Population Problems By Garett Hardin

On the other hand, Thomas Malthus had little hope for the future. He believed that the world’s population will increase faster than the production of food. The human race, he believed, would starve and there would be periods of chaos. Malthus said that the population increases at an exponential rate, nearly doubling amount. There is no way food growth would be able to catch up with population growth. Malthus’ solution was “War, Famine, and Plagues”. He believed that was the only way to decrease population and hopefully salvage the human race. These events would increase death rates liberating the world of disaster. Malthus tried to persuade lower classes form creating children and from marriage. At that time the lower classes were considered to be given higher wages, which would increase the makings of children and marriages. Thomas Malthus pleaded with everyone to make a change in order to decrease population.

This paper can be an excellent source for anyone researching into how to fight overpopulation. Hardin provides several other viewpoints that show he did not selectively choose evidence or distort it. Hardin proceeds from point to point logically which allowed the reader to comprehend the main idea effortlessly. The author glided to how the people of poor

Later in the essay, Hardin writes about the differences in the population growth between rich and poor nations. Poor nations multiply much more quickly than richer nations. The essay then goes on to explain what the consequences would be of setting of

In 1798 utilitarian Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population as an argument against an utopian society based on social and economic equality. Malthus believed that if the human population is left unchecked then the population would outgrow the resources necessary to maintain the population. Malthus’s argued that the population will continue to grow and the burden will unavoidably put on the poor population. However, the inequality of population would be a good thing in terms of controlling the population.

This increases the responsibility of the state for looking after its citizens as the poorer population of the country grows in numbers. Hardin demonstrates this in ‘Living on a Lifeboat’ by examining the rate of reproduction of the poor in comparison to the wealthy. According to Hardin, the population of the poorer classes doubles every thirty-five years, whilst the wealthier classes experience the same growth over a period of eighty-seven years. (Hardin, 1974) In a lifeboat situation, this reproduction rate would mean the poor would be heavily reliant on the income and supplies of the wealthy. Due to this Hardin states that the wealthy must assume that the poor will be self-interested and sharing our resources with them will only be harmful to our own survival. (Hardin, 1974) Why should the wealthy share if they get nothing from the poor in return? They deposit their supplies into a shared collective on the boat and the poor on-board take it without giving anything back. Hardin refers to this as the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and if taken into a real-life situation we are presented with the development of social benefits for the poor - a system in which the rich pay taxes in order for the poor to be financially supported through state benefits, social housing etc. (Hardin,

At first Hardin’s ethics seem rude and selfish, but as you continue reading he makes it clear this may be the only way to save our world and have it become a better place. For instance, "on the average poor countries undergo a 2.5 percent increase in population each year; rich countries, about 0.8 percent. If the poor countries received no food from the out side, the rate of their population growth […]" (Hardin 4). Hardin continues his piece explaining why rich countries should not help poorer countries that are in need. He believes a poor country that needs support needs to learn the hard way, even if that means losing resources or people. His words like "rich countries", "no food" shows the use of a metaphor that Hardin is able to paint a visual illustration of his argument to his audience. This helps influence and persuade his readers because they are able to grasp the whole concept of Hardin’s argument. Hardin also spoke in his essay using the repetition of the words "we" and "us" is a language factor that persuades the audience to accept Hardin’s ideas because it implicates that he and his audience is of equal status. Here, the ethics he reveals in his essay have good reasoning. Helping someone in need has always been a moral in someone’s life. But now, Hardin proposes a new ethic, "lifeboat ethics". Singer, on the other hand, often refers to the fact that nearly one-third of Americans spend their income on luxuries that they “desire” instead of donating the

Hardin's complex dexterity of petrifying diction is brought to a halt when compared to the scientific diction seen in Durning's article. Hardin's nauseating, fear-provoking diction is rendered in the same passage mentioned in the previous paragraph; the unequivocal author uses words such as: "swamps," "drowns," and "catastrophe" (Hardin, 477). All of these words are associated with devastation and misfortune as Hardin tries to point out our suffering as a result of caring for the poor nations. This is an example of the visceral appeal Hardin employs to scare his audience by having them consider the consequences of not abiding into just letting the still developing nations handle themselves.

