One Child: Do We Have a Right to More?
Sarah Conly
Abstract
This book argues that at present we don’t have a right to have more than one child. The world is suffering serious environmental degradation, and we can foresee that as the population rises this degradation will become more and more severe. This, in turn, causes grave suffering for others. We don’t have a right to commit acts that have this likelihood of causing great harm. Rights generally are thought to arise from either of two bases: interests and the exercise of autonomy. The book argues that we don’t have any basic interest in having more than one child, so we cannot insist on this as nec ... More
This book argues that at present we don’t have a right to have more than one child. The world is suffering serious environmental degradation, and we can foresee that as the population rises this degradation will become more and more severe. This, in turn, causes grave suffering for others. We don’t have a right to commit acts that have this likelihood of causing great harm. Rights generally are thought to arise from either of two bases: interests and the exercise of autonomy. The book argues that we don’t have any basic interest in having more than one child, so we cannot insist on this as necessary to our basic welfare. While we generally have rights to choose the way we live, thought of as autonomy rights, even when basic welfare is not at stake, autonomy rights are always limited by the amount of harm an action would cause to others. At present, the foreseeable harm from population growth seems to make unlimited procreation too dangerous to be something that can be protected as a right. Given this, if done correctly, state sanctions intended to constrain how many children we have can be morally justified. While there are some punishments and some preventive measures that would be impermissible, it seems likely that there are other methods for enforcing such a law that would not violate rights.
Keywords:
overpopulation,
environment,
right to have children,
population control,
one-child policy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190203436 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190203436.001.0001 |
