Keif,
Thinking aloud some ideas inspired by your piece, and also Saletan's recent stuff on one-child policy:
It seems to me that Malthusian population pressures will provoke a deep rethinking of human rights. There are questions of death and resources that your piece brings up, but I think the toughest challenge for classical Western-style formulations of rights will center on fertility. Do we have a right to as many children as we wish? Under what circumstances could one ethically impose limits? What kinds of policy would be both just and sensible? And... at the heart of all politics, who decides?
Part of the point is optimistic. We have evolved sufficient reason to understand that "we can make judgements that actually trump the whole functions that a particular system" (in this case, having kids) "is designed to serve" (see bloggingheadstv's Will Wilkerson ). So beyond travelling to space (more on that in a moment), we can help relieve pressures by simply having fewer children. There are a lot of things working against this optimistic projection of the future, but to me it remains the best case scenario. The problem (as I see it) is getting to a world in which most people desire 1 or at most 2 kids in a way that is itself not morally unjust. True, it's easy enough to support this moral reasoning with existing philiosophy. Kant's moral imperative, for example, suggests that if my actions (having 2 kids) were applied in general as a moral rule, there would be (1). no inherent logical contradiction and (2.) a good outcome, or at least a better outcome than the one projected. Or Mill's idea that you have freedom up until the point when you affect the freedoms of others. So it's not like you (not you personally, but one) has to invent a bizarre new approach to thinking to make an argument for limited fertility.
Except it's pretty clear you do. Because it's also reasonable to say that having kids is a right, that limiting a right is itself a harm, and (particularly if you disagree that my "best case scenario" is both possible and optimal), there's no entity that can limit this right without doing harm. The kind of regime it would require to get people to turn on their instict to procreate would require an awful exercise of power. It's not at all clear that even China has limited fertility to the extent that it can solve the Malthusian puzzle.
In general, I think it's hard to convince people of moral obligations regarding acts that are destructive in aggregate across a large population but of small consequences individually. Cars may pollute the enviornement, but because my car is a small piece of that larger puzzle, my culpability feels small. Using that kind of argument against having kids seems to me a nonstarter.
I've got to believe, however, that real shortages are going to give new force to that kind of argument. Population growth is going to make people think differently about bodies (I doubt the post-Roe formulation -- that people has the right to do whatever they want with their bodies -- will survive. And that makes me very worried about rights in general. I've been reading a book by Mark Mazower called Dark Continent. Mazower has persuaded me that there was a time when things like euthanasia, forced migration, and autocracy seemed reasonable to people who thought of themselves as open-minded and progressive. Genocide was a small step further. People who thought of themselves as good found themselves perpetuating great evil. I think the conditions that make such points of view seem plausible/attractive/politically viable are fast upon us. It's a conundrum to me -- how to be on the side of the good.
Two side points -- 1. if humans survive long enough, space colonization is inevitable, not only because of population pressure, but also because the earth will not go on forever. 2. I thought this was truly awesome.
august