12/24/2023 0 Comments Lifeboat food![]() Preserve some excess capacity as a safety factor.) (This, however, is to violate the engineering principle of the "safety factor."Ī new plant disease or a bad change in the weather may decimate our population if we don't To be generous, let us assume our boat has a capacity ofġ0 more, making 60. Here we sit, say 50 people in a lifeboat. The ethical problem is the same for all, and is as follows. We have been living on "capital" -stored petroleum and coal- and soon we must The exact limit is a matter for argument, but the energyĬrunch is convincing more people every day that we have already exceeded the carrying capacity Passengers on a rich lifeboat do? This is the central problem of "the ethics of a lifeboat."įirst we must acknowledge that each lifeboat is effectively limited in capacity. Poor fall out of their lifeboats and swim for a while in the water outside, hoping to be admitted toĪ rich lifeboat, or in some other way to benefit from the "goodies" on board. The poor of the world are in other, much more crowded, lifeboats. Year.) Metaphorically, each rich nation amounts to a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people. (For the United States it is nearly $5,000 per The people in poor countries have an average per capita GNP (Gross National Product) ofĪbout $200 per year, the rich, of about $3,000. In developing some relevant examples the following numerical values are assumed.Īpproximately two-thirds of the world is desperately poor, and only one-third is comparatively Stake, the acceptance of responsibilities is a precondition to the acceptance of rights, if the twoīefore taking up certain substantive issues let us look at an alternative metaphor, that of a As we shall see, this strategy is counterproductive in the areaĭiscussed here if it means accepting rights before responsibilities. Spaceship metaphor is used only to justify spaceship demands on common resources withoutĪcknowledging corresponding spaceship responsibilities.Īn understandable fear of decisive action leads people to embrace "incrementalism" -moving United Nations is a toothless tiger, because the signatories of its charter wanted it that way. What about Spaceship Earth? It certainly has no captain, and no executive committee. But it could not possibly survive if itsĬourse were determined by bickering tribes that claimed rights without responsibilities. It isĬonceivable that a ship could be run by a committee. Under unitary sovereign control (Ophuls 1974). The "generous" attitude of all too many people results inĪsserting inalienable rights while ignoring or denying matching responsibilities.įor the metaphor of a spaceship to be correct, the aggregate of people on board would have to be What is missing in the idealistic view is an insistence that rights and These suicidal policies are attractive because they mesh with what we unthinkingly take to be the One of these is a generous immigration policy, which is only a particular instance of aĬlass of policies that are in error because they lead to the tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968). Unfortunately, the image of a spaceship is also used to promote measures that are Notably useful in justifying pollution control measures. Required for continued survival in the limited world we now see ours to be. Replace the wasteful "cowboy economy" of the past with the frugal "spaceship economy" Kenneth Boulding (1966) is the principal architect of this metaphor. ![]() Inevitably, we have entered this world of concern through the door of metaphor.Įnvironmentalists have emphasized the image of the earth as a spaceship -Spaceship Earth. No generation has viewed the problem of the survival of the human species as seriously as we From the interplay of competitive metaphors, thoroughly developed, we may come closer to metaphor-free solutions to our problems. To avoid unconscious suicide we are well advised to pit one metaphor against another. "All of us," said George Eliot in Middlemarch, "get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them". We must learn to live with them, to understand them, and to control them. Since metaphorical thinking is inescapable it is pointless merely to weep about our human limitations. (I count no less than five in the preceding two sentences.) Later, attempting to meet the demands of rigor, we may achieve some success in cleansing theory of metaphor, though our success is limited if we are unable to avoid using common language, which is shot through and through with fossil metaphors. Susanne Langer (1942) has shown that it is probably impossible to approach an unsolved problem save through the door of metaphor. Currently available in Stalking the Wild Taboo. 561-568 and in The Social Contract, Fall 2001 issue. This article appeared in BioScience, vol 24(10), pp. Living on a lifeboat by Garrett Hardin, 1974 Home Society Garrett Hardin Articles Books Videos Quotes Links Tributes
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