POPULATION

Population often is said to be the biggest problem facing the world. However, precisely what this problem is varies, depending on whether the issue is meeting basic human needs, the stress placed on the natural environment by increased consumption, changes in family structures, or demographic transitions within nations. Population is at once a conceptual, scientific, technological, ethical, and political issue.

Definitions

The simple definition of population as the total number of persons in a geographic area indicates the relativity of population to sometimes arbitrary boundaries. Other relevant factors in population studies are fertility, mortality, and mobility; empirical studies of those factors are often difficult to pursue and are subject to contentious interpretative frameworks. Scientific theories of population growth and its relationship to social stability or economic development often rely on intuitive or "commonsense" views that have not proved reliable. The influence of technologies on population growth or delimitation similarly is lacking in specificity.

Indicative of the complexity of this issue, the entry "Population Ethics" in the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics is the largest single composite, with more companion pieces than any other entry. Under the general title there are three entries on the elements of population ethics, an analysis of normative approaches, and eight entries describing the perspectives of different religious traditions. In this entry a brief review of how population became an issue is followed by an overview analysis of major ethical assessments that emphasize science and technology.

Population Issues

What is experienced directly is not population but people. Before the modern period there were only informal political-philosophical discussions of how different numbers of people in a state can affect its character, and Christian traditions sometimes highlight the biblical injunction to "be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:27). For population to become a subject of debate and inquiry the modern techniques of political economics had to be brought to bear on issues related to both aggregate production and consumption, a process that began in seventeenth-century England and reached its first peak in the work of the economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) (Glass 1973).

Before Malthus most early modern population theorists argued for the simple stimulation of population growth (the political philosophers Baron de Montesquieu [1689–1755] and Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1712–1778]) or predicted that in the near future, because of good health and long life, human commitments to procreation would be moderated in favor of more liberal pursuits (the political philosophers William Godwin [1756–1836] and the Marquis de Condorcet [1743–1794]). Malthus attacked both views in his Essay on the Principle of Population, which appeared anonymously in 1798 and was revised with acknowledged authorship in 1803 and given the subtitle "Or a View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions." Malthus continued to revise this work, with five more editions appearing during his lifetime.

It was Malthus who formulated what may be considered the classical form of the population problem. Malthus's argument was that population, by increasing when unchecked at a geometric rate (2, 4, 8, 16, etc.), outruns food supply, which grows only at an arithmetic rate (2, 4, 6, 8, etc.). What is known as a Malthusian catastrophe occurs when this happens and starvation forces some of the population back to a subsistence level. For Malthus this catastrophe can be prevented only through self-restraint or technology, meaning contraception or abortion. In later editions of his Essay Malthus further noted that increased wealth was correlated with reductions not only in mortality but also in fertility; this suggested that technological development could meliorate the problem more indirectly. However, Malthus did not foresee the ways in which advances in science and technology might alter growth in the food supply.

The central problem for the classical Malthusian view may be described as the extent to which human population increase becomes unchecked through scientific progress. For thousands of years the human population remained relatively stable, checked largely by the vicissitudes of nature. Over the course of the agricultural revolution (roughly 10,000 to 5000 b.c.e.) the human population rose to about 150 million worldwide. Only very slowly, over the next 1,500 years, did it increase to over 300 million. However, by 1700 world population had risen to 600 million, by 1800 to 900 million, and by 1900 to 1.6 billion (see Figure 1). These dramatic increases resulted from decreases in infant and adult mortality brought about by advances in public health technology and medicine as well as in scientific agriculture. In 2000 world population reached more than 6 billion. Food production was able to keep up with population growth as a result of radical developments in agriculture, from the industrialization of agriculture to the Green Revolution.

A second form of the population problem arose in the 1960s in association with the environmental movement. The first population problem was based on doubts that people could extract enough from the earth to support themselves. The second population problem arose from the concern that they would be so successful that they would alter the character of the natural world. The first problem focused primarily on whether humans would be able to sustain themselves, and the second on whether the earth was sustainable in the face of human abilities, through science and technology, to transform the world. The possibility that destruction of the earth might rebound on humans was, of course, a supporting worry.

Central to articulating the second form of the population problem, and thus playing a role similar to that of Malthus in regard to the first form, was the Club of Rome's study The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, and Behrens 1972). According to the limits to growth argument, which has been argued in equally dramatic fashion in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968) and Garrett Hardin's Living within Limits (1993), high-affluence industrial societies cannot indefinitely expand the exploitation of inherently limited natural sources such as oil and fresh water or pour wastes into inherently limited ecological sinks such as the oceans and the atmosphere. At some point the resources will run out, the ecological sinks will be full or destroyed, and the societies based on their consumption and pollution will collapse.

In response to this limitationist argument, Julian Simon and other expansionists have argued that science and technology are capable of expanding the resource base indefinitely and transforming pollution into raw materials that can be used for further productive activity. Simon's argument in The Ultimate Resource (1980) is that population itself and the human ingenuity manifested in the individuals who make up a free society are a more important resource than is any combination of minerals or vegetables on the planet. Under conditions of economic and political liberty human beings, through science and technology, can create the resources necessary for their indefinite expansion.

