[3.4.] Hardin vs. Singer: Two Very Different Utilitarians.

 

In the 1970s, ecologist Garrett Hardin compared the earth to a lifeboat and argued that developed countries have no moral obligation to help people dying from malnutrition and disease in the developing world:

 

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? How do we choose? Do we pick the best 10, "first come, first served"? And what do we say to the 90 we exclude? If we do let an extra 10 into our lifeboat, we will have lost our "safety factor," an engineering principle of critical importance. For example, if we don't leave room for excess capacity as a safety factor in our country's agriculture, a new plant disease or a bad change in the weather could have disastrous consequences.

Suppose we decide to preserve our small safety factor and admit no more to the lifeboat. Our survival is then possible although we shall have to be constantly on guard against boarding parties.

While this last solution clearly offers the only means of our survival, it is morally abhorrent to many people. Some say they feel guilty about their good luck. My reply is simple: “Get out and yield your place to others.” This may solve the problem of the guilt-ridden person's conscience, but it does not change the ethics of the lifeboat. The needy person to whom the guilt-ridden person yields his place will not himself feel guilty about his good luck. If he did, he would not climb aboard. The net result of conscience-stricken people giving up their unjustly held seats is the elimination of that sort of conscience from the lifeboat. [1]

 

Pence interprets Hardin’s so-called lifeboat ethics as a form of utilitarianism that endorses a triage approach:

 

The biologist Garrett Hardin has argued that the planet is like a lifeboat with so many people wanting to get in that if we adopt Christian or Kantian ethics, which value each individual as an end-in-himself, we will let everyone in the boat and the boat will sink. Developed countries are the lifeboat, with limited amounts of resources, and the developing countries of the world are survivors of the wreck at sea, all wanting to get in. (92)

 

Pence describes the following implications of Hardin’s lifeboat ethics (92):

·         “we should not give money to save victims of famine because they will only have more children later who will fall victim to another famine in their lifetime”;

·         “we should triage large parts of the world, letting them save themselves if they can, but generally not wasting our resources on them”;

·         “we should only expend our limited charity on countries where the people are willing to change and become self-sufficient.”

 

With regard to helping countries with AIDS epidemics, Hardin’s lifeboat ethics implies the following:

·         “we [should] pick pragmatic countries with educable citizens willing to learn and to change their behaviors, such that the whole country is spared.” (93)

·         Our limited medical “resources should be used in utilitarian-triage fashion to save [as many] lives [as] possible and, sadly to ignore the rest. In reality, what that means is allocating the existing money to preventing the spread of HIV in countries with cooperating leaders and attitudes, while triaging countries with bad attitudes and uncooperative leaders.” (95)

·         “…a good utilitarian at the head of the Global Fund Against AIDS will identify those countries willing to do what it takes to suspend the spread of HIV and give them the resources they need to do so. In this way, scare resources will maximize life in a tragic situation. … [N]ew funds for AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa should be earmarked for preventing new cases of HIV, not for treating people infected with HIV or in the last stages of AIDS.” (98)

 

But this is not the only way a utilitarian might approach the issue of helping the poor and sick in the developing world.

 

Another utilitarian, Peter Singer,[2] has argued a position nearly the exact opposite of Hardin’s: that it is the moral obligation of citizens of the developed world to donate as much of their personal income as possible to charities that provide water, food and medicine to the world’s poor.

 

This difference between Hardin and Singer indicates that putting utilitarianism into practice, using it to decide which course of action is right in a real world situation, is not always easy.

·         Hardin believed that if developed countries were to do all they can to help the rest of the world, there would be dire consequences.

·         On the other hand, Singer believes that the general level of well-being in the world will increase if the developed world makes such an effort.

This is ultimately a factual disagreement about strategy, not a moral disagreement. Each is making a utilitarian assumption about our moral obligations, viz., that we have an obligation to do what will make the most people better off in the long-run. They would each also accept the maximization principle, which is a corollary of utilitarianism.

 

But they disagree about which course of action will actually have the morally desirable consequence, i.e., they disagree about which course of action will in fact save more lives in the long run.

 

Pence’s view seems to be that the best utilitarian-triage approach is to focus our efforts on preventing the further spread of HIV rather than treating people who have already contracted that virus:

 

                Given the failure of the present methods, if the present 40 million people infect another 80 million ... then adoption of an idealistic, patient-centered ethical position would be one of the greatest mistakes in the history of medicine. At first, Farmer’s saintly ideal seems noble, but the utilitarian physician-captain has to constantly keep in mind that the opportunity cost, which may be that treating one identified, HIV-infected person with $20 worth of medicine diverts $20 from prevention and thus condemns several children and women to HIV infection. Moreover, this process will repeat tens of millions of times around the globe. (96)

 

 

 

Stopping point for Friday January 23. For next time, finish reading Pence ch.4 (pp.96-107).