Topic: What is the most ethical way to reduce the growth of human population? (Read 220 times)

People don't like to be forced to do anything. Force 'em to have kids, and they sill stop of their own free will.

 

Without being much of a religious person or sounding so. Population growth will not reduce. That is the reality. And it is so because as a Christian God Almighty has commanded that we should multiply, and replenish the earth. And He further said that none of His world will come back to him void, without accomplishing that which He sent it for. So now using ethical means to stop a divine mandate is futile to me. We can only try but at some point our methods will fail and the natural way as predestined will begin to work or take effect.

Poverty is a completely different question. Of course, I realize that poverty has a big effect on birth rates. The poorer people are, the more they typically tend to have children. They need the children to work for them by selling something or working on the farm to get more money for the family. Birth rates go down as populations get more wealthy. The nice thing about rivers is that they move. To stop pollution in a river, you need to stop polluting it upstream. Typically, the more wealthy a country gets, the better they get at dealing with pollution. (I'm not sure about China, but it seems like they're at least making some efforts now.)

I respect your opinion but its not always about habitat , many country even lived beside polluted river , just to get a waste food so their family can eat, Too many children in a family is a crucial things to them, first the children can't go to school because of poverty, second the they don't have a house and if theyre going to relocate , it I's much harder to them to adopt where they will be placed.

I think the most ethical way to reduce the growth of population is through educating everyone about this matter. I think, people who have a lot of children are the ones who is lack of the knowledge of what would be the effect of having a lot of children to the parents and also to the children. Most of the people who have a lot of children belong to poor class. This simply means that if we educate those people, we might get into reducing the population growth and it is done in an ethical way.

There would have been no way to predict this 200 years ago. In 1818, there was just a little more than 1 billion people on the whole earth. That was before people understood what they do now about hygiene. It was before vaccines for the most part and medicine was much less effective. Nobody would have been asking the question of overpopulation. It wasn't a problem. I still don't think it's a problem. Birth rates are going down, quite radically actually in some countries. The problem is not our population is growing too fast. It's that the people we already have are not doing what's needed to make our stay on earth sustainable.

There is no need “to reduce the growth of human populations”! Human populations are self-regulating and the current population rate decline is happening naturally, concurrent with the growing role of females in the paid workforce and within society. True, some patrioarchical regions are lagging behind, but it’s obvious that the societies that can harvest the creative and intellectual capacities of their female members will out-compete those that limit female participation. (Islamic and Latin American societies continue to struggling with one hand tie behind their backs.). With female participation comes declining fertility and population growth. Today we’re headed toward a more equatable equilibrium of the human population with the resources available (strongly resisted by the retrograde elites in power).

Of course we couldn't possibly fill up every part of the earth. There's no need to do that either. There is so much more space. If people want, we can also just build taller. Theoretically every house or 2 or 5-storey building could be replaced with a 50-storey building or maybe even a 100-storey building. There are so many places left to inhabit. Take a look at some stunning images of how much of Canada is empty: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/04/17/canada-empty-maps_n_5169055.html. You can see her that 47 percent of the US is uninhabited: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2607431/Want-away-Interactive-map-shows-staggering-47-PERCENT-country-currently-uninhabited.html. There are plenty of good places to live, if needed.

Here is the most ethical way: Implement a strict one child policy. If a couple is violating this policy and having a second child, then they should be fined $1,000. In case they are having a third child, they should be fined $5,000 ($5K for each subsequent child). This will make sure that the slum dwellers won't engage in population explosion.

I get your view. I have a follow up question, Does this mean that every place that humans have not occupied has to be occupied? what about other living species? And lastly, Don't you think that places where are not yet occupied by human are not that favorable for survivor in the long run?

I completely agree with you. There are so many places in the world that are just empty. I would actually say that most of the world is not inhabited by people. People really just group together in the big cities. Of course, you wouldn't actually have to kill people to reduce the population. It can happen naturally. Nonetheless, I don't think it's necessary. In terms of food, people are worried that we'll run out. Well I've heard that we actually through out about 50% of food that is produced! If we just fixed that problem, we could feed twice as many people!

