Analysis Of Garrett Hardin's The Tragedy Of The Commons

When facing a conflict, one mostly tries to find a solution that will benefit him rather than accommodate everyone. It’s much more satisfactory to have everything go one’s way than having to compromise with another. This selfish mentality is something that repeatedly takes place in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, where many characters act out of their own self-interest. However, throughout The Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck, the individuals often commit acts of true altruism. Instead of always being on the lookout for themselves, they often make sacrifices for others. The Great Gatsby’s selfish, egocentric acts contrast with the altruistic, selfless acts in The Grapes of Wrath through demonstrations of self

In Garrett Hardin’s essay, Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor, Hardin describes the wealthy population of the world as being in a single lifeboat that is almost filled until buckling while the poor population of the world treads water below. Hardin’s essay gets his readers to feel the natural instinct to survive. The lifeboat metaphor that Hardin uses relieves the wealthy population of their moral obligations to the less fortunate, but in addition, puts all of the blame and cause of the depletion of earth’s resources on the poor. As much as his argument may make sense,

Population is one of the key points that Hardin stresses. Still thinking in terms of the lifeboat example, “The people in the lifeboat are doubling in numbers once every 87 years; those swimming around outside are doubling, on the average, every 35 years…” In the real world, developing countries’ populations are multiplying at an exponential rate, and the world’s resources can only dwindle.Hardin states that in 1970 the US had a population of 210 million people, who were increasing at a rate of .08 percent a year. In terms of the lifeboat example, Hardin says that we should imagine that same number of people outside the boat, only

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 states that throughout most of history there's been no need for concern about population control. Nature would come along with epidemic diseases and take care of the matter for us. Disease

Hardin begins to describe how there are fifty people sitting in the lifeboat, with a total capacity of sixty. There are one hundred people swimming in the water, begging to be let on the lifeboat. The people that are on the lifeboat to begin with are the rich people who feel guilty that they already have a spot. Hardin believes that the people shouldn’t

Garrett Hardin developed the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons. The basic concept is a giant pasture that is for everyone to have a piece of land and for the herdsman to have as many cattle a possible to sustain the land. This land should be able to maintain itself for quite a long time because of cattle dying as well as the population staying relatively stable. But at some point the population will begin growing and the herdsman will want to maximize their profits by having more cattle, which in return the land cannot sustain. The herdsman receives all the profit from adding one more animal to the pasture so the herdsman will eventually begin adding more cattle, but the overgrazing caused by that added animal will destroy the land

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

Common pool resources denotes natural resources used by many individuals in common, such as fisheries, groundwater basins, and irrigation systems. Such resources have long been subject to overexploitation and misuse by individuals acting in their own best interests.

“The Tragedy of the Commons” written by Garret Hardin explains how the human population is degrading the environment. When Hardin refers to commons he is talking about a resource that is owned by no one and used by a group of people. Some examples of commons include the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the oceans we fish. The tragedy is that people don’t look at the bigger picture; the over use of commons for our own personal benefit leads to the destruction or extinction of these commons. For example if one fisherman wants to fish the oceans as much as possible that’s fine, but now imagine if every fisherman wants to fish the oceans as much as they can, this is one example of a common being destroyed by the human population. The

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

In reading Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons,” and through my participation in the Kivulini Simulation lab completed in class, my knowledge and understanding of the psychological factors that contribute to the logic behind the decisions made by humans that negatively impact the planet we inhabit have significantly expanded. Many of these decisions are made out of ignorance, while others are made despite knowledge of the harm that results from them. There are some ways that I can apply this knowledge to my life in order to contribute to the effort to preserve this planet in the hopes of allowing it to sustain future generations.

In his paper published in 1974 entitled ‘Living on a Lifeboat’, Garrett Hardin condenses the issues of foreign aid, growing populations and immigration amongst other things to a metaphor of people living on a lifeboat. In the paper Hardin’s premise is that each country represents a lifeboat, which can only hold a certain capacity depending on the relative size of the country that the boat represents. The capacity of each boat symbolizes the weight of responsibility that is placed on a state when caring for its citizens as well as the possibility of allowing new citizens onto the ‘boat’. This essay will discuss Hardin’s thesis for lifeboat ethics by outlining the problems faced in maintaining a stable lifeboat by examining the issues of immigration,

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how overpopulation causes social problems. To do so you must take many things into consideration, such as different views of racial problems and conflicting definitions of a social problem. Social problems can be defined in many different ways. They effect everyone and some of us encounter problems everyday as a result of our race, religion, gender, or low income. Others experience problems from technological change or declining neighborhoods, others are affected directly by crime and violence in their own neighborhood, and sometimes definitions of social problems are changed by society because of changes around you. Finally in

Few decades ago, clean water was “commons” (Hardin, 1968) to us. It was a natural resource shared by everyone and not owned by anyone. This “commons” was taken for granted to the extent that people exploit clean water without considering its finiteness. Resorts and factories dumped wastewater and ruined nearby rivers and oceans. People carelessly littered garbage and substituted the dirty water with diminishing clean water. They definitely benefited in terms of financial cost and comfort from their negligence. However, those individual interests ended up bringing severe water pollution, attacking our collective interest of public health and well-being. In this vein, water pollution is undeniably the “Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin, 1968). Following these dire circumstances, water purification techniques and systems have been further developed and become widespread. Yet, the technical measurements have not quite fundamentally solved the problem. What is needed at this point is people’s will and practical action to improve the environment. However, merely hoping and encouraging people to do so are not enough. In order to have a steady support from people, we need a practical device for a “mutual coercion” (Hardin, 1968) to earn consent to coercion necessary to amend the situation. In this paper, I am going to address the technical and individual effort for water pollution and its limitation, and suggest a way to complement this limitation through a device on an institutional