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POPULATION CONTROL
Background:
The current global population is over 6.5 billion people. There is much evidence that at rates of Western consumption, this population size cannot be sustained. Global population is forecast to reach 9 billion by 2050, and then to keep growing. At the most efficient rates of consumption, the upper limit for a sustainable population is estimated to be right about 9 billion.
Population control is an important issue for environmental ethics. Some argue it is the most important issue because other policies are moot if the size of the global population is not brought under control. If current rates of population growth are not reversed, then famine and disease will limit population size. Nearly all problems of resource use and environmental degradation are in one way or another linked to population size. However, limiting population growth is a difficult issue because many policy options involve violations of what many believe to be non-negotiable individual freedoms and reproductive rights.
Assignment:
Give an ethical argument supporting or criticizing a means of controlling population size through national policy. Limit your support to arguments that would be expressed either by a deontologist or a utilitarian.
For instance, you might choose to support China’s one-child policy and do so for a reason that a Kantian would approve of. (The objection need not be expressed according to any particular ethical framework.) Your position will be stated in #2. Also state the framework you are adopting in #2 or #3.
Guidelines:
You may base your argument on one of the assigned readings, “Reaching the Limit” or “Lifeboat Ethics,” or on material you research independently on the internet. (You might start with some of the links above.) Not everyone will choose exactly the same topic or approach it in exactly the same way. The argument outline format is here.
Jeremy Bentham
Utilitarianism has become so entrenched in modern life, and particularly in public policy, that we often don’t even realize that an ethical framework is being deployed. Instead, we assume that the best action is going to be the one that produces the best consequences, and we’re accustomed to thinking that what counts as the best consequence is total human welfare.
But how do we measure happiness or welfare? One method that is is used is to measure the market cost of various goods (modern economic theory has its roots in utilitarianism). For goods that aren’t bought and sold on open markets (e.g., spending time hanging out with friends), we can measure how much people value a good by asking them what payment they would accept in order to give it up. At the same time, we have to keep in mind that for most people, their happiness cannot be reduced simply to material possessions (i.e., “Can’t buy me lo-o-ove“).
It’s worth distinguishing utilitarianism from several nearby positions.
1. ETHICAL EGOISM. The ethical egoist claims that morality demands that individuals always act in their own best long-term self-interest. Utilitarianism, similarly, evaluates what is good based on people’s preferences (Mill referred to the total sum of happiness of all people affected by an action). However, the utilitarian does not say that each individual should act in their own self-interest. Rather, individuals should do what is required for the good of the group as a whole, and it is the total welfare that determines what that desired action is.
John Stuart Mill
2. EPICUREANISM: Utilitarianism does share some elements with ancient Greek epicureanism. For instance, both hold that pleasure and pain are the measure of what is good and bad. And both put a high value on empirical investigation. For both, “the good life” is a life that has a high ratio of pleasure to pain, and so pursuit of pleasure is a basis for moral action. However, one difference is that Epicurus thought that this evaluation of pleasure and pain would lead people to value and pursue tranquility or a state of mental peace. Pursuing tranquility would lead people to withdraw from politics and other stressful situations or concerns. In contrast, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were very involved in politics. Mill was a Member of Parliament for several years and an advocate for women’s rights.
3. COMMUNISM: It seems ironic that utilitarianism has close relations both with the evaluative practices of capitalist economics, particularly cost-benefit analysis, and also with communism. In structure, the socio-economic theory of communism resembles Bentham’s utilitarianism in that both prioritize the good of the group over the good of the individual. However, the two theories differ at many points as well. For instance, redistribution of goods to create social and economic equality is a central tent of communism. But a common criticism of utilitarian theories is that they don’t necessarily pay attention to distributive justice. Indeed, Karl Marx was a prominent critic of utilitarianism.
Some key ideas from the lecture:
- Kantian ethics responds to the need for moral truths to have an independent justification which depends on reason and not just on intuition or implicit agreement.
- Kant argues that if a law is to be morally valid, then it must follow with absolute necessity.
- He provides such an algorithm in the form of the Categorical Imperative.
- The Categorical Imperative is similar to–but more universal and less personal than–the Golden Rule.
