It is likely that other professors have asked this question, so I may not be entirely original with this particular lesson. I begin class by asking my students to make a choice. Someone has to die. And the choice is this: It could be one thousand individuals in some far-off land (their choice), one hundred Americans, ten folks from their neighborhood, or just one person from their immediate family. I give students about fifteen minutes to make their decision and provide their rationale after which time I ask for their responses and tally up the sum. The idea is to measure a person’s selflessness. The closer to home – say, the one immediate family member – the more selfless. The farther away from home – the one thousand folks in some far-flung part of the globe – the more selfish. It is not an exact science, but it puts us in the ballpark for an interesting conversation. Those who chose the one thousand argue that they do not know them – that thousands of individuals die every day anyway, so what is a thousand more, even though they might be an intentional part of the exercise. Those who choose one hundred or ten are not comfortable with one thousand deaths, so they choose something in the middle: not as many as a thousand but not an immediate family member either. Those who choose one family member contend that the thousand, the hundred, and the ten all have immediate family members, too, and that, to prevent so much indescribable sadness, they would rather, as they say, take the hit themselves. The decision is tough but tougher is the thought that many others would be burned. These students prefer to keep the flame close to home. Of course, there is another choice that I purposefully leave out of the question: the self. It is here when we usually pivot to a conversation about Garrett Hardin’s famous 1974 essay, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” Hardin first dismisses the popular-at-the-time metaphor that earth is a spaceship. Our resources are finite, he points out, and only those in power or with influence have access. To be sure, there is a great disparity in wealth between human beings with roughly two-thirds of all of humanity living in desperate poverty and that a more apt metaphor is that earth is a lifeboat. The wealthy are in it, and the poor are not. If, to build upon this metaphor, the lifeboat would sink if overwhelmed with too many individuals, what becomes the so-called right or moral posture to take? Indeed, Hardin adds that “[t]he 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.” If the goal is to decrease human suffering then the writing is on the wall. Hardin concludes that “For the foreseeable future, our survival demands that we govern our actions by the ethics of a lifeboat, harsh though they may be. Posterity will be satisfied with nothing less.” Everybody knows that a population goes up or down depending on its access to food and other vital resources. If we want to decrease human suffering then we would want to decrease the amount of humans. How do those who chose one or ten feel about this plan of action? Those who struggle to reconcile what makes sense on paper with an internal moral compass that rejects that approach outright are, I would argue, operating less by brain and more by heart, begging a question that transcends Hardin’s entire argument: Not scientific, not rational, not purely logistical, but human ... human ... What is the human thing to do? We should all be eternally grateful that one figure made the choice of self that only He could make.
