8 ms·

what's the moral thing to do if the world's population was 250 billion?

by jrs99 13y ago

twerquie 13y ago
Scientists centuries ago could not imagine our modern world, with people living vertically in the sky, in dense urban metropolises, eating frozen food, enjoying vaccines and generally having an awesome quality of life. Just as we cannot imagine advancements that have not yet come, and are led to believe we are doomed to starvation by our current mental constraints. Acting politically on this belief is incredibly dangerous and has contributed to many human atrocities over the years, including the Jewish holocaust, English subjugation and starvation of Irish potato farmers, China's misguided one child policy, and many more. Be careful of this mental trap. If you'd like to see fewer babies, educate women and give them equality in the workplace and in political power.
- bencollier49 13y ago
  I think you need to back up with evidence that assertion that Malthusianism was the reason for the holocaust. Or the potato famine, for that matter.
  - twerquie 13y ago
    I never said Malthusian theories were _the reason_, only that they contributed significantly. I'm not a PHD in this or anything, your google search result is as good as mine.
- pvnick 13y ago
  Your comment deserves so much attention and praise, it's difficult to put into words. It never ceases to amaze me when I look around and see psuedointellectual arguments for shrinking the population (read: genocide), mandatory birth control, totalitarian systems of government. All to protect against some theoretical future event - global warming, running out of space, not having enough meat to put on our cheeseburgers. Technological advancement and human good-will has historically been way more than enough to thwart these dangers. Look around. We're living in a world in which smallpox has been completely eradicated. Amazing! And peak oil? With all the advancements in solar energy coming out of our ivy league universities that seams so silly now. And yet we frequently hear so-called "enlightened" individuals calling for policies that immediately lead to suffering and death out of fear that the future holds certain doom.
  - jrs99 13y ago
    I'm not saying that it's a good policy to limit children. But more to spark dialogue. It's an interesting question. What happens when there are 100 billion people on this planet, and if possible, what happens if one day there are 1 trillion people. Does it one day make sense to say you can't have more than 1 kid? Is it amoral?
    - twerquie 13y ago
      > Is it amoral? Yes for two reasons. A) You're telling other people what they can do with their own bodies, and that is fundamentally wrong (see the ridiculous abortion debate in the USA). B) It's impossible to apply the rules evenly and fairly, creating (at best) destructive social imbalance and (at worst) an opportunity for slippery-slope eugenics.
      - Double_Cast 13y ago
        I don't think eugenics will be the biggest issue. At that point, I'm pretty sure everybody will openly declare war on everybody else over limited resources. Basically the Civilization V/Minecraft experiments. It'll probably happen sooner than we expect over bodies of fresh water.
      - jrs99 13y ago
        i understand why you think it is amoral. However, your definition of something being moral or not is very different from someone else's. Someone might think it is amoral to abort at 8 months, while there certainly are many that think it is perfectly fine to abort at 8 months. Other people are certain that you are killing a human being. My own view is that none of us actually knows whether it is moral or amoral to abort at any given month. You have to really think of a world with hundreds of billions on it and how that possibly would change the morality of something.
  - angersock 13y ago
    Technological advancement and human good-will has historically been way more than enough to thwart these dangers. Erm, that works well and good, until it doesn't, and then you're fucked. The point is that these advances don't come in a timespan of weeks or months, but years or decades (or centuries!), and when we finally see a problem concretely manifest we may well have no alternative but very nasty population reduction--the trauma of which may result in a near irreversible backslide to barbarism.
- vidarh 13y ago
  > China's misguided one child policy China's "misguided" one chid policy came at a point where the extremely rapid population growth started in part thanks to Mao coupled with the massive other upheavals the party triggered had caused massive starvation and death. While there are many issues with it, it also put the breaks on a population growth that was totally unmanageable, and frankly helped mitigate some of the effects of past atrocities. It's easy to criticise, but it'd have been even easier to criticise the results of allowing the insane growth rate to continue unchecked.
- mousefad 13y ago
  Centuries ago people could not imagine humans measurably changing the ph of the oceans, fishery collapse, global deforestation, anthropogenic climate change and an elevation in the extinction rate to rival the great mass extinction events of millions of years ago. While I admire your resistance to knee-jerk doomsaying, suggesting we're just going to technology our way out of this mess without having to make tough choices about population is blinkered and myopic.
  - cobrausn 13y ago
    Kneejerk doomsaying followed by praise about resistance to kneejerk doomsaying.
ck2 13y ago
Force catholics to start using birth control?

what's the moral thing to do if the world's population was 250 billion?

by jrs99 13y ago

what's the moral thing to do if the world's population was 250 billion?

