Secondly, there is this idea of spaceship Earth. Earth is on a spaceship. There are limited resources which means you can't have the cowboy ethic view because you have to be concerned with what you waste. It calls for longterm unselfish thinking, you have to think of the generations ahead of us. Both of these led us to the idea of lifeboat ethics.
Everyone is a ship and stranded passengers in the water. Who do we rescue? There are three things we can do. First, we could do the right/just thing and save everyone, however then we will use up all of our supplies and then everyone dies. The ship will sink because it has too much weight. Second, we could save as many as possible, but then we have to deal with the question of who makes the biggest contribution? We can take the maximum number of people the boat can sustain. I like this choice the best but it still has problems. If you let down the lifeboats and let people swim to them then whoever makes it to the boat first should live. It is survival of the fittest, but then you have to turn people away when the ship has reached it's limit. There's always the question of who is the most important? A doctor might be important but is he more important than a school teacher, a mother or a scientist? Without the mother the doctor wouldn't be here because he wouldn't be born, without the school teacher the doctor would have never learn anything he knows and without the scientist the doctor wouldn't have any of his medicines or tools. So who is the most important? But I still like the second option most. Though the third, being the most unjust, is probably the most ideal. We save no one, save ourselves. yes it is not just to let everyone die but it is easier than trying to figure out who is the most important.
