Is It Time To Panic About Birth Rates? Ctd

Joyner rebuts Douthat:

[M]ost American conservatives, myself included, rail against collectivism in much less significant arenas. Let government try to force us to change to a more energy efficient lightbulb or regulate the water capacity of our toilets and the calls for revolution ring out across the land. Encourage us to buy more energy efficient automobiles through tax incentives and corporate subsidies and you’re a tyrant. Suggest that we turn off electronic devices that aren’t in use and you’re at very least a dirty hippy and probably an out-and-out commie. But suggest that women give up the advances they’ve made over the last half century because somebody has to have more kids, why, what could be more reasonable?

Blogger "djw" uses a different line of attack:

[Douthat] argues that while in theory we could deal with the challenge of population decline in wealthy societies through greater immigration, as "humanists" we should seek to maintain those populations through children instead, because we’re so rich that we can provide better childhoods than other people. This is spectacularly unconvincing.

A broad commitment to something we might plausibly call humanism might very easily lead to the opposite conclusion: that providing an opportunity to migrate to a wealthy society for people suffering considerable oppression or mired in hopeless poverty scores at least as high on the humanism scale as having a not especially wanted additional child. I would also submit that a humanist commitment to the well-being of future generations is, first and foremost, concerned with the quality of life of those future people, rather than quantity in which those people exist. (Is Douthat a closet Parfitian?) Given our rather pathetic lack of progress to date to scale human consumption to a level that doesn’t dramatically alter the earth’s climate, a somewhat lower population at some point in the future might be worth pursuing as a necessary but not sufficient condition of ecological stability, despite the policy challenges it presents.

Earlier Dish here.