Knowing that contraceptives and abortion are sins and in some country is still against the human rights, the most ethnical way that I can think of to reduce the growth of human population is for all parents to practice self control and be mindful of the consequences of having a big family. A parent that is knowledgeable about sex, reproduction, responsibilities and population is most likely to have self control and lessen giving birth to a child. Because he would think of how to raise them and how to support them from birth, education, needs and wants. In that way, we can help reduce the growth of human population.

I do not believe in this topic. Humans are not so many as we think. Even if we were so many, why reduce for what? Many people think that food will not be enough in the future but it is not true. We have a lot of places where we can cultivate. Countries like Canada and Russia are actually empty. People can easily move there if there are nowhere to go. With science, we can easily plant anywhere. We are already eating modified fruits and vegetables. We are doing great. We do not need to kill people or to reduce the population.

There is no problem in mating, as long as there is proper and careful use of contraceptives. Some even knowing the fact, do ot go towards it. I believe the policy applied for years by China, is the most ethical way to get through the issue. Where money matters are involved people take care of things themselves with complete devotion.

I don't think education is enough to reduce population because people can be very obstinate and anti government. I believe a successful attempt at population control and reduction must involve some force of enforcement through the instruments of punishment and reward. If ethics is the focus, then educate people by all means. Buy if population control is the focus, then ethics should take a back seat. We the peooe define what is ethical or not.

The most ethical way to do this would be to focus on wealth and education. There is a strong inverse correlation between income and birth rate. The fact is that more educated and well-off people are, the less children they have.

Just develop technologically. If we did that, we could inhabit seas, go high into air or deep into ground, eventually to other planets. We could also do the same with growing plants and animals. I'm sure that Earth is large enough for many times more people, only if we spent money that's spent on military on some real issues and actually moving forward.

It’s already starting. The fertility rate of North American males has gone down about 40% in the last 20 years.

there is no need reducing it, you have to organise the population growth and develop the civilisation,

I think that the ost ethical way to reduce the population of mankind is through introducing birth control, especially in the provinces and states in which the statistics shows that the majority of the females who have been pregnant is from the rural areas. By making a complex and sound plan to distribute birth control materials and proper education about birth control, it will drastically reduce the population of mankind.

Educate our children on how to adopt birth control and also eradicate unwanted pregnancy which common nowadays.

Honestly, this is the only way to ethically go about it. I don't think it's ethical at all to enforce a one child policy of anysort, nor do I think it's ethical to tell certain cultures that they're not going to be allowed to have kids.

Education though, may not do enough to be able to change peoples minds -- as there is a cultural layer to having more then one, or two, or three kids (and so on and so forth)

I think education will make strides in some cultures, and we may see some benefits of this. But I do think that we're going to grow too much for this earth, and we're going to have to get natural resources from other sources (maybe from fiquring out different ways of producing goods, new areas to find goods (space))

This is a good topic though, I will without a doubt be leaving this on notify and watching this.

I completely agree with you. The Earth is so rich. In almost all cases I don't believe all the talk of us running out of something. If you take oil, for example. We often hear talks about how much oil there is left, that it's going to run out soon. Have you noticed though, how every few months or so the magically find more oil. It is obviously in the best interests of the oil companies to make everybody think there is a limited amount of oil. This makes all the oil more expensive. They need to control extraction, so they can control prices. If we extracted more, the price would go down. We should focus more on using resources wisely and effectively than on panicking about some false idea of scarcity.

Family Planning I think is the most ethical way to reduce the growth of human population. It is very important to educate everyone about careful family planning. Some religious groups are not in favor of birth control, although that is a good way to prevent the population, as well, so the best alternative is to educate people about the consequence of mating.

I have been telling folks around me for a while now and I will mention it here. I really think we're focusing on the wrong stuff. The big question is do we really need to reduce human population? Because the more we think we need to, the more crazy unethical ideas spring up. The major question we should be facing is how can we increase the quality of the existing human population? This earth is rich, irregardless of what speculators say. We will keep discovering more and more of its resources. And I think this will be an unending process. People crowd up in cities and developed places just to escape the rigour of developing other regions. And I think this is our undoing.

