Selfish Ethics

In his essay “Lifeboat Ethics”, Garrett Hardin claims that it is our moral duty to refrain from aiding the poor (i.e., by providing them with food and other resources necessary for their survival) because it would cause the human population of the world to increase beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity (if we haven’t already exceeded it), lead to further environmental degradation, and decrease the quality of life of both posterity and certain people who are currently living- namely, wealthy people. Hardin argues that food and other resources that we could potentially give to poor people in need are “surplus” materials that should be used as a “safety factor”, or be put aside for our own peoples’ use if and when we need it.
Hardin doesn’t acknowledge in his essay the fact that affluent nations (such as the U.S.) are the most responsible out of all of the world’s nations for our current ecological crisis because of the amount of resources we consume and the magnitude of waste we produce. We have also established environmentally-destructive factories/facilities in other, poorer nations (since it’s cheaper than building them in our own country) that cause damage only we can be blamed for.
Therefore, ecological damage should not be blamed primarily on the poor because of their high and increasing populations; we should take responsibility for the damage we have caused and the inequity that currently exists in the world, in part by aiding people in poor countries whose survival is at stake. Moreover, it would be possible for us to allocate a portion of our nation’s wealth to other, poorer countries that are in greater need of resources than we are.
Nations should not be compared to lifeboats, because we wouldn’t need to sacrifice our own survival or well-being if we were to aid the poor in Third World countries; it is possible to achieve a more equal distribution of wealth across the globe. There is enough food being produced on Earth right now to satisfy the nutritional needs of all human beings, but rather than distributing it equally, Hardin would prefer to keep things as they are in order to ensure that future generations (namely, future generations of Americans) will have the resources they need to survive. I find it interesting that Hardin seems to care more about future generations- people who do not yet exist- than about currently living individuals who are suffering from starvation and disease.