The Case against Helping the Poor.” To make his point, the author uses the metaphor of a lifeboat and divides the world into rich nations and poor nations. The rich nations are the people inside the lifeboat, and the poor ones are people outside the boat who are drowning and calling for help. And then lots of statements are made to show people the harm and danger for rich people to help the poor people. At the beginning, He uses the word lifeboat to describe the main argument of heping poor people . He starts by comparing the rich nations and poor nations. Every lifeboat has a limited capacity and resources which are only enough for a small number of people. But the surrounding swimmers, poor people, who want to get onto the lifeboat cant because there is no room and if they over fill the life boat it will sink and nobody will be left to pick up the pieces. It seems that in the metaphor rich nations are playing the role of King while poor nations become peasants that could contribute nothing but only wait for help and drag down the rich.
This metaphor is bias to the rich because it totally ruins the relationship and exaggerates the differences between rich nations and poor nations. Everyone needs intercommunication even the wealthiest and strongest of the United States,we need it to import foreign stuff.If we didnt get stuff shipped to us we would run out of resources and that would be bad. For example, as one of the biggest consumers of gasoline in the world, every year the United States needs to import alot of gas of gas from Middle East, which might be considered as poor nations, otherwise the American economic stucture would collapse. How could the rich countries always be the people to help the poor people inside the lifeboat? The author argues that our planet faces the problem of overpopulation. which means theres too many people for how little resources we have. The reproduction rate in poor countries is much higher than in rich countries and with poor people being so populated they run out of resources faster than the rich because there are way more people using them and they cant afford to get more. That means while population of poor nations is increasing by a great amount, the rich nations rapidly decreases.so then theres alot more people to try to get in to the life boat and not enough people that will actually help. Hardin also introduces the concept of “The Tragedy of The Commons” and explains it as a bad effect on users of common resources around the world. It has led to overpopulation.
The rich countries helping the poor resulted in creation of The World Food Bank. But, He says that the program will stop the development of poor nations and it lets them depend on rich countries when emergency occurs. While trying to find a solution for this problem and help the poor, using the “Green Revolution” the objective is to show poor nations how to grow “miracle wheat” and “miracle rice.” But the author argues that this program resulted in the spread of cancer and overloading the environment and by trying to save people from starvation, other harms were created. Hardin believes that immigration is another reason of the overpopulation issue because it allows people to escape from poor nations and burden the ecosystem of rich countries. And in “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping Poor,” Garrett Hardin suggests that our planet could be saved only by following his advice otherwise, there will be nothing left fo the next generations to thrive in the world.
But Hardin ignores a basic connection between rich nations and poor nations. It completely neglects the fact that all the people in the world are sharing the same living environment. Once this only living environment is destroyed,everyone will be struggling, no matter rich or poor. Therefore, helping poor nations is not only a form of humanistic expression, but also a kind of self-help for rich nations. In other words, those rich nations, in a way, help those poor ones out of the concerns on their own interests, which is quite different from the generous aid for the people outside the lifeboat by the people inside the boat. Therefore, I think the earth actually is a big ship, and all the nations are the people in this ship. All the people on board, regardless rich or poor, they will have the same basic task to protect this ship, since no one would survive once the ship sinks. But now, the big ship faces the problem of overpopulation, it is the responsibility for all the people on board to solve the problems as soon as possible, before the harmful effect of such problems extending throughout the ship. Before we all run out of resources.
It is useless to blame for anyone at this time. Although I agree that the control of reproduction is the basic approach to solve the problem in the example of the text, but I don’t think rich nations should sit back and look like nothing is happening In fact, the overpopulation problem has become a big burden on the use of resources in the whole world, rather than for those poor nations only. Those rich nations may help those poor ones by accepting immigrants. By accepting immigrants, rich nations would not only help to ease the burden of poor nations, but also solve the problem of negative birth rate in some rich countries. It is a good way for both poor nations and rich nations. In conclusion, the lifeboat ethics introduced in the text is not so proper. Helping the poor in need is not only out of humanism but also for the consideration on their own interests for the rich nations. As to the overpopulation problems, it is useless to blame the poor nations only. Although the control of growth rate is the basic solution no one listens.
