Overpopulation and Individual Responsibility
Sarah Conly
Abstract
Abstract The world is threatened by overpopulation. Current predictions are for a population rise within a hundred years that seems radically unsustainable on this planet. However, some people oppose controls on how many children people have. I argue that one reason for that is that no individual child will itself cause the environmental havoc that overpopulation will wreak. While we are willing to interfere with the use of the body to prevent a great harm—we can arrest you if you are trying to assault someone—we think we should respect people’s bodily autonomy if the threat they pose is small. I argue that while it is true that each increment of population in itself does no harm, we, as individuals, are nonetheless morally responsible for overpopulation if we have too many children. The fact that we share moral responsibility for the damage caused by overpopulation does not mean that each of us then bears less: moral responsibility does not “divide” according to the number of perpetrators. Since overpopulation constitutes a great harm, interference with the individual is then warranted and states can use certain forms of coercion to stop people from reproducing unsustainably.