Garrett Hardin's Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping The Poor?

In a campus filled with countless of students, the overall goal is to make sure that every student achieves their goals. However, imagine if the lifeboat ethics metaphor was applied to college campuses, students that are underprivileged would be left out and only the privileged students would achieve their goals. Many students would like to attend classes, but due to lack of money or space available in the classrooms, they are left outside the lifeboat. In Garrett Hardin’s essay, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor”, Hardin argues that “a nation’s land has a limited capacity to support a population and as the current energy crisis has shown us, in some ways we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of our land” (415). Hardin provides several solutions before he ultimately acknowledges that they will not work and finally states that “our survival demands that we govern our actions by the ethics of a lifeboat” (423). In other words, in order to survive, the people in the rich nations should do nothing for the …show more content…
Throughout Hardin’s essay, he continuously mentions how the population rates are way too high for the poorer nations. In addition, mostly every plan to help the poor would not work because of the massive reproduction rates. Hardin states, “[the nation] cannot safely divide the wealth equitably among all people so long as people reproduce at different rates” (423). The massive population rates will eventually affect college, leaving classes overcrowded, however, people should not be punished for wanting big families. Instead, colleges should consider making larger classrooms. If the class capacity is increased to at least fifty or even sixty students, more students will be able to benefit from learning instead of being left