Vinny Genovesi
English 1010 Night
10/17/14

Network Ethics: A Response to Garrett Hardin

As human beings, we share certain ethical responsibilities, both to ourselves and to our
fellow human. Most of us feel a natural need to defend, protect, and assist our brothers and
sisters in all corners of the globe. But where does our ethical responsibility to all humans around
the world end and the responsibility to be prudent with our local resources begin?

Garrett Hardin has made a case for defending the future of one's homeland over the
immediate needs of people who are currently alive in his article "Lifeboat Ethic: A Case Against
Helping the Poor," published in 1974 by Sussex Publishers, Inc.

Hardin warns that rather than being like a spaceship, which is mobile and under the care
and guidance of a single authority figure and can always collect more resources, Earth is more
like a lifeboat: limited in it's comforts and stockpiles. His analogy switches modes quickly,
though, to compare not Earth, but the richer countries on Earth to a lifeboat, with the people in
poorer countries compared to those who are still thrashing about in the water. He claims that
helping the people on the outside only serves to swamp our boat and drain our resources, or, at
the very least, rob us of our safety factor. He goes on to say that even if sharing our resources
were feasible, we'd be met with unchecked reproduction and disrespect for the commons we've
created. He imagines a world where some people give and some people take, with very little
overlap between the two and a certain amount of ingraditude from the takers. He gives the
example of a World Food Bank and compares it to a pasture that is privately owned versus one
that is commonly shared and says that a privately owned pasture will always be better kept than a common one. Hardin believes that teaching students about the dangers of sharing should be at
our core curriculum. I didn't make that up, that is actually in the article. In his final example of a
commons in action, Hardin attacks U.S. immigration policy. He begins on the defensive, stating
that anyone who calls in to question the policies we've adopted thus far is labeled a bigot and
then goes on to use several racially insensitive terms as examples of how the press acted not two
decades before his article was published. He claims that with a net inflow of roughly 600,000
immigrants per year, immigration accounts for 19 percent of our yearly population increase.

 While on the surface Hardin's argument seems to have a basis in sound reasoning and
while he certainly has a great deal of data at his disposal to back up his claims, he comes across
biased and xenophobic. He makes an interesting point during his essay that providing education
and technology to poorer countries might be a good solution, but he dismisses this epiphany and
veers from it rather quickly. His analogy of spaceship-versus-lifeboat is a clumsy one, but the
reader is expected not to notice this, and once a person has agreed to the initial metaphor, it's
easy to guide them further and further away from it until they're agreeing with things that they
normally wouldn't. Hardin is a man who has a great deal of interest in the big-picture
sociological impact of his theory, but little thought or care for the individual human side of
things.

 Let's start with what's good here. Our planet certainly does have a limited number of
resources. A sociological longview is a good thing if we're talking about humanity's future peace
and comfort. Allowing the Earth's resources to be drained hapazardly without regulation will
absolutely doom us all. Big business has made a practice of skirting regulation at the cost of
resource and it has cost us dearly. Hardin's point about the energy crisis showing us the limits of
what we have available to us stands, as that crisis was caused by peak oil, which was caused by too many people drawing from a finite pool.

 Hardin offers a large of amount of data to support his claims in an attempt to sway more
liberally-minded people. Facts and figures are hard to argue with, and Garret Hardin quickly and
expertly lays down a logical framework for his opinions. He presents the alarming statistic that
poorer nations are reproducing at nearly double the rate of rich ones and makes it sounds like
these rapidly-doubling rabbit-people are waiting at our gates, shaking the bars, always moments
from breaking through and spoiling all the pretty things that us rich white folk have worked so
hard to collect and protect. His perspective makes a lot assumptions and he expects us, the
readers, to agree with each one so that we'll agree with the next one. He has an practiced hand at
disguising his slippery slopes, so much so that I found myself nodding along on my first
read-through.

 The truth, though, is more complicated. His initial argument, that earth is a lifeboat and
not a spaceship, seems fairly sound on the surface, but I want to dig into that for a second. First
of all, this a bad metaphor. He gets you to agree with it by giving you a false choice and then sets
it up with his personal bias so that you make the decision he wants you to make. "Earth is not a
spaceship, that's silly. My only other choice is lifeboat and he makes it sound pretty plausible, so
sure, it's a lifeboat." From that point it's easy to get you to agree with the other characteristics of
a lifeboat. Then he immediately and subtly changes tacks so that now the reader is agreeing that
rich countries have a lifeboat and poor ones do not and that we need to protect the rich. It's very
clever if you ask me. The fact of the matter is, the best analogy for Earth, if we're talking about
it's human population, is that Earth is a computer and each human represent a small fraction of
it's processing power. If we think of the sum of human progress as being the result of collective
and cumulative human processing power, it seems that the most logical course of action would be to activate and network every node. We can do this by providing each "node" with a power
source (food) and information (education) and then networking each one via the Internet. Poor
people get fed and get a chance to stop being poor (not to mention, they'll stop rattling the
proverbial "gates"), and those of us who are more fortunate get better touch-screen phones.
Everybody wins. Hardin touches on this very briefly, but shies away before he gets a chance to
explore it. I don't typically like to invoke my own accomplishments, but I'd like to point out that
I was once a homeless alcoholic who lived on the streets and ate at the Cathedral D'Madeline for
lunch every day. Through hard work and aid from the state and AA I've managed to pull my own
life together and provide myself with shelter and an education. People don't want to be poor.
They don't want to struggle. If you give them a chance to get out, they will take it. Most times
they will be so happy for the opportunity, they will do whatever it takes to succeed.

 Moreover, our author has lost sight of what is actually important. Yes, we need a
sociological overview so that we don't kill ourselves as a people. But he wants to draw lines in
the sand and say that one part of the planet deserves more than others simply by virtue of their
birth. We're not a nation. Those lines are imaginary. We are human beings and we are inexorably
interconnected until we find a way off this rock. What happens to one of us, happens to all of us.
If things fall apart out there in the poorer parts of the world, believe me when I say that we're not
going to keep our temple gates up for very long. Those people we're sidelining have immediate,
pressing needs. Hardin would ignore and forgo those needs in the name of some imaginary
desendent who he's never met and who has not yet suffered. We have a responsibiltity to our
future, yes. But not at the cost of our present. Without our compassion and humanity, we simply
have no future. Our bodies are corporeal and will wither and die one day. It is our ideals that live.

It is then our ideals, not our bodies, that must be allowed to flourish and reproduce and spread.  To summarize, Hardin is a convincing writer but it's all rhetoric. His ideals are more
short-sighted and more harmful than he'd like to believe. They favor exclusion and
xenophobia-disguised-as-prudence over humanity and progress. His logical arguments are less
than logical and his facts and figures mean little when they're outdated, uncited, and very likely
cherry-picked. The article is written as though it were an appeal to logic, but in my opinion this
is a pathologically fear-motivated write-up and I believe that any alert person who isn't looking
to have their own biases confirmed will find it falls fairly short in it's goals