Toward a Small Family Ethic
Host Dave Gardner talks with Travis Rieder, bioethicist and author of Toward a Small Family Ethic: How Overpopulation and Climate Change are Affecting the Morality of Procreation. Appearing on NPR and other national news outlets, Travis is encouraging everyone to consider the ethics of having children on an overpopulated, climate-disrupted planet.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Dave Gardner 00:03
Have you ever considered that you might have a moral obligation not to have children, or to limit your family size to just one child? Well, that's the topic on this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. I'm Dave Gardner, Executive Director of World Population Balance, a nonprofit organization committed to helping the world achieve a smaller, sustainable level of human population. You can find us, learn more, get involved, and support our work at worldpopulationbalance.org. Well, I am very excited about today's guest. Travis Rieder is the author of Toward a Small Family Ethic, How Overpopulation and Climate Change Are Affecting the Morality of Procreation. He's assistant director for education initiatives and research scholar at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. Welcome, Travis.
Travis Rieder 01:00
Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me on. Glad to be here.
Dave Gardner 01:02
I appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. Your ideas about the morality of family size decisions have been getting a lot of attention lately.
Travis Rieder 01:12
Yeah, that was a little bit surprising. Academics like myself are not always used to being thrown into the public eye. So it was exciting and interesting. It's it's continuing to be exciting and interesting, sometimes slightly disconcerting. But these are really important conversations and I am glad if I have any small part to play and bring it to a wider audience.
Dave Gardner 01:37
Well, that's great. And if time permits, toward the end of this podcast, we'll circle back and I would love to ask you for a few more details about the response to some of that. But I think more important is for us to really kind of get into the meat of of the conversation you've started. And first of all, this book is a, it's an interesting book that I really want to recommend people read if they have the kind of the patience and the appetite for a little bit of science. It's, it's written in a really, I think, in a kind of a friendly, informal way and yet, it is chock full of what, you know, I think must mean a lot to philos, serious philosophy students, I guess.
Travis Rieder 02:20
Yeah, so I appreciate you saying that it's it's at least somewhat readable. The idea was to write something small. So one thing you probably noticed is that it's a really, really short book, it's for this series Springer Briefs. And the idea for a Springer Brief is that the author presents a kind of single argument or a single overview or a thread or a particular conversation that can be captured in, you know, a hundred pages or so. And so what I wanted to do was I wanted to make a single argument for this idea that perhaps we ought to be changing our norms around family size, and that it was something that is at least potentially readable to a pretty wide audience. The idea is also that say, master of public health or master of bioethics students could use this as a textbook. So that's why it does have some footnoting and a decent amount of data. But yeah, the idea is supposed to be that someone like you, who has an interest, but may not be a philosopher by training, could pick it up and get a good sense of what the argument is.
Dave Gardner 03:31
Yeah, it is a pretty quick read. And it definitely spoke to me, but I definitely found myself at the same time, there were some mind boggling somersaults that you did in there, because it was clear that you were exercising, you know, the discipline, I guess, that I can't even begin to appreciate having, I don't think I ever took a single philosophy course in college. Shame on me.
Travis Rieder 03:53
Shame on you, indeed.
Dave Gardner 03:56
So anyway, with that caveat, I really want to recommend that and it's not hard to find. I want to do a spoiler here, because I think that's, I think it would be good to maybe start at the conclusion and then let you help me kind of unpack these conclusions. So you wrote in the final chapter of the book, "There are many good reasons not to have children. Having a child contributes to the massive systematic harm of climate change, more so than any other non-procreative act a typical person takes, depends on and reinforces injustice, and puts the created child in harm's way." So that's it. That's it in a nutshell. And sorry for kind of spoiling the book, but you do a pretty good job of, of spoiling along the way, telling us kind of where you're, where you think you're going and then helping us follow you through the logic of where you arrive. So first, before before we unpack it, let's talk about this climate change aspect of it because as I'm sure you know, the sheer scale of the human footprint on the planet is causing a lot more disruption and injury to the biosphere than just climate change. Freshwater crises, fertile soil depletion, fisheries collapse, toxification of the atmosphere and water and of course, species extinction. So why choose climate change here?
