Critique #3 Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against "Aid" that Harms By Garrett Hardin

Essay by m lipscombUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, August 2004

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Critique #3

Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against "Aid" that Harms

By Garrett Hardin

After reading the above reading by Mr. Hardin, I had come to the conclusion that in life there are many choices that must be made. In correlation to my Environmental Science class I can understand more of what his thought process is. In comparison, he could be talking about world hunger.

His strongest points in the article were "each rich nation can be seen as a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people, and in the ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor world, who should be allowed to get in to share the wealth?" By breaking down the population of many countries and showing that their population rate is expanding past their ability to feed the hungry is also another strong point. He also brings out the point of if poor countries were not given assistance with food sharing; it may possibly stabilize their population growth.

But would it? According to many countries standards, women are having so many babies to try and have sons who can be strong enough to do work to bring food into the home. So by shutting out the poor would produce greater risks to their health.

But there were several parts of his story I could have cared less about. For instance when he began talking about the fundamental error of spaceship ethics, I was lost and had no clue what this had to do with the rest of the article. Who cares about immigrants? This was not changing my world view on the issue of world hunger. He goes into the slang words for generations ago such as Dagos, Wops, Polacks, Chinks, and Krauts, what are half of these slang words referring to and who cares what they are...