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From: brandenberg@star.dec.com (Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.)
Newsgroups: net.sci,net.politics,net.philosophy
Subject: Population Control
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Date: Fri, 22-Aug-86 13:35:00 EDT
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Posted: Fri Aug 22 13:35:00 1986
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Subject: Re: Population control
Posted: 20 Aug 86 03:27:08 GMT
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Xref: decwrl net.politics:19076 net.sci:1587 net.philosophy:6656
 
A rejoinder in the spirit of American Constitutional Democracy,
Laissez-faire Capitalism, and Enlightenment Metaphysics:

[Richard Carnes net.sci:1587,net.politics:19076,net.philosophy:6656]
>[Marc Campos]
>>            [...]  And unless you can point out solid reasons why
>>some peoples' having children directly and forcibly harms other
>>people, you don't have a moral case.
> 
>But why must having a child (an additional child) DIRECTLY and
>FORCIBLY harm other people for there to be any moral justification
>for population control through incentives or any form of coercive
>control?  Why not if it harms others indirectly?

I, too, would ask the first question, answering that having a child
that would directly and forcibly harm other people is not moral
justification for population control.  That by directing the
government to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our
Posterity," the founding fathers intended that we indeed have a
posterity, and that procreation is part-and-parcel of these blessings.
This is the nature of my disagreement with you:  that you have assumed,
in the Great Society tradition, that you may legislate regardless
of empowered authority in order to control any particular aspect of
private or public life which you find efficacious to so do.
That you ignore the principles set forth in the Constitution as a
standard for judging the appropriateness or merit of legislative
and executive action and have taken up the banner of, sometimes
numerous and incompatible, sociological valuators whose validity derives
from perceived benefits in the narrow area it is concerned with
or the favorable academic reputations of the authors who propose it.


> 
>Most libertarians and anarchists agree that an individual's natural
>right to lead her own life and do as she pleases stops at the point
>where she inflicts harm on others.

Argument from authority?

>                                    "Your right to swing your fist
>stops at my nose."  If I dump tons of pollutants into the atmosphere,
>don't the people whom my pollution harms have the right to force me
>to put less in the air or to pay for the damage?  Or do you take the
>position that everyone has the right to pollute the air and water all
>they want, without any interference?  If everyone does so, then we
>have an multiperson Prisoner's Dilemma: each individual has an
>incentive to pollute *more* than the optimal amount, and the result
>will be a collectively suboptimal amount (excess) of pollution; i.e.,
>society as a whole will be suffering greater COSTS from the pollution
>than it is receiving BENEFITS from allowing this amount of pollution,
>and yet no individual will have an incentive to reduce the amount
>pollution he generates, since the individual alone bears the costs of
>doing so, while the benefits, even though larger than the costs, are
>spread out over the whole society.  Obviously, the consequences could
>be severe.
> 
>There is thus a prima facie case for some sort of enforcement
>mechanism that would INTERNALIZE the cost of pollution, e.g., through
>taxes equal to the social (total) cost of the pollution (at a given
>level) to be paid by the polluter.  Then the polluter, to maximize
>profit, will reduce his pollution to the collectively optimal amount.
>If this is unclear, please see any basic economics textbook.  
> 
>Now, if it is reasonable to impose a tax on a polluter, why isn't it
>reasonable or legitimate to impose a tax or other penalty on a family
>that chooses to have an "excess" child, if the *net* effect of excess
>children is harmful?

Proof by analogy or just a red herring?  It is neither reasonable or
legitimate by this argument.  You have said: (1) Because the net effect
(of pollution) is harmful, state intervention is motivated and justified.
(2) Because the net effect (of excess children) is harmful, state
intervention is motivated and justified.  As you don't state it
explicitly, I'll propose that your metaphysical principle is:

	IF any action is judged harmful by some criterion
	THEN state intervention is motivated and justified.

There is no such principle in American Constitutional Law and in
the specific case of procreation, and a number of other areas,
state intervention is excluded by way of unalienable [sic] rights
and reasonable expectations.

>The point is not that we can calculate the exact costs and benefits
>of an additional child -- clearly, we can't.  The point is that there
>is nothing obviously immoral about penalizing parents for having
>another child, or attempting to change their preferences through
>propaganda (or public-interest advertising, if you prefer
>euphemisms), if an extra child (directly or indirectly) has a net
>harmful effect on other people.  After all, that is how we handle
>pollution, or should.  

Analogy again?

>                        Or do you have a better plan?  Because let's
>get one thing straight: the potential consequences of overpopulation
>are catastrophic.  They could well include the premature deaths of
>millions or billions through war, disease, or famine; and the
>extinction of large numbers of species, which alone would have severe
>consequences for humans.  The potential consequences are a *severe*
>reduction in the quality and/or length of life for present and future
>generations -- we're not talking about reducing the per capita income
>by 1% or some other triviality.