Travis Rieder 05:21
Yeah, that's a great question. There are a couple of different reasons that are kind of more and less satisfying. So one of the reasons that I chose climate change that is maybe less satisfying, is just kind of purely pragmatic. So I'm a, I'm an academic, I'm a scholar, by training and by profession, and my view on a field like bioethics, which is, you know, massively interdisciplinary, and works on the ground with physicians and public health officials and science policy people is that you're only doing good work if you have a really thorough understanding of the relevant fields that you're discussing. Or if you have co-authors and collaborators who are genuine experts in all of the various fields. So that being said, I, in my single authored work, did not feel qualified to take on every aspect of overpopulation. And to be kind of frank, I don't think there are very many people who are. One of the only people who drop jumps to mind is what the only pairs of authors is, Anne and Paul Ehrlich, and, you know, they're still writing today. They had an essay just here in 2016, kind of comparing their work from the sixties and seventies to the situation today. And they really have an incredible grasp of the ethics, the biodiversity, the, you know, geology, the ecology. I mean, they have an incredible grasp of food, nutrition, water, resources. And that's impressive, but I don't have that. So I had to, I had to pick, you know, kind of one entree into my concern about sustainability and planetary limits. So that's a real pragmatic answer. But but because I could have picked a variety, the reason I chose climate change is because climate change is kind of inextricable from all of the others. So we do have serious nutrition worries across the world now and more coming in the future. And those are being made worse by climate change. And we have severe water stress in various parts of the world now and they're going to get worse. And that's being made worse by climate change. And we have incredible biodiversity loss and species extinction. And that's being exacerbated by climate change. Right? So climate change is one of the problems and it's a reinforcing problem for pretty much all other sustainability and resource issues.
Dave Gardner 05:22
Good point. You probably had access to pretty good data there too that-
Travis Rieder 06:15
Yes.
Dave Gardner 06:15
Simplifies it a little bit, perhaps.
Travis Rieder 08:02
Exactly, exactly.
Dave Gardner 08:03
Okay. Okay. Alright, so where do we go? What do you think is the first stop on our exploration of this subject? Maybe maybe, first of all, you you kind of begin with this. I'm not going to call it as an assumption, with the knowledge of the fact that there's no other single act that you can refrain from that will have anything like the environmental impact of refraining from having a child. That is not something that has been widely, I don't think it's widely known today. Where did that come from?
Travis Rieder 08:33
Well, so I start with an intuition. And so this is a very kind of philosopher turned practical ethicist move to make. I started with an intuition and then I looked to see if there was any data that could help me verify or disprove that intuition. So the intuition was, when my spouse and I create a new human being, right? There are immediate impacts on my carbon footprint. So when a lot of Americans do this thing, create a new human, they immediately buy a bigger and less fuel efficient car, they sometimes move into a bigger home that then takes more resources, you know, to heat and cool. They buy a bunch of diapers that are then thrown into landfills and create problems with carbon emissions of garbage. So all there kind of these kind of immediate impacts. But that's not the real problem with procreating in terms of the carbon impact. The real problem is that you then have another small human who is, you know, hopefully going to turn into an agent themselves, a person that's going to go on and make their own choices and do their own emitting activities. And then here's the kicker, that person is statistically likely in America to have two children of their own, right? With a partner. And each of those children is statistically likely, if fertility stays the same, to have two children of their own. And so the intuition here that we don't at this point in the dialogue have data on is that, well, geez, when I make a new person, I don't just increase my carbon footprint through immediate activity but I kind of stand on the top of this iceberg of carbon emissions that extends out as long as we are carbon emitters into the future, basically. So as long as we are not net zero emitters, I am going to be continuing to increase the emissions that I'm at least partially responsible for through creating this individual. So that's the starting point. And when I began looking for data on this, I got discouraged for a while because I thought that I would find it in the modeling literature, that perhaps somebody, you know, ran an agent-based model where they ran a bunch of simulations in a world with little digital agents who procreated. And then, you know, measured the difference when, you know, this agent decided to make one fewer person. And I didn't find anyone doing that. But then I stumbled on to this paper that folks in the population discussion are quite familiar with by scientists out at Oregon, Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax, and Michael Flex. And they gave me the data that I was looking for in a couple of interesting and provocative ways. So they asked the question, "What is the carbon impact of procreating?" And they identified exactly the feature that I was looking at, which is the fact that my children are likely to have children who are likely to have children. And they call that the carbon legacy of procreating. So long story short, they set up a mathematical model where they said, "Look, here's an intuitive way to think about your responsibility for carbon emissions. You and your partner are each responsible for half of the emissions of your offspring, right? And then you're responsible for a quarter of the emissions of your grandchildren because your children then assume some responsibility. And you're responsible for an eighth of the emissions of your great grandchildren. And that this basically tracks your genetic contribution to each of these people into the future." And so it eventually kind of cycles out to zero, right? You get far enough away the numbers so small, it doesn't matter.
