Sarah Conly, One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? Oxford University Press, 2016
Travis N. Rieder
Berman Institute of Bioethics
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD, USA
There are too many people on the planet. This isn’t a popular thing to say, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s true, and that we need to do something to address it. Even in our radically unjust world, where billions of people do not have adequate access to food, water, energy, and other resources, we’re still living unsustainably—overcharging our ecological credit card and torching the climate. But discussing the link between these environmental problems and the population is uncomfortable, because many people believe that procreation is an essentially private act that is morally and politically off-limits.
In her new book, One Child, Sarah Conly argues that this belief is false: If it is true that overpopulation is a massive problem (she believes it is, and I think she’s obviously right about this), then the world’s governments may be justified in restricting their citizens to one child per couple. Although many will find such a conclusion implausible on its face, Conly’s argument is thorough, often persuasive, and worth taking very seriously. In what follows, I will quickly summarize the structure of her main argument, before raising two concerns that I have with the project.
The background premise of Conly’s book is (1) that overpopulation is a major driver of climate change and other environmental degradation, which now threatens to be utterly catastrophic. Since Conly is a philosopher and not a scientist, she tells us that we should take her argument to be conditional on the truth of this premise; she thinks it’s true now, but if not, then the rest of the argument follows if and when it becomes true (4). She then argues (2) that we do not have a moral right to more than one biological child per couple. In an attempt to mitigate the harms of overpopulation, then, (3) we should adopt a suite of fertility-reducing interventions, which, if necessary, includes a one-child policy. Of course, Conly has much more that warrants analysis in this nuanced book, including helpful discussion of the philosophical difficulties concerning future generations, and moral worries with the actual construction of a permissible one-child policy. In this brief review, however, I’ll focus on what I take to be her core argument.
Many readers will already be trying to get off the train at (1) (even in its conditional form!), because discussing population is unpopular; however, not only did I open Conly’s book already believing (1), but I found her discussion of the threat of overpopulation utterly convincing. That left the core of the argument resting on her defense of (2) and (3), and while I think she does important work here, I want to raise some worries. These are friendly worries to be sure, because I think a weaker version of her argument goes through relatively easily—something of the form: “Given the environmental threat from overpopulation, we morally ought to be addressing population growth through individual, group, and government action.” This weaker version of Conly’s argument—though still quite contentious—acknowledges the two worries that I have with her argument: first, that it may be more difficult than she thinks to limit procreative rights; and second, that a one-child policy seems less likely to be necessary than she acknowledges. I’ll take each of these concerns in turn.
For those of us who think that dangers like climate change imply that we ought to address population in some way, perhaps the major challenge is the wide-spread belief that persons have strong procreative (moral) rights that would be violated by government intervention like a one-child policy. The heart of Conly’s book is her sustained, two-chapter evaluation of this view, and this detailed discussion is a valuable contribution to the literature. In short, she argues that procreative rights must be grounded either in one’s basic interests, or in one’s bodily autonomy. Chapter 2 then evaluates an interest-based account of procreative rights, while chapter 3 evaluates an autonomy-based account. She concludes in chapter 2 that any basic interests one might have in procreating is satisfied by having a single child, and so we have a moral right to procreate only once. In chapter 3, she argues that autonomy-based rights are always taken to be limited by other moral considerations, such as harm, and so we don’t have a right to procreate at a level that harms others. Although there are many interesting things to say about both of these chapters, I will simply note that I found chapter 2 very compelling, but I also assumed that the more difficult challenge would be responding to an autonomy-based account of rights in chapter 3. And it was her response here that I found somewhat unsatisfying.
Conly is of course correct that having a right to bodily autonomy doesn’t mean that one can do whatever she likes with her body. Although I have a right to swing my arm, I do not have a right to swing my arm where your face is located. However, this sort of argument is problematic in the context of overpopulation—a fact she acknowledges (93)—but then doesn’t seem to properly appreciate in the remaining discussion. Throughout the rest of the book, Conly makes claims about rights being limited by harm. She writes of having too many high-consuming children that “[w]e don’t have a right to wreak this much havoc” (90), and she concludes chapter 3 with the claim, “If there is a high probability that our actions will cause great sufferings to others and deprive them of the liberties we ourselves cherish, we are doing something we don’t have a right to do” (100). But that’s precisely the problem, because my procreating doesn’t wreak havoc, and there is no high probability that it will cause suffering. Indeed: my procreating doesn’t harm anyone through its contribution to overpopulation. Precisely as she notes, environmental problems like climate change make traditional moral reasoning hard, because they involve massively complex collective action, and it just doesn’t seem true that my taking almost any single action harms anyone. In a population of 7.3 billion people, any number of people that I can add to the population makes virtually no difference—the resources consumed by my child, against the earth’s available resources, are infinitesimal.