Population Ethics

According to Donald Warwick, "Those stating that there is a population problem base their assertions on three elements: perceived threats to social, moral, or political values; factual evidence; and theories explaining how population creates the conditions that threaten values" (Warwick 2004, p. 2035). For Warwick the primary need in population ethics is to distinguish these values, evidence, and theories and carefully adjudicate their interactions. Population ethics depends on an ethics of analyzing population issues that would eschew quick ideological appeals and emotional rhetoric. Those who argue for particular interpretations of population as a problem should state their values, sources of evidence, and theories explicitly. Conclusions and policy recommendations should follow from the careful analytic interrelation of those different elements.

With regard to overarching values Warwick further proposes respect for four fundamental rights: the rights to life, freedom, welfare, and fairness. As for evidence, many people would argue that scientific knowledge should trump other ideas about what should count as data. Theories about the relationships between values and evidence remain fundamentally problematic in relation to population,astheyareinmanyotherareas.Whatisimportantis to acknowledge the problematics even when conclusions and policy recommendations cannot be avoided because failure to reach a conclusion or make a recommendation will function as a conclusion or recommendation.

Against this background it is nevertheless useful to highlight at least three basic ethical arguments regarding population: what may, for want of better terms, be called limitationist ethics, libertarian ethics, and management ethics. The first two grow out of the limitationist and expansionist interpretations of the problem. The third is more the consensus view of the international development community.

LIMITATIONIST ETHICS. Garrett Hardin (1974) devised the term lifeboat ethics, suggesting that because the planet has limited resources, humanity should be thought of as having been cast adrift in space like survivors in a lifeboat. If there are too many passengers, the lifeboat will run out of supplies for those passengers. Using this logic, Hardin states that providing food aid to countries in crisis does not address the problems that created the need for such aid. Hardin's limitationist thesis is that people in poor countries should be allowed to starve because the net result of helping them would be negative for the planet as a whole. In his opinion, extensive food aid would court disaster. Another version of limitationist ethics would argue for limitations on consumption and the practice of voluntary simplicity in the lifestyles of people in wealthy countries.

LIBERTARIAN ETHICS. Julian Simon (1980) argued that the population problem has been fundamentally misperceived. Population growth is a good thing as long as you allow individuals freedom of choice, and grant them the economic and political freedoms to be creative in their uses of science and technology. "Human beings," he wrote, "are not just more mouths to feed, but are productive and inventive minds that help find creative solutions to man's problems, thus leaving us better off over the long run." For Libertarians like Simon, population is not the cause of our problems but the generator of solutions to all of our problems. The more people addressing problems the quicker they will be solved. Thus, population growth is a resource and not a threat to our future. Arne Naess referred to this view as the Cornucopian position.

MANAGEMENT ETHICS. Between the limitationist and libertarian positions is the Management ethics viewpoint. Proponents of this position, like the World Bank, are not as pessimistic as Hardin and the limitationists, nor as optimistic as Simon and the libertarians. The view that population is more of a two edge sword. Managed properly it can be a resource, a boon to the world. Left uncontrolled, it can have disastrous effects.

In a radically different take on the issue Barbara Duden (1992) questions the concept of population as a variable for economic problem solving. For Duden population is such an abstract concept that it creates situations in which human beings are deprived of their humanity as they are transformed into statistics to be manipulated by others. The problem of population is not its role in issues involving environmental resources (the limitationist perspective) or in fostering major misperceptions of problems (the libertarian perspective) but the tendency to lose sight of people in their existential reality as models are created to manage problems.

FRANZ ALLEN FOLTZ

SEE ALSO Consumerism;Chinese Perspectives:Population Policy;Social Darwinism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Duden, Barbara. (1992). "Population." In The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs. London: Zed Books.

Ehrlich, Paul R. (1968). The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine. Revised edition, 1971. Rewritten, with Anne H. Ehrlich, as The Population Explosion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).

Glass, David Victor. (1973). The Population Controversy: A Collective Reprint of Material Concerning the 18th Century Controversy on the Trend of Population in England and Wales. Compiled With an Introduction By D. V. Glass. Farnborough, UK: Gregg International.

Hardin, Garrett. (1974). "Living on a Lifeboat." BioScience 24(10): 561–68.

Hardin, Garrett. (1993). Living within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos. New York: Oxford University Press.

Meadows, Donella H.; Dennis L. Meadows; Jürgen Randers; and Williams H. Behrens. (1972). The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books. This book has been revised or extended as Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future (Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green, 1992) and The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004).

Simon, Julian L. (1980). The Ultimate Resource. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Revised and enlarged as The Ultimate Resource 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

Simon, Julian, and Herman Kahn. (1984). The Resourceful Earth. New York: Basil Blackwell.