Dave Gardner 12:28
Yeah.
Travis Rieder 12:29
So they ran the math under a bunch of different scenarios, well a few different scenarios rather. And what's really distressing is that on the the kind of most optimistic scenario, which we almost certainly are not going to hit, on which we take all of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's, recommendations for decarbonizing immediately. Even if we do that, choosing to procreate swamps kind of all of the typical green activities that you normally think of. But that wasn't the really scary number, because we're almost certainly not going to hit that. So I wanted to know, if we stay on the course that we're pretty much staying on right now, if we do business as usual for the next, for the foreseeable future, then what's the situation like? And it turned out that under a business as usual scenario, when you procreate, you swamp your lifetime carbon emissions by nearly six times for each child you have.
Dave Gardner 13:35
That just floors, floors, people when they hear that.
Travis Rieder 13:38
Yeah, it's really unbelievable. And there's lots of ways that you can present the data. I think that's the simplest. But another one that kind of boggles people's minds is they picked six of the most common kind of stereotypically green activities. So if you're a responsible environmentalist, you'll get a more fuel efficient car, you'll invest in energy efficient appliances, you'll drive fewer miles, you'll recycle everything, right? So they took six of those, they summed them up and said, "If you do that for your entire life of eighty years, the decision not to have one child is more than twenty times more effective at reducing your carbon footprint than the sum total of your lifetime activities doing those six things."
Dave Gardner 13:40
Well, that's certainly a good message to get out there. And I guess as kind of an aside, I don't think, I think it would be really challenging to do this kind of calculation for say, a, a couple of prospective parents in Niger or Chad or, you know, or someplace where, where their current carbon footprint is infinitesimally smaller than ours here in the US where you and I are today.
Travis Rieder 14:56
But yeah, well, you could run the calculations, you know, you can actually use their formula and just put in the data. But it'll turn out yeah, that your decision not to have a child if you live in Niger, is going to have, you know, virtually no impact on the overall state of affairs. The average Nigerien emits point, one metric tons of carbon every year, and the average American emits sixteen metric tons of carbon every year. So that's what, a hundred and sixty times? Yeah. So you can run the numbers, you know, with anybody, as long as you have the data for average fertility, so you know how many children your children are likely to have, and then annual emissions under various scenarios. But yeah, you're exactly right. The really terrifying version of this is to run it for Americans or run it for, you know, the citizens of the United Arab Emirates, you know, these really high per capita emissions countries.
Dave Gardner 16:01
And that basically informs us that, you know, a lot of people just assume that the overpopulation problem isn't here because they know that we're at, about at replacement level fertility rates. So they jump to the conclusion that the overpopulation problem is in Sub-Saharan Africa where fertility rates are still a lot higher. But here, just now you have explained to us why it's, it's really a much more important thing to be thinking about right here in the US or Canada, Australia, United Arab Emirates, as you mentioned.
Travis Rieder 16:35
That's exactly right. Yeah. So one of I think the most important message is, you know, you and I live in United States. Most of the time when I'm talking, I'm speaking a lot to Americans, sometimes folks from other highly developed and wealthy countries. And that's exactly right, that we have this sense that overpopulation is about numbers. But it's not the numbers by themselves that are the problems, right? We aren't facing a population crisis because we don't have a plot of land to stick humans on. We're facing a population crisis because humans require resources. So the problem of overpopulation is the problem of the number of individuals times the resources that they're using. And that means that a citizen of Niger who, on average, still has over seven children, right? It's just not part of the overpopulation problem, because each of their seven children are using, as we said, point one metric tons of carbon emissions annually. And then if we brought in the other population concerns of food use and freshwater, they're also, very often, using many, many fewer of these sorts of resources, right? So the overpopulation problem is the number of people using extreme amounts of resources and that is squarely on our shoulders, us being the wealthy, developed nations who are using an insane amount of resources.