Not everyone agrees with me on this point. John Nolt, for instance, has argued that we can use one’s lifetime emissions to calculate how much harm one does, and that on one method of doing this, the average American is responsible for the suffering and/or death of 1-2 future people as a result of her emissions (Nolt, 2011). However, I think that Dale Jamieson is correct to point out that this doesn’t ring true as an account of one’s responsibility for harm (Jamieson, 2014). The massive problem of climate change, which is caused only when trillions of tons of greenhouse gases are emitted by billions of people, is what harms people. Indeed, it’s not even true that all of my individual emissions will go into the atmosphere; some will end up in natural carbon sinks, in which case they won’t even partially cause the climate disruptions that do the harming. In short: the scale and the complexity of climate change make it implausible to claim that my emissions, or those of my child, actually do any harm.
Now, many people take this sort of consideration to imply that I don’t have any duty to refrain from any particular emitting behavior (Sinnot-Armstrong, 2010), and I’m not arguing for this conclusion. However, I am arguing that the idea that my individual procreative action harms someone seems false, which means the harm cannot be what limits one’s autonomy. What I do is something like contribute to a massive harm, and while I tend to think that we ought not to so contribute, it’s unclear that such a contribution limits one’s rights in the same way that directly harming another would. While it is relatively uncontroversial to say that my right to act is limited by the direct harm that so acting causes, it is not uncontroversial to say that my right to act is limited by the harm that will be done if billions of people act similarly. So, while I’m sympathetic to the idea that we don’t really have unlimited procreative rights, I don’t think that Conly has provided an argument that demonstrates this.
The second point that I want to emphasize is that, even if we concede (1) and (2), this only justifies the adoption of a one-child policy if it were necessary for mitigating the damage of overpopulation. Conly’s argument for raising the discussion seems to be that laws may be necessary, because they solve the collective action problem, by ensuring that my individual procreative sacrifice isn’t swamped by others’ procreative excesses (126). And laws could be especially effective, as they not only change our cost-benefit reasoning with threat of punishment, but they “change our opinion about what it is morally permissible to do,” and so help to change our very culture (128). Although I’m not certain that I disagree with her view, I do think that motivating the discussion of coercive policies is quite challenging, for a few reasons.
As Conly herself discusses (103-122), there are plenty of other large-scale interventions that are possible for the sake of reducing fertility, and these come at much lower moral costs. In fact, Colin Hickey, Jake Earl and I have recently argued for large-scale fertility-reduction interventions, and we never even consider the adoption of one-child laws, since they seem so morally risky; we argue for adopting education and family planning policies, preference-adjusting policies (using persuasion, media and advertising), as well as incentives (Hickey, Rieder, & Earl, Forthcoming). Not only would these policies face much less push-back (although certainly they would still face some), but it’s an open, empirical question as to whether they would ultimately fare worse than the wide-spread adoption of a one-child policy.
Conly presents some seemingly impressive data in her concluding chapter, which shows that dropping the global fertility rate to one child per couple sooner rather than later can have a drastic effect on peak population and the speed at which we reach sustainability (219). However, this data isn’t actually all that helpful, as there is virtually no chance that we will reach a global fertility rate of 1.0 in the near future: not only is universal endorsement of one-child policies hopelessly unrealistic (a consideration that we must keep in our minds when doing practical ethics), but even if we somehow did achieve universal adoption, this would be unlikely to lower the fertility rate that far. Consider that China’s policy, which was far more draconian than what Conly would support, succeeded in lowering fertility only to 1.6 children per couple (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2015). A fertility rate of 1.6, however, is comparable to (or higher than!) that of many European countries, and plausibly could be attained in many more through the less coercive measures discussed above. What we need to ask, then, is whether in the real world, pushing for one-child policies would in fact be more effective than pushing for other, less coercive measures. And if these less coercive measures are sufficiently more likely to be adopted, along with sufficiently effective, then we lose any reason to pursue the more coercive measure.
I am not suggesting that Conly should not be raising the question of whether a one-child policy is justifiable; I am simply pointing out that we may want to be more reticent to support unnecessarily coercive policy interventions than she seems to be. As she well knows, a one child policy is morally risky (that is, it has the potential to lead to human rights violations, such as forced abortions and sterilizations), and it has straightforward moral costs (it utilizes the coercive power of the law to limit some people’s pursuit of a valuable, central life goal). In short: it would be better if we could reach a sustainable population without such a policy (103). Thus, I want to suggest that we should invest more time and energy in investigating other, less coercive fertility-reduction policies before taking the one-child proposal too seriously.
With all of that said, One Child is an important book. Potentially catastrophic threats like that of climate change are changing the rules of moral reasoning, and discussion of procreation and population policy cannot stay off-limits for long. And indeed, the tide is already turning, with books and articles raising the issue ever more frequently. Sarah Conly has lent her voice and rigor to this small but growing movement, and the discussion is better for it.
Travis N. Rieder
Berman Institute of Bioethics
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD, USA
REFERENCES
Hickey, Colin, Travis N. Rieder, & Jake Earl. Forthcoming. “Population Engineering and the Fight Against Climate Change.” Social Theory and Practice 42 (4).
Jamieson, Dale. 2014. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nolt, John. 2011. “How Harmful are the Average American’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” Ethics, Policy and the Environment 14( 1): 3-10.
Sinnot-Armstrong, Walter. 2010. “It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations.” In Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, edited by Stephen M. Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson, & Henry Shue, 332-346. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. 2015. World Fertility Patterns 2015 – Data Booklet (ST/ESA/ SER.A/370).