      Logos is the logic, internal consistency, and clarity of the argument and it is split into claims, reasons, grounds, warrants, backing, and qualifiers. Hardin begins his essay by establishing his main claim, which is the idea that he believes is the most believable, that the world’s resources cannot be distributed equally, and any attempts to equally distribute current resources will ruin them. He does this by using the metaphor of the earth and its resources as a lifeboat. Only so many people may fit on this lifeboat, just as so many people may have access to the world’s very limited resources, and trying to fit too many people on this lifeboat will sink it. This phenomenon he calls “The Tragedy of the Commons”. He supports this claim with reasons and grounds; reasons being claims which support his initial claim, and grounds being supporting evidence that leads the audience to support the reasons. His warrant, or understood belief, is that spoiling resources and leading the world to ruin is not optimal,

In the two stories "Lifeboat Ethics" and "A Modest Proposal" the topic of distribution of resources is brought up. Hardin, who has a more realistic mindset believes that the resources should be given to the people that will benefit him and the rest of the society. Hardin thinks that if the poor are already in trouble, then that is their loss and they can not get any better. It seems very harsh but he discussing his thoughts on the idea of the World Food Bank. He says that the food bank won't neccesarilly fix the world starvation but may cause other parts of the world that aren't struggling for food to suffer.

In the article “ Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”, Garrett Hardin (1974) argues that wealthy people should not be responsible for the poor and that the consequences of feeding the poor are detrimental to the environment and to the society as a whole. Hardin was a well known philosopher and ecologist. He earned his bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1936 and also earned his doctorate degree in microbiology from Stanford University in 1941 (Garrett Hardin, n.d.). The main issue that he tackled was human overpopulation and one of the books that he wrote that analyzed this issue was called ‘How Global Population Growth Threatens Widespread Social Disorder’(1992). Because the author has a sufficient

Garrett Hardin wrote an essay titled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”. In this essay he spoke of the Earth being similar to a lifeboat in which it has limited capacity and resources. This is a fair assumption, as the Earth does have limited resources and carrying capacity. He mentions that we are “adrift in a moral sea” saying that in today’s world it is morally abhorrent to not help a person in need but that we should do what we have to in order to survive ourselves. Hardin mentions a “tragedy of the commons” he states that if a pasture were to become a commons it would only take one person to not show restraint to ruin the system and cause mass suffering. He uses the world’s air and water as an example claiming that they

In The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin proposes that the problem of population exists in a pool of problems without a technical solution. In particular, he notes that the infinitude of space fails to be a solution to the problem of over population. He strikes down opposition to this argument swiftly, citing one of his other publications as a defense. I take issue with this negative claim and explore ways in which the over-population problem as it pertains to modern humanity could be solved in the long term via inter-planetary colonization. In particular, I cite SpaceX's work toward colonizing Mars as the basis for the inductive argument that such colonization will allow humanity access to an effectively infinite amount of land and resources.

Thomas Robert Malthus is one of the most controversial figures in the history of economics. He achieved fame chiefly from the population doctrine that is now closely linked with his name. Contrary to the late-eighteenth-century views that it was possible to improve people’s living standards, Malthus held that any such improvements would cause the population to grow and thereby reverse these gains. Malthus also sparked controversy with his contemporaries on issues of methodology (by arguing that economics should be an empirical rather than a deductive science), over questions of theory (by holding that economies can experience prolonged bouts of high unemployment), and on policy issues (by arguing against free

Hardin’s version is essentially a critique of overpopulation; the causes, the dangers, and the remedies, as he believes that over-breeding is causing the population to grow exponentially as our finite resources are being diminished at an alarming rate, leading us to extinction. He blames the welfare state for providing for children and supporting “breeding" as a human right. Instead, he suggests individual responsibility established through the process of coercion to restrain the reproductive rights of human beings or what Hardin explains as “A mutual coercion mutually agreed upon by the majority of people

Garrett Hardin was a controversial ecologist who believed that overpopulation was going to bring a downfall to a world of limited resources. Each nation was compared to a lifeboat with the rich being inside the boat and the poor in the water, drowning (Hardin, 561). He wrote the “Lifeboat Ethics” in 1974 when Ethiopia was having a starvation problem. Hardin’s opinion about the situation was that sending aid to Ethiopia was only making the problem worse and by feeding the people would aid overpopulation; the root to the problem. Hardin’s thesis developed from the notion that the rich should do nothing to help the poor. He believed that one