Abstract

Both the Lifeboat ethics and Humanist ethics are very popular in our contemporary world. The Lifeboat ethics, which deals with the gap between the rich and the poor and the moral responsibility of the former towards the latter, is based on the Lifeboat theory which is a product of human reason that includes some scientific considerations as regards the engineering safety measures of the lifeboat. Thus, the Lifeboat ethics utilizes both reason and science. In a similar vein, Humanist ethics is also based on human reason and scientific methods. Notwithstanding these common grounds in the sources of the aforementioned ethics, there are dissimilarities in their respective ethical values that outnumber the similarities. This study critically compares these two types of ethics and further examines their similarities and dissimilarities.