In Lifeboat Ethics: the Case against Helping the Poor, Garrett Hardin uses an extended metaphor to, blatancy and redundancy aside, make a case against helping the poor. With his essay, he both discredits the metaphor of earth as a spaceship in outer space and supplants it with a new image: earth as lifeboats floating on the sea, with the well-off in the boats and the poor swimming for their lives in the sea. Hardin makes the case that helping the poor is equivalent to overfilling figurative “lifeboats,” thus capsizing them and destroying all hope for any man or woman to sustain life on earth regardless of affluence or origin.

            Hardin makes an interesting point when considering birth rates in considering foreign aid of poverty. He establishes early on that impoverished nations tend to have higher birth rates than that of, say, America, and he goes on to acknowledge that, by aiding the poor, we maintain these rates. He ties this into the metaphor by saying that this is increasing the number of people in the sea, outside the lifeboats. He argues, appealing strongly to logical, that this perpetuates the problem and even makes further action more difficult. The real-life occurrence he is describing is the idea of land depletion: the idea that a tract of land can only support so many before life becomes unsustainable (lifeboats only have so much room).

 -DSH