Scientists centuries ago could not imagine our modern world, with people living vertically in the sky, in dense urban metropolises, eating frozen food, enjoying vaccines and generally having an awesome quality of life. Just as we cannot imagine advancements that have not yet come, and are led to believe we are doomed to starvation by our current mental constraints. Acting politically on this belief is incredibly dangerous and has contributed to many human atrocities over the years, including the Jewish holocaust, English subjugation and starvation of Irish potato farmers, China's misguided one child policy, and many more. Be careful of this mental trap. If you'd like to see fewer babies, educate women and give them equality in the workplace and in political power.

bencollier49 13y ago
I think you need to back up with evidence that assertion that Malthusianism was the reason for the holocaust. Or the potato famine, for that matter.
- twerquie 13y ago
  I never said Malthusian theories were _the reason_, only that they contributed significantly. I'm not a PHD in this or anything, your google search result is as good as mine.
pvnick 13y ago
Your comment deserves so much attention and praise, it's difficult to put into words. It never ceases to amaze me when I look around and see psuedointellectual arguments for shrinking the population (read: genocide), mandatory birth control, totalitarian systems of government. All to protect against some theoretical future event - global warming, running out of space, not having enough meat to put on our cheeseburgers. Technological advancement and human good-will has historically been way more than enough to thwart these dangers. Look around. We're living in a world in which smallpox has been completely eradicated. Amazing! And peak oil? With all the advancements in solar energy coming out of our ivy league universities that seams so silly now. And yet we frequently hear so-called "enlightened" individuals calling for policies that immediately lead to suffering and death out of fear that the future holds certain doom.
- jrs99 13y ago
  I'm not saying that it's a good policy to limit children. But more to spark dialogue. It's an interesting question. What happens when there are 100 billion people on this planet, and if possible, what happens if one day there are 1 trillion people. Does it one day make sense to say you can't have more than 1 kid? Is it amoral?
  - twerquie 13y ago
    > Is it amoral? Yes for two reasons. A) You're telling other people what they can do with their own bodies, and that is fundamentally wrong (see the ridiculous abortion debate in the USA). B) It's impossible to apply the rules evenly and fairly, creating (at best) destructive social imbalance and (at worst) an opportunity for slippery-slope eugenics.
    - Double_Cast 13y ago
      I don't think eugenics will be the biggest issue. At that point, I'm pretty sure everybody will openly declare war on everybody else over limited resources. Basically the Civilization V/Minecraft experiments. It'll probably happen sooner than we expect over bodies of fresh water.
    - jrs99 13y ago
      i understand why you think it is amoral. However, your definition of something being moral or not is very different from someone else's. Someone might think it is amoral to abort at 8 months, while there certainly are many that think it is perfectly fine to abort at 8 months. Other people are certain that you are killing a human being. My own view is that none of us actually knows whether it is moral or amoral to abort at any given month. You have to really think of a world with hundreds of billions on it and how that possibly would change the morality of something.
- angersock 13y ago
  Technological advancement and human good-will has historically been way more than enough to thwart these dangers. Erm, that works well and good, until it doesn't, and then you're fucked. The point is that these advances don't come in a timespan of weeks or months, but years or decades (or centuries!), and when we finally see a problem concretely manifest we may well have no alternative but very nasty population reduction--the trauma of which may result in a near irreversible backslide to barbarism.
vidarh 13y ago
> China's misguided one child policy China's "misguided" one chid policy came at a point where the extremely rapid population growth started in part thanks to Mao coupled with the massive other upheavals the party triggered had caused massive starvation and death. While there are many issues with it, it also put the breaks on a population growth that was totally unmanageable, and frankly helped mitigate some of the effects of past atrocities. It's easy to criticise, but it'd have been even easier to criticise the results of allowing the insane growth rate to continue unchecked.
mousefad 13y ago
Centuries ago people could not imagine humans measurably changing the ph of the oceans, fishery collapse, global deforestation, anthropogenic climate change and an elevation in the extinction rate to rival the great mass extinction events of millions of years ago. While I admire your resistance to knee-jerk doomsaying, suggesting we're just going to technology our way out of this mess without having to make tough choices about population is blinkered and myopic.
- cobrausn 13y ago
  Kneejerk doomsaying followed by praise about resistance to kneejerk doomsaying.

ck2 13y ago

Force catholics to start using birth control?