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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (21330)	7/19/2005 11:51:32 AM
From: Oeconomicus	Respond to of 28931

"Considering that the population is already crowding on the last remaining habitat of many species we should not discourage anyone who voluntarily has fewer children." Were are not talking about "other species" right now, but rather the capacity of the Earth resources to support a given number of people, whether population growth is likely to outstrip that capacity, and what can or should be done about the alleged population problem. Endangered species is an unnecessary tangent. That said, you are right - we should certainly not discourage people from having fewer children (or more, for that matter - it IS an individual choice and I firmly believe in individual freedom). That does not mean, however, that we cannot make moral judgements about exactly what means we allow people to employ in "managing" their household size. We do not, for example, condone infanticide, but we do, for the most part, condone measures to prevent pregnancy - i.e. "birth control." The only problem is that there is an area of widespread disagreement about when you step from birth control (in the common usage meaning preventing pregnancy, not the literal meaning of preventing birth) to infanticide (or feticide or any other "cide"). Some appear to think that society is not capable of making, or has no right to make, a judgement about where to draw the line and claim to have identified some purely objective line they insist must be THE line, but the arguments for any particular line amount to little more than tautological proofs. For example, "the line is birth because that's when one is separated from the mother", which is, of course, only the definition of birth. Or, "the line is conception because that's when one's own unique DNA (ignoring identical twins) is formed from the combining of the mother's egg and the father's sperm", which is, of course, only the definition of conception. Such an argument can go on forever, with no resolution, as we know. But what is clear, to me anyway, is that abortion is NOT birth control. At some point, IMO, it becomes infanticide, but I don't pretend to know of any objectively identifiable line where it becomes so. "All of which shows that population is really only a problem when there are barriers to family planning." Actually, what it shows is that birth rates seem to be inversely related to prosperity or standard of living. Relating it to the availability of "family planning", however one defines that term (it is often a euphemism for abortion, as I'm sure you know), would take further empirical study. But I would submit that it is a conscious choice to have fewer children, or perhaps somewhat less than conscious if it's a matter of cultural norms changing over time, that is made easier to accomplish by the availability of birth control, but is really a result of individual freedom and security, and that particular abortion laws have nothing material to do with it. "The tragedy of the commons is still relevant today." Of course it is. But that doesn't make Malthus right about the destiny of man that he concludes from his population theory and it doesn't make Hardin right that we need to surrender our "freedom to breed." His is just another of a long history of tyrannical ideas derived from Malthus.