Dave Gardner 18:09
So this pretty upside down view of that, that a lot of people have. So thanks for kind of turning us upside down. Although I don't, I don't think we should necessarily let the people in the developing world completely off the hook because we all think that they have a right to improve their lives. And so somewhere down the road, those, thanks to exponential growth, high fertility rates today are going to contribute to a problem if human human civilization manages to survive this climate crisis.
Travis Rieder 18:42
That's absolutely right. Yeah. So you know, we're talking right now about the book that I wrote. But I also have done work on the kind of larger policy side with some co-authors at Georgetown University. And this is exactly one of the points that we make, that the short term is so important because the climate change horizon, you know, that is the the timetable on which this problem could become catastrophic is, you know, the next thirty to a hundred years, and so we have to be talking about the people who are contributing massively to the problem at this moment. But it's also the case that the citizens of Niger are owed basic goods. And when they have basic goods, given our current technology and the way nations tend to develop, they will become heavier resource users. So one of the things that we need to ensure, if we're thinking about this at the level of policy and institution and global structure, is that the poorer people of the world who have fewer resources, as they develop the resources and are given the resources that they're owed, that they do it in a sustainable way, which obviously is not with a fertility level of 7.6.
Dave Gardner 19:56
No, nor is it to really to follow any of the path that we've charted.
Travis Rieder 20:02
Yes. Exactly.
Dave Gardner 20:06
And speaking of that, so, so there's really kind of two choices. And they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, which would be, you know, if we're concerned about this and concerned about disrupting the climate, and you talk about it's, you know, because of the way we behave in the developed world that our numbers are a problem, we could just say, "Well, we can't really mess with the numbers of us so we better just get really serious about the way we behave." And I'm not talking about procreative behavior, but every other type.
Travis Rieder 20:38
Right, consumptive behavior.
Dave Gardner 20:39
Yeah.
Travis Rieder 20:41
So I think that that would have been a really smart thing to say forty years ago, right? And, you know, there were people saying it forty years ago, and sadly, we didn't listen to them. But if, if we had the luxury of time, then obviously, the best way to solve this crisis would be to focus entirely on the least intimate of our decisions. Right? So I'm gonna give you a few answers here. There's actually a little bit of tension between some of them and we can explore this out as much as you want. But when I talk about procreation, procreative norms, and population, I get a lot of pushback because this is such an intimate decision. And so there is one sense in which, as an ethicist, this should be the thing that I least want to engage people on concerning norms and even policies. Whereas consumptive behaviors, like we like them. But there's, there's much less of the sense that I'm not allowed to talk about your money that could go to carbon tax, right? Or your ability to fly your private jet or to drive a Hummer. Those aren't really intimate decisions, although people still get angry about thoughts that we might intrude on those decisions. So if we had the luxury of time, perhaps the appropriate thing to do would be to focus only on consumptive behaviors. The argument that I make, and that my co-authors and I make on our policy work is that we're just out of time. What you need to make this argument go is you need to show that the situation is morally urgent, and that there are alternative models that can make a real difference. So the moral urgency is demonstrated by facts about how far behind we are at discharging really minimal, plausible obligations concerning climate change mitigation. You know, so we finally in 2015 came to the table with the Paris Accords and got the nations of the world to say, "Yes, we will pledge this." And then finally in 2016, we have ratified the Paris Accords, and it's being hailed as this momentous achievement. And it is in the sense that it's it's the first real step in this direction. But it's also just woefully short of what we need. So I just saw a new paper today that gave us a more precise number than some of the others I've seen, which is that if every nation follows through on their pledges, which are non-enforceable, and which nations don't have individual plans for achieving gets. If we do that, we're still going to hit three degrees Celsius total warming, which is double what the Paris Accord said should be our aspirational goal of 1.5 degrees. And it's, you know, 50% again, higher than what we have said for a decade or more is the threshold for genuinely dangerous climate change. So the fact is, the most kind of aggressive action that we've considered taking so far, without considering population as a variable, still has us falling woefully short. And folks like you and me, who are living in the wealthiest parts of the world and with the means to react to the first wave of assault from climate change, are not going to be the ones to pay for this. The folks who are going to pay for this are the folks in low lying island nations, in poor countries like Bangladesh or living in delta regions, who are going to be facing massive resource shortages, who won't have anywhere to go that doesn't cause armed conflict, right? The poorest people in the world are going to be hit first and worst. And that's an absolute, you know, massive injustice. So what kind of argument is there for considering this really, acting on this, you know, really intimate set of norms and thinking about population policy was that not doing this threatens to be just morally catastrophic.
