(by
I said in "The Human Predicament" that the present population of the earth already exceeds the planet's long-range carrying capacity. Although it seems to me that that statement will certainly prove to have been true, the future undoubtedly will hold surprises for us. Thus, there does remain a theoretical possibility that technological advances and changes in life style could permit a world population as large as the present one somehow to be maintained indefinitely.
But that doesn't really make a lot of difference. What does seem absolutely certain is that there is a limit to the population that the earth can support,and that if the population continues to grow exponentially (and how else is it to grow?), it's only a matter of time before it will exceed that limit. Once thelimit has been exceeded, it'll be only a matter of time before population reduction begins to take place. (In fact, some of the mechanisms that will be involved are no doubt already operating on a small scale today). In any case, a reduction in the earth's population will have to begin before very much longer. How soon it will begin will depend in part on people's reactions as living standards(1) decline--as they are obliged to choose between the value traditionally attached to maintaining living standards and the value traditionally attached to human life. At a very elementary standard of living a considerably larger population could be maintained, just as with a sufficiently reduced population, a relatively high standard of living could be maintained for a considerable time. But if, as I suppose, there'll be (at the very least) a significant number of more influential people who won't be prepared to tolerate a significantly reduced standard of living, and if I'm right in "The Human Predicament" that for a number of reasons human beings won't be able to reduce population (or for that matter, even to stop population growth) by limiting the number of births, population control will have to come about through reducing the life spans of some already-living people. The question that I want to broach here is: What will determine which people these are to be?
If humankind doesn't find a way (or the will) to exercise some kind of collective judgment, presumably those who survive will be those who are best able to seize and defend access to whatever life-sustaining resources remain. The population reduction will probably come from starvation, disease (a great deal of it probably consequent to impure air and water), and violence (probably much of it resulting directly from competition for existing resources). In that case, the principle on which the order of dying is determined will presumably be one of power--on the whole, the resources necessary to sustain life will go to those with sufficient power to claim them. However, if the human species was somehow able to plan its own destiny--if humans did somehow manage to o rganize themselves so as to permit them to decide, on some basis other than power, which people were to die first--what should the basis for the decision be? What would be the optimal solution? That's the subject that I want to introduce--although certainly not resolve--here. I have to admit that I have trouble imagining how humanity could possibly organize itself so as to permit rational decisions about anything of this importance to be made and implemented. However, I cling to the faith (maybe an occupational disease of the teaching profession) that an attempt to come to some kind of understanding of the problem can't hurt (except, of course, for those individuals whose emotional health requires them to hold beliefs that would be incompatible with any free-ranging discussion of these matters) and might possibly help in some way. I don't think I've ever heard any proposals as to how population might actually be reduced except through stringent birth control over a long period, but there is considerable discussion of slowing population growth (with the hope of eventually stopping growth entirely at some point before world population has reached infinity). Presumably such modest efforts are about as much as could even be considered in the present political climate.
However, if the only means of population control that's ever proposed is reducing the birth rate, we won't make much progress. As I tried to explain in"The Human Predicament", I don't believe that any birth rate reduction that's sufficiently large to reduce, or even stabilize, population size would be tolerated. The reason which I mentioned there was the distribution of different age groups in the population, but I think there are also other, psychological, reasons as well why birth control beyond a certain modest level wouldn't be tolerated.
In short, I think the idea that humankind could bring about the necessary population reduction through birth control amounts essentially to self-deception. But if we were to resort to the expedient of reducing the lifespan of living people, which people should it be? In other words, who should die first?
As a preliminary to seeking the answer to that question we should consider what's at stake. If human life has a value, as we are so often told, we need to consider what that value is and, consequently, whether or not the value of some lives is greater, and therefore the cost of some deaths greater, than others.
While acknowledging that the transcendent value of life is constantly being proclaimed, we need to look more closely into what lies behind these proclamations. For example, to whom is life valuable?
It seems that different sorts of values are being proclaimed simultaneously. First, we often hear pronouncements that refer to individuals' "making a contribution to society", or "making a difference", or "leaving the world a better place". Such remarks suggest that the individual is valuable to society (or even to humankind as a whole). In this interpretation, it seems that the value is held in the name of society itself.
A second sort of value is implied in the recognition that the lives of most people are intertwined with those of some others in such a way that they would be missed by those others--that their deaths would cause inconvenience, unhappiness, and frequently genuine suffering to certain individuals. In this interpretation, the value exists in the name of an ad hoc set of relatives, friends, and associates.
