Population Control

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 609 Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2015

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week the Moral Maze asks: "is it our moral duty to have fewer children?" The question has been brought in to focus by two stories in the past week. First, that by 2027 the population of the UK is expected to top 70 million people and the second that China is to end its "one child" policy. With 238,737 births every day the world population is rapidly approaching 7 and a half billion and will be 8 billion by 2024. While many people will be campaigning for tougher policies at next month's UN climate change conference, should they also be calling for policies to control population growth? Without some technological miracle, more people will mean more unsustainable resource use, worse climate change, massive population displacement and large scale migration - something we're already seeing. If we can foresee the suffering that unrestrained population growth will cause for all those who live after us isn't it our moral duty to do something about it? Is it time to accept that having more than one child is just something that none of us has a moral right to do? Of course, if all the world's resources of food, energy, homes and knowledge were evenly distributed, the problems of population would be less urgent. So do we have a moral duty to take a less of them so that others who were born less fortunate can have more? This is global question, but also an intensely personal one. Is it reasonable to expect people to sacrifice their own family interests, in terms of size or privilege, in favour of the common good? Is our profound love for our family and our children a barrier to a more just society and equitable world? Chaired by Michael Buerk, with Matthew Taylor, Giles Fraser, Melanie Phillips and Anne McElvoy. Witnesses are Prof Sarah Conly, Hazel Healy, Frank Furedi and Dr Dernot Grenham.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4. Good evening. China's productivity is the envy of the world in
0:07.6	almost everything apart from themselves. True, they're still the most populous country on the planet,
0:12.3	but 30 years of a draconian, if not universal, one-child-only policy, have meant an estimated 400 million
0:19.3	Chinese babies weren't born,
0:21.5	and that title will shortly pass to India.
0:23.9	The news the policy is to be abandoned came in the week we heard that the population of Britain,
0:28.8	by neat coincidence, pretty much the least economically productive of the major industrialised countries,
0:34.0	is growing much faster than its peers, and will pass 70 million in the next decade.
0:38.6	Another coincidence, the world's human population grows by 70 million every year.
0:44.6	This is either our biggest problem, indeed perhaps the cause of nearly all the others,
0:48.8	or no problem at all, because human ingenuity will cope until such time as it solves itself.
1:13.4	It does seem to be true that birth rates in many developing countries are not falling as fast as had been predicted. In a number of richer countries, they've started to tick back up again. Meantime, we're not dying as we did. There's been an astonishing increase in lifespans in what used to be called the third world. Result, the UN estimates human numbers, which have nearly tripled in my lifetime,
1:18.0	will go up from something over 7 billion now to 10 billion by the end of the century.
1:22.7	And, of course, spreading prosperity multiplies the demands of mere numbers on the planet's resources.
1:24.6	Two questions here.
1:29.3	Do we have a moral duty to limit our numbers in our own interests as well as the Earths? And flowing from that, if life on a packed planet is increasingly a zero-sum game,
1:34.3	should our moral responsibility be more towards the wider world, less to those who are close to us?
1:40.3	That's our moral maze tonight. Our panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator on The Times,
2:03.9	Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist, the chief executive of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, and the Anglican Priest-come newspaper columnist, Jarls Fraser. Jarls, are you worried about this, or are you all go forth and multiply? No, it's a big issue. I mean, I think one of the most common human fantasies is that we can exist without limit, and it gets us into trouble.
2:09.8	We have a finite planet with finite resources, and we cannot accommodate continual and infinite growth.
2:10.8	Anne McClevelyne.
2:16.9	I don't see the application of the word finite in either sense, the way Giles has described it.
	...

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