As a university student, I always respect my teachers a lot. Garrentt Hardin, a famous human ecologist whose knowledge and contribution are worthy my admiration as I have for my teachers, eventually got some disagreement from me on his academic article Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor. Because I believe what Aristotle said thousand years ago: “I love my teacher Plato greatly, but I love truth more.”

The main reasons why Mr. Hardin adopted the lifeboat metaphor are: He had no confidence in human beings and he did not use the viewpoints of evolution.

Suppose that, according to the author, rich nations were in the lifeboat and the poor were swimming around were true and we also use his view: admit no more to the lifeboat. On the surface, the so-called tragedy of the commons would not happen. However, if you think twice you’ll find that there are 50 rich ones but not only one in the lifeboat and they are not of equal wealth. What if there’s only one bottle of fresh water? What if the lifeboat swamps slowly because of a small hole? Shall we dump one man each day to decrease the weight and increase the chances of being rescued? It is inevitable that the resources of the earth will be used up no matter if we control the population or not. The earth is just like the swamping lifeboat in the cosmic ocean. Even if the rich nations dumped all the poor people as the author suggested, they will finally end up with dying out the day the resources are exhausted. Therefore, we can’t take the earth in an isolated way so the lifeboat metaphor can not hold up.

Then Mr. Hardin criticized the World Food Bank fiercely. He attributed the reasons of being poor to the poor management of the poor nations’ governments and blamed them for their ever-growing population. So he thought that helping the poor will not solve their problem fundamentally a little bit but deteriorate the situation as well as a great burden for the rich nations. Obviously, the author had no faith in human beings at all so I suggest him take a look at human’s history. There was no single country born to be poor or rich including the wealthiest at present, USA. Prior to the discovery of America, there were only some poor American Indians. If Great Britain did not settle down there (colonization can be regarded as foreign aid since it provides knowledge and technology), chances are that the most powerful nation, USA, may still be desperately poor. As a matter of fact, foreign aid can be considered as an investment in a long run to the rich nations and a helping hand to the poor nations which never give up making progress. For instance, China, which used to be as poor as North Korea, depending on exerting herself and foreign aid, has become the second largest trade partner of USA. Thus, we shall not lose faith in our brothers and sisters. The push to create World Food Bank is not as simple as a satisfaction of humanitarian impulse but for all human’s best interests.

Ultimately, Doctor Hardin focused on the population problem and environmental issues and he believed that our posterity would thank us if we dumped all the comparatively poor nations and their offspring. Again he neither considered it in a long run or in wider circumstances other than the small earth. On one hand, as I mentioned, the limited resources will definitely be exhausted and human nature decides that we’ll not be satisfied with living on the tiny earth. Consequently, human beings must set out to explore other planets not only for survival but also for our glory and dreams. Of course, exploring outer space doesn’t mean we use up all the resources on the earth. On the other hand, settlement of human beings on the other planets is such a challenging job that we do need a great deal of manpower and material resources. Only when we come and united together, generation by generation, can we pass human beings’ kindling of life and civilization to our posterity because individual’s capacity is too limited in his transient lifetime.

The earth can be compared to a lifeboat which keeps on swamping in the spacious universe. If we human beings who live on this lifeboat want to survive, what we should do is inheriting human civilization and passing it on to our offspring at the first place but not abandoning our temporary poor families and friends.