Overpopulation: You get to cast the deciding vote.

[Excited Penguin]

@Pyrrho

---

Being continuously tortured for life.  I think that would be one that most people would agree with.  In my case, I think not having a good life is worse than death, but I know that many will disagree with that.  I have made a living will and have instructed my wife to have the doctors "pull the plug" as soon as it is legal to do so.  I do not want to have a bad life, and have no fear of death.  Once one is dead, nothing bad can happen to one.  So I think a bad life is worse than death.

Losing the right to bear children, as per context, is not the same as being tortured for life. Nor is being tortured for life as likely to happen as death, given certain variables, such as population growth and unavailability of resources.
I don't see what it brings to the conversation to point out that there might be worse things than death or extinction.

I think everyone being tortured for as long as they live would be worse than the extinction of the human race.  (By "extinction," I mean the human race no longer existing.)

I refer you to the line of reasoning used in my previous reply[the above one].

The term "extinction" can be used either way:

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defini...ctCode=all

I know it can.

 I was, however, using it in the sense of them no longer existing; of being extinct.       

I know you were.

 The process may or may not be particularly unpleasant.  If, for example, people got a virus that made everyone completely sterile, but otherwise had no effect on them, that seems to me to not be such a terrible thing.  It would mean the eventual extinction of humans, but no one would be suffering horribly from the virus.         

I don't see why you pointed all of this out.

  [i]Of course, some people would be upset by the fact that humanity would go extinct, but humanity is going to go extinct eventually anyway.  I do not see the extinction of humanity, per se, as a bad thing.  That "per se" is essential for my meaning.  I can certainly think of bad ways in which humans could become extinct.    [/i]  

How can you claim to know that the extinction of humanity is inevitable? We don't know what lies in the future, nor do we know for sure that the universe is finite in time. As for the sun going out, we don't know that we couldn't get around that in the billions of years left for it to burn. We might either learn how to manipulate the sun into subsisting, find a way to protect ourselves from its engulfing us and replacing it's energy or manage to travel to other solar systems before any of it happening.

Why do you have such a borderline nihilistic view of life?

  I am easily able to read "hidden" text.      

 
I know you are. I meant if the site still showed you that you got a reply from me, regardless of my replying to you in this manner. I am asking about the Alert feature, to be precise.

---

---

---

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.

I find it hard to swallow any justification of the actual dehumanizing of people based on hypothetical fears of mass starvation or other results of overpopulation.

Mind you, I'm not saying overpopulation is not dangerous.  I'm saying that I would vote "no" in the OP scenario because I think there are other, more humane ways to address the issue.

My apologies for extending it to species extinction. That clearly wasn't in there, and was me inserting my own reading. I'll be more careful next time.

---

Your thinking that there are other ways to address the issue is irrelevant to the OP scenario, as  that hypothetical scenario presents you with no choice in the matter. You either choose that way or millions die. That's the choice, not whether you choose more or less humane ways to do it.