(July 11, 2015 at 1:04 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote: ... It is not based on death of the individual, but on species extinction, and the reason that this is an important nuance is because the argument in favor of forced birth-control for humans is not based on the preservation of individual lives, but on the species as a whole. ...
No. If millions of people starve to death, that does not necessarily entail the extinction of the humanity. The choice is between millions of people starving, and between people being forcibly made sterile.
This can be examined in terms of animal overpopulation. When that occurs, then many individual members die of starvation and such things, but it does not necessarily mean that all of the members of that species die.
A brutal experiment could be done (which I hope no one does, but probably someone already has done something similar) with rats in a very large enclosure, with enough food for a thousand rats being delivered each day. The rats would likely overbreed and exceed the food limit, with very nasty results. The rats would likely fight and kill each other over food, and would also likely eat each other as well. My guess is that this would not cause the rats to all die off, and, if that is correct, there would be no extinction, just a nasty, brutal existence for the survivors. Eventually, perhaps, the rats would evolve to not overbreed, but unless and until that happened, there would be a very gruesome situation.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