- The core of morality is not what we do but why we do it.
- Principle-based ethical theories are called deontological.
If you have any questions, feel free to raise them in the comments section. On Wednesday I’d like to hear your ideas about whether you foresee any problems with applying this ethical theory to specific moral problems.
Just for fun, here’s what a political attack ad against Kant would be like:
In class, we’ve distinguished between descriptive theories and prescriptive (or normative) theories.
Psychological egoism is descriptive: it says that people act selfishly (as a matter of fact). We can disprove this thesis when we give examples of people acting unselfishly.
Ethical egoism is normative: it says that people should act selfishly (whether they actually do or not). Acting to further one’s own self-interests becomes the way to define morality for the ethical egoist. An ethical egoist believes that an altruist is not living up to the highest standards of integrity. The egoist believes that the altruist is manipulated and weak for not pursuing egoism.
Looking at actual behavior does not necessarily tell us much about how people ought to behave. If morality were nothing more than always following our intuitions, there would be no point to having either moral codes or ethical theories.
However, I do think (and many other philosophers agree) that we can learn something from studying actual behavior. For example, we can learn whether people find it easy or difficult to act in ways they believe are moral.
I used the example in class of the ultimatum game, which shows that many people value fairness above self-interest. Studies by economists and psychologists have shown that while extreme acts of altruism are rare, altruism that meets the following criteria is quite common:
1. People are willing to sacrifice their own material well-being to help those who are being kind.
The attempt to provide public goods without coercion departs from pure self-interest. Experiments show that people cooperate to contribute toward a public good to a degree greater than would be implied by pure self-interest. Individually optimal contribution rates, as defined by the standard utility model, are close to 0 percent. However, in experiments, the willingness for an individual to contribute to a public good is highly contingent on the behavior of others.
2. People are willing to sacrifice their own material well-being to punish those who are being unkind.
Evidence is provided by the ultimatum game, consisting of two people, a proposer and decider, splitting a fixed amount of money. The proposer offers a division of the money, then the decider decides if he or she refuses or accepts the proposal. If the decider says yes, they split the money according to the proposer’s offer, but if the decider says no, neither person gets any money. The standard utility model would find that any offer proposed to the decider should be expected if it is greater than zero because utility should increase with any increase in income. Along the same lines, the standard utility model would predict that the proposer would offer the smallest amount of money possible to the decider in order to maximize his or her own utility. However, data shows that deciders are willing to punish any unfair offer and proposers tend to make fair offers.
3. Both motivations 1 and 2 have a greater effect on behavior as the material cost of sacrificing becomes smaller.
In the article we read for class, Pojman wrote that “Ethical relativism is the doctrine that the moral rightness and wrongness of actions vary from society to society and that there are not absolute universal moral standards” that apply to all people at all times.
Although there are many ways that different theorists fill in the details about moral relativism, the key idea is that there are not moral standards that can be applied to judge people’s actions across cultural boundaries and through history.
Many people think that moral relativism is compatible with tolerance for moral difference. But this is not necessarily the case. A relativist commonly thinks that morality is dependent on culture, so in the case of an intolerant culture, intolerance would be a morally correct position (according to the relativist).
Also, some people want to be tolerant of others’ views because they believe tolerance is a virtue. And then, from the idea that all views deserve to be heard and all people deserve to be respected, they derive the idea that all views are equal. The flaw in this argument is that by taking tolerance as a moral principle, relativism is abandoned from the outset. A conclusion that is better supported by this argument than moral relativism is the conclusion that moral judgments which proceed from a position of tolerance for cultural differences are (all other things being equal) better justified than judgments which proceed from intolerance.
In arguing against relativism, I hope I made it clear that we can be tolerant without being relativists. The reason is that relativism has strong consequences: it undermines any grounds we might have for thinking our beliefs or ways of life are more correct than someone else’s. Without rational grounds for our beliefs, we adopt one belief rather than another just because it is more popular or because we inherited it or for some other non-rational reason. Therefore, relativists have no reason to change or improve their way of life. They can have no account of moral development.
Some people would like to adopt a position that ethicists call value pluralism. This is the idea that there are many admirable moral values, and they may even conflict with one another. This means that moral deliberation is necessarily messy. There may be no uniquely perfect solution to moral dilemmas. However, unlike moral relativism, value pluralism does not give up on deliberating about values.
