Every day hundreds of thousands of people are starving. The issue of who should assist them is brought up time and time again. Should we give of our own? If so, how much should we give? Since only one third of the nations in the world are rich and the other two thirds are poor can and should the rich countries be expected to provide for the less fortunate? Garrett Hardin, author of "Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Aid That Harms" states that each country has a carrying capacity and by helping out others we push ourselves closer to a limit that we are close to reaching. Our nation only has a small amount of energy left and Hardin believes that by assisting the poor we will only make ourselves more susceptible to disaster. On the other hand, Peter Singer, author of "Rich and Poor" believes that there is something that can be done to prevent some people from starving and that people should take action.

He states that there is hunger that can be stopped without the rich having to give up something significant. The articles disagree in that Hardin believes that these people cannot be helped without harming the rich in some way and Singer believes that something should be done about it. Singer's article "Rich and Poor" is a better article because the rich can give to the poor without causing financial strain on themselves. In Hardin's article, the nations of the world are compared to lifeboats with the rich sitting inside and the poor swimming in the oceans outside. Hardin explains how allowing all of the poor into the boat with the rich would be completely moral but would but everyone in the ocean would perish because the boat can't support that...