Destroying the World to Save It

Still from the Tree of Life, directed by Terrence Malick

In an opinion piece published in the Guardian, entitled “Why We Should Have Fewer Children: To Save The Planet,” Travis Rieder responds to objections raised by others in response to his research and teaching concerning population control in an age of climate change. The upside of voluntary population control would be that there would be less overall human suffering and competition for resources. The downside to voluntary population control would be that fewer humans would have a chance to experience life. Rieder is trying to convince people that it is their moral duty to curtail the most basic activities that make us human so that less suffering will exist in the world.

Travis Rieder has great academic credentials. He works at John Hopkins University’s Berman Institute of Bioethics as a philosopher. He obviously has great expertise and training as a researcher. He’s also a good writer with his pulse on people’s anxieties about the future, along with a unique angle on how to address them.

Rieder invokes our emotions in a few ways. First, he mentions the suffering of people in underdeveloped nations, which will be the first to be affected by massive climate change. He writes that, “The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that from the years 2030-2050 – as we reach this level of warming – at least 250,000 people will die every year from just some of the climate-related harms.” The global poor will obviously be hurt the most, since they lack resources those in the West enjoy. He then plays on the sympathy of the Western reader by pointing out that if the warming trend continues we will be the cause of rising sea levels, which will destroy places like the Maldives.

Rieder also tries to make the case that making the people who are currently alive happier is better than making more humans with the potential to be happy. Of course there is a conflict here with many religious people, such as married Catholics or Latter-day Saints, who believe in the sanctity of life. How could people with such beliefs ever adopt the ideas that Rieder proposes? Rieder says that, “It is not a harm to someone to not be created.” For Latter-day Saints specifically, this would not hold, since we believe that God created people’s spirits prior their being born on Earth, and that God has ordained marriage and family as the means to provide these spirits a physical body, and experiences on Earth that they need to become more like God. To be denied this would be a great harm in the Latter-day Saint view, and in fact would be a form of damnation. For Catholics it is a sin to tamper with the means God has ordained for the continuance of life. So that’s more than a billion people who cannot in good conscience support the measures Rieder suggests. I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that Rieder is not a believer in any traditional religion.

Rieder’s reasoning is strong, yet his evidence for world destruction is flimsy. He is basically encouraging people to give up on what makes them human –their genetic inheritance – on the word of scientists who cannot prove their claims of destruction. Everything he claims is based on an “if, then” model. For example, yes, if the ocean rises and the Maldives are destroyed and it was my fault because my wife bore two children, I will feel terrible. But that’s not going to happen tomorrow. It’s not going to happen without warning. He bases his arguments on current trends in the planet’s warming. 40 years ago scientists were predicting that we were about to enter a new ice age and that the effects of the planet cooling would be disastrous. This was based on current trends. The trends changed. The trend in the United States for childbirth is at below replacement levels, something Rieder would cheer. This might or might not change. Would Rieder want us all to react to this alarming news by increasing childbearing? Of course not. So why does he want Westerner’s to stop having kids based on the warming trend?

I think fundamentally his argument is a religious one. He believes the prophecies of the secular prophets of scientism. But knowing what he knows, he still brought a child into this world. He still uses automobiles and flies on airliners to conferences to present papers. I feel he has a faith without works. His argument would be more persuasive to me if he were a sustenance farmer with a good wi-fi connection writing his own blog. His argument avoids specific logical fallacies. He is just good old-fashioned wrong.

In Rieder (2016)’s very last sentence he says, “I believe difficult yet civil discussion is the crucial first step to making that future one we won’t be condemned for creating.” It’s interesting that he brings up the idea of future generations condemning us. This is an aspect of social proof (Cialdini, 2009, p.99), only instead of looking around at those around us and taking our cues from them, Rieder would have us look to the future and imagine what people who are not alive yet will think of us if the predictions of scientists come to pass, and choose to act now based on how he imagines they would want us to act if they were in our shoes. I believe that the reason this tactic works on people is because of some of the horrible practices of the past that we are taught were mostly practiced unthinkingly, like slavery and other horrors. People today do not want to be looked at the way we look at people of the past.

There is a strange inverted form of reciprocation (Cialdini, 2009, p.19-20) implicit in this argument as well. It’s as though Rieder is saying that because our parents have given us a pretty good world it would be impolite to give a worse world to our potential children.

The argument also hinges on people’s uncertainty (Cialdini, 2009, p.109), but again in an inverted form. The future has been scary for the rising generations for a very long time. Whether it was the great depression, World War II, the threat of nuclear war, being drafted into Vietnam, the cold war, the threat of terrorism, economic recessions, mass shootings, massive student loan debt, or environmental disaster, the world that’s coming is uncertain, and has been for a long time. Rieder seems to provide answers that will benefit us by allocating resources here and now by ensuring that no one else is born to compete, and also helps theoretical people, who if Rieder’s suggestions are followed, will never exist, thus negating the help he wants to give them, which effectively means no help was given. Rieder wants to destroy the world in order to save it.

References

Cialdini R.B., (2009). Influence: Science and practice. Boston, MA: Pearson.

Rieder, T.N., (2016). Why we should have fewer children: To save the planet. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/12/why-we-should-have-fewer- children-save-the-planet-climate-change