What is a "positive fertility rate"? |
How many kids a woman must have to keep the population stable. With modern first-world
infant mortality and other death rates, I'd say 2.15 children per functional vagina on average ought to do it.
I still notice that you don't explain the "economic and cultural collapse" thing. |
Declining population means some productivity gains are wasted on the necessity of the economy making do with fewer people, and if productivity doesn't increase fast enough then we have economic contraction and an actual decline in standards of living: work more hours, make less, be able to afford less stuff.
Aging population means higher cost of living (medical costs), slower adaption of new ideas and technologies (old people don't learn as fast), inflated cost of physical labor, inflated security costs (i.e. your neighbor can't defend himself because his hands shake), and so on.
Oh heck... ever see the film
Idiocracy? That's
no joke!
And don't forget, we're talking about relative loss here. It might be the difference between 1% and 4% yearly growth in the world GDP, over time it makes a huge difference. And we're not just talking about money here, it could be a matter of life and death - someone curing your diabetes when you're 60, curing your cancer when you're 70, curing your heart disease when you're 80, making you look like Brad Pitt when you're 90, upgrading your brain capacity when you're 200, and so on.
So, because they chose to reproduce, I have a duty to? Why? |
I am in the process of explaining why. For the same reason why you have individual rights: the functional reality of human nature. Reproduction is a self-evident evolutionary advantage. You may not like the answer, but
c'est la vie, you can't blame the universe for 2 plus 2 adding up to 4, it just does.
Nonsense. There is no such responsibility. |
Yes there is. You are responsible for the harm you do to others: murder, theft, wrongful imprisonment, property damage (like pollution), or demographic damage.
A crime that harms everyone a tiny bit is still a crime.You are not responsible for working for society: presuming you don't initiate aggression then what you do for money is your own damn business. You are not responsible for spending money on anything but your pleasure (once again, within the context of the non-aggression principle) - read Ayn Rand. There is just one exception that Objectivist / Libertarian / Anarcho-Capitalist philosophers failed to understand - when it comes to reproduction, your life is not entirely your own.
No one consciously chooses to be born, but by doing so you nonetheless enter into biological debt. This debt is not just to your mother - she may have consented to you being born by allowing that to happen, but she was fulfilling her own biological debt (as was your father).
You have to pay it forward - your biological debt is to the children that you would need to bring into this would to keep the process going beyond your own generation, no matter if you contribute biologically, financially, or both.
[...] who is the person I am aggressing against. |
Image you're driving a car at high speed and suddenly you close your eyes and let go of the wheel - you crash into somebody's house causing property damage and physical as well as mental injuries. The consequences of this crime are very direct: there's one criminal and a finite quantity of people in that house who are victims. When you willfully refuse to reproduce, on the other hand, the consequences are delayed. You benefit from the fact that your ancestors didn't fail to reproduce, but you don't pass that debt to the next generation.
Imagine you are a due-paying member of a club of people that has a couple billion members (not sure how many people willfully have less than two children, but that detail doesn't matter). What this club does is release a virus into the earth's atmosphere that quickly infects every human being, regardless of whether they were members of that club or not. That virus doesn't do anything for decades, but then it gradually starts to have a negative economic effect each person infected (which is everyone), same as a declining population has a negative effect. Is that not a crime?
"Aggression against the mechanisms of life itself." There are no "mechanisms of life" I am aggressing against, and aggression is only wrong if it violates rights, and "mechanisms of life itself" have no rights. |
I am hereby saying that they do, and I am basing that argument on the same rational basis as individual human rights.