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Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping The Poor Analysis

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Some of the main issues facing the world today are the issues of poverty, the poor, and overpopulation. As each year goes by, it becomes awfully clear that these issues are problems that must be dealt with. While many want to address and solve these issues, there tends to be a divide on how to do so. A great example of this division is how the issue is presented in these two essays – Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” and Garrett Hardin’s “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping The Poor.” While both essays are well written and make their points, they support differing sides of the issue; Stinger’s essay states that we have a moral obligation to aid the poor opposed to Hardin’s essay arguing for the case against helping the poor. Even though both writers made very good points, I think that we do indeed have a moral obligation to help the poor. While reading through Hardin’s essay he failed to convince me otherwise. His essay starts by describing two different metaphors. First, he talks about the spaceship ethic, which is where we should share resources, and then the lifeboat ethic, which is where we should not …show more content…

I do not believe it is right to turn your back to someone that could use your help. An example supporting my view on this is Stinger’s shallow pond” analogy, an I illustration involving a small child drowning in a shallow pond, you should wade in and save them, even if it sacrifices something small like your clothing getting wet and muddy. As Singer states, “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing something of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it” (392). While your clothes getting muddy is a down fall, the child losing his or her life would be ethically outrageous, so for that reason, the clothing should be sacrificed in order to save the life of the

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