Garret Hardin Lifeboat Ethics Summary

In Lifeboat Ethics: the Case against Helping the Poor, Garret Hardin attempts to persuade people that rich countries should not help the poor countries and resource sharing is detrimental. Also, people should restricted immigration policy as it speeds up the destruction of the environment. However, Hardin’s article is mostly his opinions inexactly supported by some numerical information. Moreover, he moves from one idea to another quickly instead of going into depth and insight. Therefore, Hardin’s article is not successfully meeting his purpose of persuading people about his idea of not helping the poor. Hardin begins the article with the metaphor of lifeboat. He makes up a situation that there are fifty people in the lifeboat and the total capacity is sixty (Hardin 54). There are 100 people swimming in the water, begging to get onto the lifeboat (54). They could take everyone into the lifeboat, but the lifeboat would sink and everyone die (54). Alternately, they could …show more content…
He mentions that World Food Bank is contributing to “the tragedy of the common” as the poor are uncontrollably using the World Food Bank (Hardin 57). He says that there are potential benefits behind the food program and everyone are making money of it (58). This analogy is not credible because Hardin is making a lot of assumptions and generalizes that people that put money into the Food Bank are not simply want to help the poor, they are taking advantage of it. He presumes that people are selfish and the food program should not exist. However, he did not consider that there are people really need help and the food program might be the only way that they could have survive. His text is not depth enough and is not fully consider from different perspectives. This example of “the tragedy of the common” hurts his purpose as he has bias on the rich people and he generalizes that people are mostly