Finally, it's also frequently asserted that lives have value to those who live them. If I understand it right, the so-called "right to life" movement bases itself on some such belief. I also have the impression that this belief would be the primary justification that would be offered for the great expense to which governmental agencies such as the Coast Guard or fire rescue units go to save individual lives. The idea is that they're protecting first and foremost something that's of great value to those individuals and only secondarily something of value to the individuals' friends and relatives or to society as a whole.
The three claims seem largely to be independent: the validity of any one would not necessarily support the validity of the others.
Of the three, the second claim is the one which seems most certain to be valid--the life of an individual usually does have value for people associated with him/her. Grieving friends and especially relatives are regularly a prominent feature of news stories of unexpected deaths. In my own case, there's never been a time in my adult life in which I haven't been conscious of the belief that there were people--mostly family members--who would be quite disturbed by my death from any cause. And at times there have been people who were financially dependent on me. I'm sure that most people have held roughly similar beliefs about their own relations to people around them.
Let's turn next to the third claim. The people who tell us what opinions to express show a remarkable agreement that we should (be expected to) say that we believe that being alive is good--that we personally would choose continued life over death, and I have no doubt that most people would claim to believe it. Moreover, I have no doubt that most do believe it (or at the very least believe that they believe it). In fact, this belief is regarded as normal not only in the sense of being the statistical norm, but also in the sense of being the only belief compatible with a healthy mind.
And there's the difficulty. Do people believe that their own lives have value for them because some kind of uninfluenced look within themselves indicates it to be true, or do they believe it because they're convinced they'd better do so? To admit to not believing it is tantamount to admitting to be a failure as a human being or, nowadays particularly, to being in a state of depression and in need of medical intervention (more to be pitied than censured, maybe, but still in need of correction). We can (in theory) contrast beliefs that people hold because they've been convinced by the evidence with beliefs that they hold because they've been persuaded that there would be something wrong with them if they didn't. We might refer to the latter--beliefs that are induced in people for their own (supposed) good or that of the society--as "therapeutic beliefs". The belief that our lives have value for us is certainly encouraged as a therapeutic belief. Whether or not it has any other basis seems unclear.(2)
As regards the first claim, the motives behind it seem transparently therapeutic. How much good would we have to do just to balance the burden that our (every person's) existence imposes on the earth's resources? Moreover, it's really impossible to go through life without doing additional harm here and there (I'm continually recalling little harmful things I've done at one time or another in my life). And we do enough harm even without counting the fact that many of us add further to the population by producing children (and the added population is enough of a burden by itself even when we are responsible enough to see that our particular children don't grow up to be among those who create exceptional problems). And, to offset all of this, how many of us ever accomplish anything during our lives that really does significantly more good than harm in the long run? In short, I'm very skeptical about claims concerning people's value to society. I think these claims can be attributed almost entirely to therapeutic motives.
Thus, the first and probably the third of the proclaimed reasons for believing in the value of human life seem to be exclusively therapeutic innature.
In sum, it seems clear that many (probably most) persons' lives have value in the sense that their removal would cause inconvenience, unhappiness, or even genuine suffering in the lives of others with whom they're closely associated. On the other hand, it's difficult to take the first and third claims as having any basis other than therapeutic. Of course, induced and constantly reinforced beliefs can be quite genuinely felt. But if they can be artificially induced, it should be easy to permit them to lapse, and even possible artificially to induce directly opposed beliefs.
I don't really plan to propose much in the way of an answer to this question here; my main intention was to lay the beginnings of a foundation for discussing it. The one suggestion I have is that self-selection might be a good first principle, and that what I think of as our "refuseniks" should be given particular consideration.
In my own thoughts I've been using the expression "our refuseniks"(3) to refer to people who want to die but (of course) aren't allowed to (or at least are carefully denied any non-messy means). The category of people that I've had particularly in mind are old people who've become increasingly aware of their rapidly decreasing competence. They're aware that they're needed by fewer and fewer of the people who once needed them, and less and less needed overall. They're aware that they themselves are needing more and more assistance of all kinds, and are making ever-increasing demands on the health care system. They're acutely conscious of the gradual loss of dignity that old people suffer as they cease to be participants in an ever-increasing part of the business that society considers important, and as they become increasingly dependent on others for their everyday needs. They see how their role will become increasingly like that of children and how they will come to be talked about, and even talked to, in terms identical with those used with children. They see how they will be increasingly perceived as a burden by their own children and others of younger generations. They see how whatever respect they have earned during their active lives will gradually dissipate.
