Lifeboat Ethics: the Case against Helping the Poor - Essay Example

This is the tragedy of the commons." (Hardin) Therefore, Hardin establishes his concept of 'the tragedy of the commons in a highly convincing manner with ample illustrations and explanations and he maintains that an important task of education today should be the creation of an acute awareness of the dangers of the commons.

One of the most significant interpretations of the arguments of Hardin concerning 'the tragedy of the commons' was offered by De Young in his article "Tragedy of the commons", in which the author comes up with serious criticisms of Hardin's arguments. According to De Young, Garrett Hardin's concept of the 'tragedy of the commons has been important in understanding how humanity has come to the brink of several environmental catastrophes. He maintains that the dangerous situations in human life are the creations of the innocent behaviors of many individuals acting alone.

Analyzing the arguments of Hardin, De Young investigates if the tragedy that Hardin suggests is inevitable. Thus, he comes up with the conclusion that "Hardin's predictions for the inevitable over-exploitation of a commons were based solely on consideration of open access situations. And in fact, case studies document that tragedies do occur when an open-access system supplants a pre-existing successful CPR management system. Thus while a tragedy is not inevitable it is a more likely outcome if one is dealing with a CPR that is subtractable, able to be overused and experiencing unrestrained, open access.

" (De Young) Therefore, De Young challenges the argument of Hardin that a tragedy is inevitable if the 'pasture' becomes a commons open to all. However, a reflective analysis of both the articles makes it lucid that Hardin's predictions for the inevitable over-exploitation of the commons were not based on a single aspect of the issue. On the contrary, consideration of open access situations merely forms a part of the general framework of the pieces of evidence against the inevitable tragedy of the commons.

The general tone of the concept of lifeboat ethics confirms this notion and the fundamental error of spaceship ethics is, obviously, that it leads to 'the tragedy of the common'. In conclusion, De Young's objection is not completely acceptable in the general framework of the concept of 'the tragedy of the common', although it does not completely negate the argument by Hardin.