Environmentalists use
the metaphor of the earth as a “spaceship” in trying to persuade countries,
industries and people to stop wasting and polluting our natural resources.
Since we all share life on this planet, they argue, no single person or
institution has the right to destroy, waste, or use more than a fair share of
its resources. But does everyone on
earth have an equal right to an equal share of its resources? The spaceship
metaphor can be dangerous when used by misguided idealists to justify suicidal
policies for sharing our resources through uncontrolled immigration and foreign
aid. In their enthusiastic but unrealistic generosity, they confuse the ethics
of a spaceship with those of a lifeboat. A true spaceship would
have to be under the control of a captain, since no ship could possibly survive
if its course were determined by committee. Spaceship Earth certainly has no
captain; the United Nations is merely a toothless tiger, with little power to
enforce any policy upon its bickering members. If we divide the world
crudely into rich nations and poor nations, two thirds of them are desperately
poor, and only one third comparatively rich, with the United States the
wealthiest of all. Metaphorically each rich nation can be seen as a lifeboat
full of comparatively rich people. In the ocean outside each lifeboat swim the
poor of the world, who would like to get in, or at least to share some of the
wealth. What should the lifeboat passengers do? First, we must
recognize the limited capacity of any lifeboat. For example, a nation’s land
has a limited capacity to support a population and as the current energy crisis
has shown us, in some ways we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of
our land. 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. This is the basic
metaphor within which we must work out our solutions. Let us now enrich the
image, step by step, with substantive additions from the real world, a world
that must solve real and pressing problems of overpopulation and hunger. The harsh ethics of
the lifeboat become even harsher when we consider the reproductive differences
between the rich nations and the poor nations. The people inside the lifeboats
are doubling in numbers every 87 years; those swimming around outside are
doubling, on the average, every 35 years, more than twice as fast as the rich.
And since the world’s resources are dwindling, the difference in prosperity
between the rich and the poor can only increase.
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