Garrett Hardin

only the strong survive,” quoted by Jack London in the story ‘The Call of the Wild.’ Garrett Hardin was an ecologist who alerted the risks of overpopulation and was so passionate about the topic that he wrote several essays and books on it. In the essay, “Lifeboat Ethics,” he discusses that people in rich countries should not help the people of poor countries, and we should not assist them with our resources. Hardin uses two metaphors to illustrate two ways of either helping the poor countries…

“The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers” (Hardin, 1244). In the Lorax, the Once-ler was aware of the pollution and destroyed habitats but denied it was doing any serious harm (Seuss). If he had accepted there were problems sooner, the land, truffula trees, and animal habitats could have potentially…

depleted (Hardin, 1968). This situation can be described by Garrett Hardin (1968) as a tragedy of the commons. In this paper, it will be argued that humans exploiting the aquatic ecosystem through the operation of dams, as portrayed in DamNation (2014), is an example of a tragedy of the commons for the following two reasons: first, as evidenced by the destruction of the quality of water and second, by the collapse of the Chinook salmon population. The Tragedy of the Commons Hardin (1968)…

Hardin talks about a scenario where there are limited seats in a boat, and there are an overabundance of people in the water attempting to persuade the people in the boat to let them join. There are two choices that the “rich” people in the boat can make, either “live by the Christian ideal of being ’our brother’s keeper,’ or by the Marxist ideal of ‘to each according to his needs’” (Hardin 291). Hoffmaster and Hooker analyze how finite agents…

by Plato, Political Liberalism by Rawls, and so on. In these books I have found the paths that lead me to answer those questions, as well as, to a lot of subjective questions, such as meaning of a good or bad. Reading Peter Singer along with Garrett Hardin has helped me to change my ideology from aspiration to become wealthy to…

Forty years ago, ecologist Garrett Hardin popularised an economic theory on the depletion of common resource with the release of his thesis titled The Tragedy of Commons (Hardin, 1968). The worlds then population was less than half what it is today, yet he recognised that "a finite world can support only a finite population” (Hardin, 1968, p.78). Despite the irrefutable logic of this analysis, Hardin’s work is widely condemned, both for its failure to place adequate weight on the detrimental…

imply that the world possesses an infinite amount of resources available. However, in reality, the depletion of Earth’s energy and resources imposes a serious risk on the environment and well-being of future generations, such as your children. As Garrett Hardin explains in his article “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor”, the world resembles more of a “lifeboat” where the wealthy are in the lifeboat, while “the ocean outside of the lifeboat swim the poor of the world”. Like a…

trees and just kept cutting them down. He was not aware about the finite number of them until it was too late and there were no more Truffula trees. And often taking advantage of a finite source comes from the freedom to do so. In the words of Garrett Hardin “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” Because people can do it, they will do it. This can be fixed if people learn to limit themselves. Instead of having as much as they can, just take one or as much as they need instead of how much…

The main argument being Garrett Hardin and his Lifeboat Ethics. This means he uses an example of a lifeboat in order to argue his point. He says imagine if you are on a lifeboat with a capacity of 60 with 50 on it already and it passes 150 drowning people. You obviously cannot let…

Peter Singer, an Australian moral philosopher, argued that individuals are morally obligated to help the poor. He states that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it” (Singer 1). This means that we should donate as much of our resources, whether it be time, money, etc., as possible to those less fortunate without causing oneself to be in the same situation as those you are trying to…