carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (09/12/86)
[Jan Wasilewsky] >Oded's proposal is non-coercive. But it is morally preferable even >compared to encouraging voluntary population control. What are the >malthusians afraid of? That people may be brought into the world >whose life will be not worth living? Well, let *them* be the judges >of that. The Malthusians are afraid of the prospect of a large number of people whose lives are much poorer, shorter, and less fulfilling than they need to be. Consider an African child born in the next century who faces an impoverished and malnourished life owing to overpopulation. Your response is to make suicide pills available -- presumably not through the government. Then, since this hypothetical person can freely choose to live or die, you consider that the situation is morally acceptable. Your view, evidently, is that a possible person is better off if he exists, so long as he is not so miserable as to take his own life, than if this possible person never comes to exist. Well, I can quote Sophocles as a distinguished authority against this view. But it is a very dubious one in any case. A possible person is not a real person who can be better or worse off. There is in fact no person until the moment the person comes into existence. There was no actual Jan before Jan came into existence, there were only possibilities. What you (the real Jan) are saying is that the fact that you choose to go on living now demonstrates that you are better off than if you had never existed. But this is fallacious, because it implies that if you had never existed, you would have regretted the fact and been deeply upset about it. Which is ridiculous, just as ridiculous as saying that fictional characters are to be pitied because they will never come to know the joys of real life as we do who are fortunate enough to exist. So when you say >If it's not worth it, they can quit. If they are never born, they get >no chance and no choice. you commit a philosophical solecism. If "they" are never born, i.e., if "they" never exist in the first place, then there is no "they" to be the subject of "they get no chance and no choice." It is nonsense to say that the "choice" of something nonexistent is constrained. Pity the poor unicorn, never to run and play in the fields like his four-footed counterparts who are lucky enough to exist -- what a colossal injustice has been perpetrated on the unicorn. So this argument in favor of unlimited population growth is absurd. My response to the question of the hypothetical 21st century African is that we should strive to keep the human population below levels at which this African may be expected to be miserable for a substantial part of his life. We ought to maximize the number of good, happy lives -- not the number of merely endurable lives. There is a great difference between merely going on living and living a truly happy and fulfilling life. See Parfit's *Reasons and Persons* for an exploration of the philosophical (particularly the ethical) problems in connection with future generations. >Some people are so scared of babies they propose coercive population >control - a conception police. This is a distortion. I have not "proposed" coercive population control measures, without qualification; rather, I have claimed that the moral acceptability or unacceptability, the wisdom or foolishness of coercive measures, *depends on both the particular type of coercive measures employed and the circumstances in which they are applied*. I am all for purely voluntary measures *unless* there is good reason to believe that they will not work. Most of the articles objecting to coercive measures (particularly from the libertarian camp) have been kneejerk reactions to the terms "coercive" and "coercion". I have already pointed out that one of the strong points of libertarianism is that you do not have to work very hard or study very long to understand it. Coercion is bad: now you understand moral and political philosophy. The rest of us have to beat our brains out on tough philosophical issues. >At any rate all population control advocates should embrace it, >*unless* what really interests them is not overpopulation, but >control for control's sake. If they won't let people be born *or* die >without permission, then they simply want total control over you - >or, in equivalent words - they want to *own* you. Even if my motives are to enslave the world and become dictator for life, that would be irrelevant to the philosophical and scientific issues we have been discussing. Speculation about one's opponents' motives is usually unhelpful. If you want to engage in a name-calling or motive-attribution contest, please do it somewhere else. What interests me is the welfare of the actually existing human beings of the present and future. Richard Carnes