It's such people as these that I have particularly in mind when I speak of refuseniks. Of course, they don't all announce that they're ready to die. In fact, although I have no way of knowing, I'd suppose that most probably never do. But even when they do, it's not permissible, of course, for the rest of us to show any sympathy. We pretend to believe that they don't really mean it, or we deliberately misunderstand what they say, or we ignore it entirely. Or, if they were persistent enough, I suppose they'd be turned over to the medical profession where they'd likely be diagnosed as suffering from depression, and treated with medication.(4)
I think that these people deserve better from us than that--that they, atleast, have a right to be taken seriously for one last time.
Anyway, to return to the question of who should die first, it seems reasonable to suggest that a first step in selecting those people should be to look for volunteers. I imagine that with some lead time, there could actually be a sizable response, at least if people were eventually persuaded that their volunteering would not bring dishonor on themselves or their families.
No doubt many of the eventual volunteers wouldn't belong to the group I've been describing--the old. And no doubt, many volunteers would be refused for a considerable time to come. What criteria would be applied and who would exercise the final authority certainly aren't clear now. However, I'm inclined to favor anything to put more power in the hands of the people whose lives are at stake, and less in the hands of strangers who by virtue of their station are presumed to possess superior moral judgment.
But present discussions of assisted suicide indicate that there's a long way to go before the volunteers would be granted a major voice in their fate. Right now the discussions center on what conditions should be required before anyone was granted the right to authorize death in a particular case and on who would be granted that right when the required conditions were met. The tendency in those discussions so far is to require--in the case of a person requesting assisted suicide--that one or more (usually more) competent authorities certify that the person has a terminal illness and cannot live more than a few months in any case and, furthermore, that he or she is suffering severe (physical) pain.
In short, the basic question being debated is whether, even under very tightly circumscribed conditions, someone (although in any case, not the refusenik him- or herself) should be authorized to suspend the refusal in a particular case.
Supposing that society is going to persist in its refusal to grant the right to die to those who seek it, can any other source of candidates for population reduction be found?
The only public policy (that I can think of) that results (other than incidentally) in the involuntary termination of human lives is capital punishment(5). And, in the United States at least, there does happen to be a demand right now for wider use of capital punishment. Furthermore, this trend coincides (in the United States, at least) with an increase in the proportion of the population who are imprisoned. There is a constant demand that more criminals should be imprisoned and that they should be kept in prison longer. But the financial burden of building and maintaining the necessary prisons and of maintaining such a large prison population is being increasingly felt and resented. To what extent this resentment is a factor in the increased demand for capital punishment would be hard to say. In any case, one might want to imagine that the trend that is developing will involve the criminalization of ever-increasing numbers of people and increasing severity of punishment until the point is reached where capital punishment comes to have a significant impact on population size.
However, the amount of population reduction that will soon be required will be so mind-bogglingly large that the rate of capital punishment would have to increase to difficult-to-imagine levels in order to make any significant contribution to solving the problem. And in the rest of the world capital punishment is often either non-existent or practiced on a scale even more insignificant than that of the United States.
1. For the purposes of this note, I'm following the practice--so well-established in the modern capitalist world--of referring to (and thinking of) people as "consumers". When I refer to "living standards", then, I'm referring primarily to the availability of consumer goods. There might be other ways to measure living standards that would be somewhat more independent of the decline in natural resources than I'm assuming them to be, but the independence could only extend so far. Backup
2. Another argument that one might expect to see in support of this claim is that animals of all species seem to exhibit an instinct to try to survive. This instinct would be argued as demonstrating that survival is a universal value established by nature. However, all that the case actually shows is that any species--if such existed--whose members were indifferent about their individual survival have not survived as successfully as species whose members did strive to survive--not a very remarkable outcome. Back up
3. In the last years of the Soviet Union, substantial numbers of Soviet citizens had applied for and been granted immigration visas by foreign countries (most often, I think, Israel or the United States). However, in many cases the Soviet Union refused to permit the person to leave. The affair was treated as something of a scandal by the Western press, and the individuals so refused came to be labeled "refuseniks". Back up
4. Another scandal (in the eyes of the West) of the last years of the Soviet Union was the assignment of dissidents to psychiatric hospitals. Western psychiatrists were disturbed by Soviet psychiatrists' permitting themselves to be used by the political system in what the Westerners saw as unethical ways. Back up
5. Maybe I should also have included war, which certainly does aim at the involuntary termination of lives, but the population that the efforts of a country at war are designed to reduce is somebody else's. Backup
Return to George Grace's home page
The Human Predicament home page
My Personal page
the Ethnolinguistic Notes page
Ethnolinguistic Notes Series 3
Ethnolinguistic Notes Series 4
First put on the Web on 25 August 1997
