“Adrift in a Moral Sea … So here we sit, say 50 people in our lifeboat. To be generous, let us assume it has room for 10 more, making a total capacity of 60. Suppose the 50 of us in the lifeboat see 100 others swimming in the water outside, begging for admission to our boat or for handouts …
… We have several options: we may be tempted to try to live by the Christian ideal of being ‘our brother’s keeper,’ or by the Marxist ideal of ‘to each according to his needs.’ Since the needs of all in the water are the same, and since they can all be seen as ‘our brothers,’ we could take them all into our boat, making a total of 150 in a boat designed for 60. The boat swamps, everyone drowns. Complete justice, complete catastrophe … Since the boat has an unused excess capacity of 10 more passengers, we could admit just 10 more to it. But which 10 do we let in? … Suppose we decide to … admit no more to the lifeboat. Our survival is then possible although we shall have to be constantly on guard against boarding parties.”
In a paper published in 1974 the US ecologist Garrett Hardin introduced the metaphor of Lifeboat Earth to make the case against rich Western countries helping out the poorer developing nations of the world. Tireless scourge of bleeding-heart liberals, Hardin argues that the well-meaning but misguided interventions of the West are damaging in the long run to both sides. Countries on the receiving end of foreign aid develop a culture of dependence and so fail to “learn the hard way” the dangers of inadequate forward planning and unchecked population growth. At the same time, unrestricted immigration means that near-stagnant Western populations will rapidly become swamped by an unstoppable tide of economic refugees. The blame for these ills Hardin lays at the door of conscience-stricken liberals, censuring in particular their encouragement of the “tragedy of the commons,” a process in which limited resources, idealistically regarded as the rightful property of all humans, fall under a kind of common ownership that inevitably leads to their over-exploitation and ruin.
Hardin’s recourse to the harsh ethics of the lifeboat was a direct response to the shortcomings he perceived in the cozier “spaceship Earth” metaphor beloved of head-in-the-clouds environmentalists; according to this, we are all onboard spaceship Earth together, so it is our duty to ensure that we do not waste the ship’s precious and limited resources. The problem comes when this picture bleeds into the liberal’s cherished image of one big, happy crew all working together, encouraging the view that the world’s resources should be held in common and that everyone must have a fair and equal share of them. A farmer who owns a piece of land will look after his property and ensure that it is not ruined by overgrazing, but if it becomes common ground open to all, there will not be the same concern to protect it. The temptations of short-term gain mean that voluntary restraint soon evaporates, and degradation and decline rapidly follow. This process—inevitable, in Hardin’s view, in “a crowded world of less than perfect human beings”—is what he calls the “tragedy of the commons.” In just this way, when the Earth’s resources, such as air, water and the fish of the oceans, are treated as commons, there is no proper stewardship of them and ruin is sure to follow.
“Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
Garrett Hardin, 1968
Toughlove ethics Hardin himself is unapologetic about promoting his “toughlove” lifeboat ethics. Untroubled by conscience himself, his advice to guilt-stricken liberals is to “get out and yield your place to others,” thereby eliminating feelings of remorse that threaten to destabilize the boat. There is no point worrying about how we got here—“we cannot remake the past”; and it is only by adopting his tough, uncompromising stance that we can safeguard the world (or our part of it, at least) for future generations.
The picture of the relationship between rich and poor countries is certainly not pretty: the former safely ensconced in their boats and splitting open the heads and cracking the knuckles of the latter with their oars as they attempt to climb on board. But Hardin’s is not the only way of interpreting the metaphor. Is the lifeboat really in danger of sinking? What is its real capacity? Or is it rather a matter of the bloated fat cats budging up a bit and taking a cut in their rations?
Much of Hardin’s argument rests on the assumption that the higher reproductive rates of poorer countries would persist even if they got a fairer deal; he does not allow that such rates may be a response to high infant mortality, low life expectancy, poor education, and so on. Stripped of Hardin’s gloss, the liberal would say, we are left with a picture of gross and naked immorality—selfishness, complacency, lack of compassion …
Moral boundaries Looked at in this light, the liberal’s guilt does not seem so out of place. A liberal incumbent of the lifeboat would not dream of clubbing a fellow passenger over the head with an oar, so how can she contemplate doing such a thing (or even allowing such a thing to be done) to the hapless individuals in the water surrounding the boat? Indeed, assuming that there is in fact room onboard, is she not duty-bound to help them out of the water and share her rations?
The lifeboat scenario thus presents Western liberalism with a nasty challenge. One of the most basic requirements of social justice is that people are treated impartially; things that are beyond someone’s control (accidental factors due to birth, for instance, gender, skin color, etc.) should not be allowed to determine how that person is treated and morally evaluated. And yet one such factor—where one happened to be born—seems to play a very significant role in our moral lives, not only for Hardin’s supporters but for most self-professed liberals as well. How can so much—indeed, any—moral weight be attached to something as arbitrary as national boundaries?
“For the foreseeable future survival demands that we govern our actions by the ethics of a lifeboat. Posterity will be ill served if we do not.”
Garrett Hardin, 1974
Faced with this challenge, the liberal must either show why the demands of impartiality can be suspended or watered down when we consider parts of the world other than our own—why it is right for us to show moral preference for our own; or she must accept that there is some incoherence at the heart of current liberalism and that consistency demands that principles of morality and social justice are extended globally.
Recent theorists have attempted to tackle the issue in both these ways. Argument for partiality as an essential ingredient in liberal thinking, while useful in addressing global realities, is certain to diminish its scope and dignity. On the other hand, full-blown cosmopolitan liberalism, while laudable, demands a sea change in current practices and policies of international engagement and risks foundering against those same global realities. Either way, there is still much groundwork to be done in political philosophy in the area of global and international justice.
the condensed idea
Is there more room in the boat?
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.AD30 | The golden rule |
| 1959 | Positive and negative freedom |
| 1971 | The difference principle |
| 1974 | Lifeboat Earth |