Thumbs up to this one.  The more we know about our inner desires the more we can control it.  I think education will not only solve the higher growth in our population but also the many crimes related to sex (e.g. sexual trafficking, rape, abuses, etc).

I'm not sure if this is going to be our biggest problem. A lot of people here are talking about overpopulation. The birth rate is actually going down worldwide. Many countries already have negative growth. A bigger problem may actually be how to deal with a lack of young people in many countries. Life expectancy is going up and we have a heck of a lot of old people. However, there aren't as many young people to take care of the old people. Many developed countries are actually recruiting caretakers from other countries. I think the less poverty there is and the most technology takes over farming, the more the birth rate will go down in developing countries.

high fertility rates from a nonhumanist perspective can be very useful and enriching. the established and powerful can replace their labourers like they are some sort of garbage

I believe sex education will be the most ethical way, and might just be the most effective way to to reduce the population.

Although I'm not really a fan of abortion, using condoms is one of the most basic way of avoiding pregnancy. It works most of the time, and it doesn't really kill or hurt anyone. (It's not like you kill millions of babies every time you masturbate, so the same logic goes with this).

Other than using contraceptives, sex education also provides family planning methods AND the needs and consequences of starting a family. It would really make people think thoroughly because they are properly equipped with the knowledge to do so. Again, it's ethical because it doesn't hurt anybody. If anything, it makes you even smarter as you know more about the most basic unit of society--which is a family.

The only problem with today is that sex education is still stigmatized, therefore people are uncomfortable around the topic.

My contribution to this topic is this:
Easily accessible contraception, followed by women’s education. This is working - it’s just something that takes time to work itself out, and most countries are at some stage or other in the demographic transition between high infant mortality, few people reaching old age, and a high pregnancy rate to keep the population stable and high life expectancy, low infant mortality, and a pregnancy rate that is observably low enough that the population will start falling again once the whole thing has worked itself out.

Yeah, this is sooo true. I know that might sound off the topic but the sexual education is so poor in all of the countries. This becomes a problem of finding out analyzing your sexual identity, feeling yourself, feeling comfortable to talk about this with your parents and etc. But yeah, this would make a difference in reducing human population. Although, it's slowly decreasing now.

Nice topic.

Something else that has had a huge impact is the fact that women have carriers as well now days, which makes the window for having children much smaller. The carrier must be given priority until the mid 30´s and only 2 children will be borne due to age and time it seems.

In Sweden this is a fact, we have a shrinking population and the mean age for having the first children in Stockholm is over 30 years.
So give the population options in the form of a carrier and they wont walk around the home waiting for the next children between the ages of 16-30, but start having children after 30 instead when the carrier has gone forward enough.

This of course is based in both technology and education, to create such a environment, but we will get there as long as education and technology keeps evolving as you mentioned!

what I would suggest is to change the social structure of developing nations while at the same time introducing economical advancements steered toward cultural evolution.

here a few methods

education can help curve fertility rates,but how useful might that be in a male dominant society where forced marriage is still the norm?
the solution:introduce norm that empower freedom and independence, while shaming those infringing on those right as if there committing a taboo, and that it acceptable for couple to have no children at all

2. the senior population might want more grandchildren for various economical and personal reason. diminishing workforce,more retiree then economic supporters,old mcgutget family-owned farm need more child labor etc.

the solution: keep advancing technology to at least substitute for the difference in the job market while the population is in transition for a smaller demographic

3. especially in developing nations, the main reason why people procreate vigorously is to better there odds of passing there legacy and that one will be a success in a poverty stricken area, more children mean better their chances.

the solution: make the opposite true; offer programs for single-children (or that has only one biological sibling) that allow various resources to be accessible to them. I don’t think they would want 7 or 8 gosling in a polluted pond if they know that stopping at one will ensure they (under-tale reference) will become a geese thriving in a crystal clear lake (world)

WHAT DO YOU THINK?