Summary of “Carrying Capacity as an Ethical Concept” by Garrett Hardin
Main
Point
Food aid does not help the recipients, in fact in the long run it is detrimental to their survival because in an overpopulated world it causes a faster transgression of the carrying capacity.
Lifeboat ethics as a
special application of the logic of the commons
Commons are community property. Everyone may pasture their animals on the commons and personally gain from the growth of their livestock. This system may work in an under-populated world, but in an overpopulated world every person can gain from increasing the amount of livestock they pasture on the commons. This in turn exceeds the carrying capacity of the land.
Some people believe the rich should help the poor through crises, when what is really happening is a crunch, not a passing state.
Crisis analysis: “These poor people (1,000,000) are
starving, because of a crisis (flood, drought, or the like). How can we refuse
them (1,000,000)? Let us feed them (1,000,000). Once the crisis is past those who are still
hungry are few (say 1,000) and there is no further need for our
intervention.”
Crunch analysis. “Those (1,000,000) who are hungry are reproducing. We
send food to them (1,010,000). Their lives (1,020,000) are saved. But since the
environment is still essentially the same, the next year they (1,030,000) ask
for more food. We send it to them (1,045,000); and the next year they
(1,068,000) ask for still more.
The argument of
selfishness
Helping people costs money, so refusing to do so is seen as selfishness. There are also selfish motives under the surface of food aid legislation such as Public Law 480 which allows food surplus to go to poor countries. Farmers benefit because the government buys there grain providing them with money and economic support to grain prices. Railroads, seaports, etc. also gain from moving the grain. A few gain a lot while millions of taxpayers split the cost and pay a little. A selfish motive can be found on both sides.
Analysis of food/population of
Invert the question “How do we help
Now we have “How do we harm
We could use weapons of mass destruction, but to make them really suffer we should give them a bounty of food every year.
On a purely vegetable diet it takes about 400 pounds of
grain to keep one person alive and healthy for a year. The 600 million Indians
need 120 million tons per year; since their nutrition is less than adequate
presumably they are getting a bit less than that now. So the 80 million tons we
give them will almost double
No, much of the food will be diverted from those who need it by corruption and
Rot. Unemployment is already high, and will increase because healthy men will be more productive, so less will be required. The population would grow, but there would be no incentive to invest in higher grain production at home, eventually leading to disaster if food aid was stopped or not increased as the population increases.
Providing food does nothing for satisfying the appetite for things
produced with non-food energy, and
Throughout
Just sending food to an already overpopulated country is to contribute to their ruin.
How can we help
Send food and non-food energy- this is not practical because energy such as oil and coal are not in surplus. It would take a lot more than we could provide to make a difference.
We can let people starve to save more people later.
Fifty years ago
When for the sake of momentary gain by human beings the
carrying capacity is transgressed, the long-term interests of the same human
beings—”same” meaning themselves and their successors in time—are
damaged.
James Woodward