Proposal, Swift effectively uses verbal irony, diction, and sentence structure to achieve his purpose of making people realize that there are problems in society that needed to be handled in a reasonable manner. He also wanted to help advance the country’s trade, provide for infants, relieve the poor and help the rich. Swift ultimately wanted to get people thinking about actual solutions that could solve their current problems.
In 1729, Jonathan Swift published a pamphlet called “A Modest Proposal”. It is a satirical piece that described a radical and humorous proposal to a very serious problem. The problem Swift was attacking was the poverty and state of destitution that Ireland was in at the time. Swift wanted to bring attention to the seriousness of the problem and does so by satirically proposing to eat the babies of poor families in order to rid Ireland of poverty. Clearly, this proposal is not to be taken seriously, but merely to prompt others to work to better the state of the nation. Swift hoped to reach not only the people of Ireland who he was calling to action, but the British, who were oppressing the poor. He writes with contempt for those who are oppressing the Irish and also dissatisfaction with the people in Ireland themselves to be oppressed.
In “A Modest Proposal,” Jonathan Swift writes of the poor men, women, and children of Dublin, Ireland crowding the streets due to the years of drought and crop failure. He estimates that 120,000 children are born each year and asks the question of how these people are to be provided for. Then he tells of his proposal. He states that 20,000 of the 120,000 may be reserved for breeding purposes, while the other 100,000 be sold to dine on. Swift offers several advantages to his proposal some being: the poor tenants will have something of value in their home, the wealth of the nation will greatly increase as well as the cost of caring for the child will be eliminated after a year, and eliminating the food shortages the nation is undergoing. The only counter argument he offers is that killing and eating those infants will decrease the population so much that it will make it easier for England to concur them. He finishes his proposal with a statement that he himself is not interested in making a profit since his own children are past the right age and his wife not being able to have any more children.
The issue is that there is a growing number of poor and starving women and children living on the streets of Ireland that are a burden to the public and the country. The context is that these homeless and starving women and children are left to fend for themselves on the streets. Jonathan Swift is making the argument from the point of a concerned citizen who has spent years among the poor in Ireland studying the situation and trying to come up with a solution. Johnathan Swift used the example that those who visit Ireland and see the streets crowded with women and children that are beggars conclude that Ireland is a very poor, overpopulated country full of beggars and that they look down upon their country that is in such poor shape. His bias is that as a citizen living in Ireland, he does not want to be looked down upon by other countries. His targeted audience seems to be the citizens of the country and those in higher up positions who ...
To start off the full title of Johnathan Swift’s writing is "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for making them Beneficial to the Publick." From just reading the title in the book “A Modest Proposal”, I was thinking it was a story about romance and how a gentleman proposed marriage to his female lover. His proposal, in effect, is to fatten up these undernourished children and feed them to Ireland's rich land-owners. He does this to illustrate how backwards and bad the state of Ireland is and the social classes. For these reasons, he looks at the politicians to blame for the poor conditions because of the apathy they presented while in the decision making process, to resolve the conditions. Jonathan Swift he says that the people, politicians, and English were all to be at fault for the terrible state and poverty of Ireland.
Garrett Hardin puts forward an argument against helping the poor from the essay “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor”. He argues that helping the poor cannot decrease population. As we all know, despite efforts made by politicians and other leaders, problems are still affecting the poor in almost all countries around the world. In Hardin’s view, many of the richer countries are seen as which is only capable of carrying so many people. People in poorer countries are “in the water” and want to get into the lifeboat which represents the rich countries. By letting more people on the lifeboat than the boat can handle will drown everyone. Hardin believes that stopping or regulating immigration that it would help feed
...erprivileged mothers who strive to take care of their children but do not have the resources to do so. Lastly, Swift states that for want of work, the children of the impoverished Irish “either turn thieves, or leave their dear native country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to Barbados.” Swift makes the reader feel sympathy towards the impoverished children who are forced to make a living for themselves by any means necessary at a young age. Swift’s use of gripping word choice to describe the living conditions of the impoverished Irish effectively puts both emphasis and pity on their situation while also making the reader despise those who do not care about the poor.