Topics Ethics

Question I just saw an advertisement on a website, the advertisement features a poor African child who is on the verge of starvation. Is it wrong for me to think that a child of his standards should die, because if everyone would have the chance to live to their 70-80s that our world would over populate? I sound like an very immoral person, but if the end result is world overpopulation, then I would want to sacrifice the unlucky ones, for the sake of all others.

Accepted:
December 6, 2008

Comments

Suppose it is true that, if everyone had the chance to live to their 70-80s, our world would become very overpopulated. In this case, the best way to bring relief would be to get rid of an appropriate number of affluent people who, through their much greater ecological footprint, are imposing much greater burdens on everyone else than the poor African child does, whose existence would barely be felt by others even if she lived to 120. In numbers, while the consumption of US residents produces about 20 tons of CO2 annually on average, 60 poor countries have average annual CO2 emissions below 1 ton per person, and 11 countries even have annual emission below 0.1 ton per person. You would have to sacrifice about 500 unlucky people in one of those very poor countries to get the same effect as you would get from sacrificing one of us. Yes, this is beginning to sound a bit immoral.

Fortunately, the choice is not this stark. If everyone had the chance to live to their 70-80s, our world would actually become less overpopulated, in the long run anyway, than it would be if dire poverty continued to take its massive 18 million annual toll. There is now abundant empirical evidence across regions and cultures, showing that, when poverty declines, fertility rates also decline sharply (for a good early discussion see Amartya Sen: “Population: Delusion and Reality,” New York Review of Books, September 22, 1994: 62–71). Wherever people have gained access to contraceptives and associated knowledge and have gained some assurance that their children will survive into adulthood and that their own livelihood in old age will be secure, they substantially reduced their rate of reproduction. We can see this in the dramatic declines in total fertility rates (children per woman -- any drop of this rate below 2 foreshadows a population decline) in areas where poverty has been reduced. In the last 55 years, this rate has dropped from 5.67 to 1.68 in East Asia, for instance, and from 3.04 to 1.46 in Portugal and from 3.18 to 1.79 in Australia. In poor and economically stagnant countries, by contrast, there has been little change over the same period: Equatorial Guinea went from 5.50 to 5.36, Mali from 7.11 to 6.52, Niger from 8.12 to 7.19, and Sierra Leone from 6.09 to 6.47 (esa.un.org/unpp/index.asp?panel=2). The correlation is further confirmed by synchronic comparisons. Currently, the total fertility rate is 4.63 for the 50 least developed countries versus 1.60 for the more developed regions, and 2.45 for the remaining countries (ibid.). The list of all countries’ total fertility rates also confirms a strong correlation with poverty and shows that already some 80 of the more affluent countries have reached total fertility rates below 2 (www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html), foreshadowing future declines in population. Taken together, these data provide overwhelming evidence that poverty reduction is associated with large fertility declines. In fact, reduction of poverty may be the single most effective way to achieve an early peaking of the human population, which would ensure that, in the year 2100, it will be near the bottom of the now-plausible 7-14 billion range. By contrast, your proposed strategy of sacrificing poor people to an early death leads to faster population growth as observed in Equatorial Guinea, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, and many other extremely poor countries and areas.