Our political system is set up to support tolerance but not relativism. That is, our democracy supports people expressing their views (”free speech”). Our newspapers publish all kinds of views in letters to the editor. But we also have laws that are based on legal principles and on deliberation. If someone wants a law changed, they have to convince others that the change would be right. That is tolerant but not relativist.
Last week I suggested that a shared human psychology and social experience provide the foundations for morality. That observation is relevant to what we’ll discuss in class today: moral relativism and moral objectivism.
The moral relativist and subjectivist hold that there are no universal moral rules. Basically, morality is relative to something else, like the culture that you were raised in.
This view has (at least) one virtue, which is that it explains the diversity that we see in various peoples’ and society’s moral beliefs. It also points to a problem for objectivist accounts of morality. Objectivists need to explain why, if there are universal moral rules, so many people seem to be wrong or mean or unjust so much of the time. If there are universal moral rules and they are knowable, then why isn’t it easy to a) act morally and b) agree on what the most moral action is? I think this is essentially the challenge that Jared throws down on the comment he posted here.
Reminder: a homework assignment is due on Monday. And, yikes, there’s also one due on Wednesday!
Anxious? Confused? Read more about my expectations for homework (“reflective comments”) here.
The history of this assignment, in case you’re wondering, is that for a while I tried having no check-up on how and whether students were reading the assignments, except for the important writing assignments and the final exam. Most students did not, in fact, read, and it showed in our lame discussions. And a number of students told me that they wish they had read, but they just needed more pressure or more reward. So then I tried frequent in-class quizzes. That was no fun for anyone. I hated making them, students hated taking the class time away from discussion to take them, and there were always some people who had tried to do the reading but just happened to zone out on the one thing I asked about. But last time I taught this class, these homework assignments were quite successful. You get credit for doing the reading, they’re hard to fake, I listen and respond to your thoughts, and our discussions are really great because nearly everyone is prepared with something to say. I hope you, too, think that this is a good solution.
In class today, we considered two scenarios published by the moral psychologist Jon Haidt.
In one exercise, we evaluated how we felt about a set of comparable scenarios. (Which would you rather do: stick a pin in your own palm, or in the palm of child you don’t know?) Haidt argued that if people are only motivated by self-interest, as classical economics assumes they are, then they would rather stick a pin in someone else’s hand.
However, most of us would rather stick a pin in our own palm than in a child’s palm or, presumably, anyone else’s palm. Also, there were a number of situations in which a “rational” person would have no particular preference, but people with particular moral outlooks do. For instance, some people would never slap their father, not even with his permission or as part of a comedy skit, though they would have no problem slapping a friend in that situation.
What this exercise showed is that many people have moral commitments that are distinct from their own rational self-interest. One such moral commitment, founded on a shared emotion, is that incest is wrong even if it creates no deplorable consequences. On a rational level, it’s hard to explain why it would be wrong. But on an emotional level, the reaction is very strong and immediate. It would not be surprising if there were a biological and evolutionary reason for such an emotion.
If you’re interested in Jon Haidt’s work, here is a TED talk called “The real difference between liberals and conservatives” and here is a Bloggingheads interview on “Happiness and the Foundations of Morality.”
I’d also like to point out a fascinating article on psychopaths. It is by John Seabrook and published in The New Yorker. Seabrook says that psychopathy is
the condition of moral emptiness that affects between fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the North American prison population, and is believed by some psychologists to exist in one per cent of the general adult male population. (Female psychopaths are thought to be much rarer.) Psychopaths don’t exhibit the manias, hysterias, and neuroses that are present in other types of mental illness. Their main defect, what psychologists call “severe emotional detachment”—a total lack of empathy and remorse—is concealed.
This blog supports the course “Introduction to Ethics” at RIT taught by Evelyn Brister in the Fall Quarter of 2009.
The blog will contain course information, assignments, interesting things to read, extensions of class discussions, and announcements. Check the links above and to the side for more information.
I welcome class members to comment on these posts–the blog can become as rich and interesting as we want to make it. I also welcome comments from non-members!
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