First, a comment on assumed consequences not limitied to the immediate
question.  The above follows the form of arguments in certain popular
social discussions, i.e.,

	IF current statistical trends continue
	THEN [undesirable/obvious/catastrophic result]

The precedent is assumed as an extant fact and then focus is placed
on the consequent, historical forms of this being:

	U.S. becomes a service economy	(Naisbett/Megatrends crowd)
	One square yard of land per	(Many from the '60's)
		person by 2060
	Exhausted oil reserves by 1990	(")
	Ice caps melt flooding New York	(")
	Inevitable nuclear war		(" + 50's + 70's + 80's )
	Fins are in this year		(Cadillac before Khrushchev)
	West converted to Communism by	(Any 19th century Socialist)
		revolution

Second, I infer from your remarks that you believe no one can be trusted
to making their own reproduction choices.  Consider the decision process
of choosing to have a child.  There are motivations: simply want a
child, enjoy raising a child, enjoy the creation.  Motivation exists; we
are here.  There are also restraints: cost of raising a child, restriction
of personal freedom due to commitments.  For this, I'll even resort to
the rhetoric which is found at such times as during detente, Vietnam, or Love
Canal and that is "Who'd bring up a child in this world?"  And yet, that
generation and all the others have brought up children.  Each individual
in each generation looks at the prevailing and expected conditions and
decides what to do.  The attractions and detractions are weighed and,
to anticipate the following remarks, a market decision is made.  Some
markets are the creation of man and some are natural in that the entry cost
is in terms of what an individual life can provide.  But any decision that
a person makes which has any external manifestation is a market
decision: there are no non-market decisions.

> 
>The fact must be faced that the individually optimal choice does not,
>in general, produce the collectively optimal outcome, except in
>certain special circumstances, such as the free market rather
>stringently defined.  It seems to me that you may have fallen into
>the habit of overgeneralizing from the marketplace so familiar to us,
>and attributed market characteristics to non-market situations.
>There is no *a priori* reason to think that allowing individual
>parents to choose the number of their offspring just as they please
>will lead to a collectively optimal or even to a non-catastrophic
>outcome.
> 

There is no *a priori* reason to accept collective optimization
as a metaphysical axiom.  I, and the framers of the Constitution,
have rejected it.  Period.

>>Since you've already stated that the state has the moral right to
>>control the lives of others...
> 
>That's clearly not what I said.
> 
[1]	The point is that there				P => ~ ~ Q
	is nothing obviously immoral about
	penalizing parents for having another
	child, or attempting to change their
	preferences through propaganda
	(or public-interest advertising, if you prefer
	euphemisms), if an extra child (directly or 
	indirectly) has a net harmful effect on other people

[2]	Because let's get one thing straight: the	P
	potential consequences of overpopulation
	are catastrophic

Either you just said it or the entirety of your reasoning
is qualified with phrases such as "potential."

>
>	[ an exchange on state control of reproduction ]
>	[ one on freedom and the pollution analogy ]
>	[ one on demographic transition and space, the final
>		frontier ]
>	[ ad hominem about ancestor on Titanic ]
>

Both sides in the quoted text have assumed that the state has the
right to control population if it so chooses and, having dispensed
of the question, proceeded to argue whether that right should now
be exercised.  I maintain that the question of governmental population
control in the United States is moot:  that no such power is
invested in the governing bodies and that any efforts to establish
such control are essentially immoral.  To quote from Cato's letters,
"To live securely, happily, and independently is the End and Effect
of Liberty ... and real or fancied Necessity alone makes Men the
Servants, Followers, and Creatures of one another."

					Monty Brandenberg


P.S.	My response to the original text has been confined mostly to the
	lack of grounding principle for any governmental control of
	population in the United States.  This is in no way to be construed
	as agreement with the claimed factual details or their consequences
	in this and previous exchanges.  In particular, the sufficiency and
	completeness of market forces in regulating decisions.

P.P.S.	This discussion has made a contribution to the practice
	of public debate by creating a new form of fallacious
	argument.  I will call it "Truth by reason of Compromise"
	and it proceeds as follows:  one side takes a position,
	the other hints at an extreme position in opposition but
	takes one somewhere between the two.  By virtue of standing
	the middle ground, the position must be correct.
	Examples from the text:

	1.  But why must having a child (an additional child) ...

	2.  In my opinion there is room for debate as to whether a
	state may ever legitimately *require* an abortion, and under
	what circumstances.  But no population control advocate I
	know of supports infanticide as a means of population control,
	even though infanticide has been commonly practiced in many
	historical periods, including in modern Europe, as a means of
	"birth" control.

	3.  What he loses is his freedom to pollute as much as he likes
	without paying for it, and you are being asked to give up the
	freedom to have as many children as you want, at least in some
	circumstances, without paying some sort of price for it.

DISCLAIMER:  These views do not reflect the opinions of my employer.  If
	our views coincided, we'd make more money.