- Premise: Everyone has the right to breed as much as they want.
- Premise: Every child and living human has a right to opportunity in life and an equal claim on the planet’s resources.
- Conclusion: other people get to take my share of the planet’s resources from me.
It’s obvious, isn’t it? All those extra babies add an extra burden on the
planet, and if we want to share the planet’s finite capacity equally, then by
giving them some we must take away from the claim of people who already exist.
And if people can take it without consent, did it really belong to the
first person at all? Why should I pay for someone else’s choice to breed; to
subsidise them?
We have to sacrifice one of the first two. The news today is full of the
UN rapporteur worrying that we will sacrifice the second. If that’s a bad
thing, there’s only one alternative.
It's difficult to allocate resources fairly
If we don’t share the planet’s capacity out equally, updated constantly,
then where do we draw the line? Just after I was born, so that I get a full
share but people a couple of months younger have to share their parents’ share?
Do I inherit my parents’ share, or is that reallocated around the world now
that they’re dead? What about that younger person? When his parents die, does
he get that full share, or is he left with just the 2/3 of a share he got when
his parents’ two shares were divided between the three of them?
These questions all naturally arise in my mind every time someone tells
me that in the future we’ll not be able to eat meat or fly abroad because these
things are unsustainable. These things give me a lot of joy, but I don’t drive,
don’t overconsume clothes or plastic or other pointless tat, and I don’t use
central heating. Someone telling me not to eat meat because others will be
having a baby is committing an outrage far bigger than me telling them not to
breed because I will be going on holiday. The difference is that they want to
take my share from me; I want to carry on using it.
The problems of allocating the planet’s resources to a shifting
population are not fully soluble. Even if we could judge each person’s actions
and intention in order to decide what they deserved, we could pick different
criteria depending on our specific conceptions of justice.
Cap and trade is fairest, if only there weren't inequality
One solution is to have a global cap on emissions and auction off the
right to emit. This leaves the decision about how much an individual can emit
to the market. But that’s a decision in itself: we choose to let the rich have
more. If society were perfectly ordered, with just levels of inequality, that
might be a perfect solution. But even within any country in the world this is
not true, and the problem is confounded by the fact that not all countries will
agree to a global market in which ‘their’ share is bought by others. They do
not distribute resources internally by markets and do not want to participate
in such a system. By formally expanding the ability of wealth to control and
buy ever more aspects of human life we expand the impact of inequality.
Rich countries like the USA would still have their worries: what would a
global government do with the revenue from such an auction? Why should wealthy
Americans agree to pay any more for their overconsumption when they can clearly
get away with no paying? If the revenue will be allocated to countries to spend
on their citizens, how is it split? Not that giving Americans even large
amounts of revenue will help, as they’re so opposed to government in general.
Poor countries will be upset because such a market will reinforce the
status quo: rich countries will buy finite resources, which now that they are
recognized as finite will leave none available for the poor to buy for
development or their own lifestyles. That revenue, in their minds, should all
go towards helping them with development which a cap on emissions will prevent
them from pursuing.
If we choose to get rid of statement 2
Back to the beginning three statements: I find the conclusion
unacceptable. That means either that people don’t get an equal claim on
resources and that some will be born with much less opportunity, or that people
shouldn’t get to breed freely. I tend towards this latter conclusion. Others
agree with me that human rights, dignity and opportunity should not be
sacrificed.
If people continue to
breed prolifically (or even at moderate rates, really) then we will continue
rapidly to exhaust the planet’s reserves. At the moment we are not in balance
with nature, or getting close to crossing some threshold. We are well past the
threshold: soils are losing fertility, we are draining aquifers, drying up
rivers through melting of mountain ice and destroying biodiversity. We have
raked the seas clean of fish, with many ‘stocks’ at less than 1% of what they
once were. Living a decent life will become expensive, and rich people will
shutter themselves away. That will be within countries, but also between
countries.
We will buy food from
poor countries and others in those countries will starve. The strains will make
political, religious and ethnic divisions erupt into conflict, and refugees
will migrate, looking for somewhere they can live. There will be millions who
legitimately meet our criteria for asylum seekers; far more than we few rich
nations can comfortably absorb.
So we will of course
start to ignore human rights as currently defined: the right of people to seek
asylum, and their right to a good life at home. The fevered dreams of
right-wing loons at the moment will in the future become reality: there really
will be (potential) billions, and the ‘loss’ of our quality of life if we
choose to care for them either at home or abroad will be significant. Land
currently inhabited by over half the world’s population could become genuinely
uninhabitable: consistent temperatures well over 40 degrees, droughts etc. We
are looking at global collapse of society. How could every human right identified
by a stable, hopeful and wealthy society be upheld in such a situation?
We will watch people
starve and know that the alternative is simply to starve with them. We will
watch and hope desperately that things don’t get so bad that we starve, and our
billionaire overlords buy what would be our food. We will watch other countries
mistreat refugees and be grateful that they’re keeping the four horsemen away
from us for a bit longer.
Choosing to give up on statement 1
The solution to forcible
depopulation through war, famine, pestilence and global destruction is
depopulation through ageing. If we just do not breed, our population will drop.
Yet to mention this possibility is met with horror. It’s fine if our children
live miserable lives in a miserable world, either starving or in constant fear
of those who are, to keep our right to create them sacrosanct. We pay tens of
thousands for couples to have IVF treatment, and there are complaints, treated
as reasonable, that it is stingy of us not to pay more to give infertile
couples even more of a chance of having children.
Why is this regarded as
a health issue? Their bodies do all normal activities well enough. They can
move, eat, think… it is simply that a life goal is denied them. What if I have
a goal to be an Olympic sprinter? Should we fund my training to the tune of
tends of thousands of pounds? Yes, people can be depressed and suffer mental
ill health from not having children, but we have a term, the mid-life crisis,
for those who are getting older and realize that their own hopes and dreams are
not possible.
There are multitudes of
poor people (poor by current standards, not by the even more desperate
standards of the future) whose dreams can never be hopes, but could be if we spent
£10,000 more on giving them a chance.
We are all,
biologically, long-distance runners adapted to do many things, including
breeding, that we need self-control to avoid in modern society. However badly
someone wants to breed, I can assure that person that I want at least as badly
not to grow old. Why do we not treat ageing on the NHS, or treat the ageing
crisis as an enormous healthcare issue?
