The Ethics of Starvation

Mark Schauer

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Philosophy - Practical (Ethics, Aesthetics, Culture, Nature, Right, ...), grade: A, Northern Arizona University, course: Political Science: Topics in Administration, language: English, abstract: Though delivering the worlds poorest citizens from starvation is an attainable goal, producing enough food to provide a standard of living comparable to the Wests is not. Efforts to preserve the worlds most fragile ecosystems are doomed when the people in them are living in extreme poverty, and the false hope of selling a poor nations natural resources to the industrialized world will only bring sufficient prosperity to stave off starvation until the mineral wealth has been depleted. It should be kept in mind that the world has not seen an uninterrupted advancement in technological progress, of which food is the building block - the Dark Age enveloped Europe when the advanced plant genetics and animal husbandry techniques of the Western Roman Empire were lost along with its collapse in the 5th century AD. The Romans, it should be added, were not particularly concerned with feeding non-Romans in foreign lands, and were brought down by peoples who were their technological inferiors.