It is often said that economics is the science of scarcity. But since a lot of economics is just applied ethics, it is perhaps more apt to say the real science of scarcity is ethics. Scarcity is arguably one of the fundamental problems that morality has evolved to address, and most discussions in ethics assume some kind of scarcity in the background. I show this by considering a number of issues in ethics, from resource allocation to self‐control, where scarcity plays a major role.