Dave Gardner 25:01
Well, this is going to be fun, very interesting. I guess I'm not gonna say fun because darn, you're such a party pooper.
Travis Rieder 25:09
No, it's true. You know, when I talk to people about this, you know, especially if they want to have a chat over wine or something, thinking it's gonna be a social evening, I'm like, "No, no, my friends, this is dark."
Dave Gardner 25:21
Yeah, you need to be like sitting on the floor of someone's apartment late at night listening to Stairway to Heaven and smoking something during that conversation or something. But no, it's really interesting that, you know, these scientists at Oregon State University you mentioned who did the carbon legacy work have kind of revealed for us how absolutely powerful the, you know, our procreative decisions can be in all of this, and so much more powerful than our consumptive behavior decisions. And so you even mentioned that because we messed around and didn't do anything, now it's more urgent. And so now it's time to consider invading the privacy and intimacy of our procreative decisions. And yet, you know, we know that we could change our consumptive behavior tomorrow, instantly. If we, if we really had the will to do that. And people, there's some validity in people's pushback about the population angle in that, well, that's not gonna, you know, you're not going to see a change tomorrow. It's going to take well, at least nine months, and most people it's going, assume it's going to take a hundred years for us to see any benefits of that.
Travis Rieder 26:36
Yeah, so this is a really interesting conversation. I told you, I was gonna get give you multiple answers. And they're actually a little bit in tension. So so here's another answer about, you know, why even talk about population and our procreative decisions. I was working with a climate editor at Bloomberg for a story he wanted to do. And when he came out with the story, I forget the exact title, but it was something like, "You know, have fewer babies or give up your toys." Right? And, and his focus here was exactly the push that I want to make now, which is, it turns out that as much as we'd like to be kind of filled with righteous indignation when someone like me comes along and says, "You know, maybe we should think about making fewer people." It turns out, that we're actually pretty good at reducing our procreative behaviors for self-interested reasons, even when we're not very good at reducing our consumptive behaviors, right? So as having kids kind of becomes more expensive and we decide that we want more good things in life that are non-procreation related. Fertility, fertility rates drop even lower, right? As life and culture and the various goods that we're constantly inventing become more ever-present in society, people will actually say, you know, "I only want one kid or I don't want any kids because, you know, I'd like to travel and have, you know, lots of toys and do other things with my resources." So there's this, there's this interesting feature that kind of despite our moral indignation, there's actually some evidence that we would prefer to have smaller families than give up our toys, right? Now, I'm worried about this line of argument because we have to do both.
Dave Gardner 28:29
Yeah, it's not an either/or.
Travis Rieder 28:33
Exactly. So I don't want to fall on this too heavily. But I really think that people's individual choices in the face of really overwhelming evidence of the risk reveal to us that the consumptive changes are going to have to come from the top down, that we are going to have to have, you know, really massive decarbonization efforts and urban planning changes and things that can take the decision out of the hands of individuals, because boy, we are not good at choosing to consume less. But we are pretty good at choosing to have smaller families for a variety of reasons. So one of the things that I want to do is I want to get this out into the ethos, I want people talking about it. Because this is something that you can do. And you know, if you have basically decided that until the government tax carbon in a way that makes it prohibitive, you're going to drive your Hummer, well, maybe you're not as wedded to having three or four kids and having one would probably make you just as happy and you could actually consider that. So this is putting a new option on the table. And it's not to assuage your guilt for you know, taking your private jet to France for lunch, right? That's still just not a moral option. But this is one more tool that we have for making progress.
Dave Gardner 29:58
Well, that's very well said, but is there any thing you can say to allay some of the fears some people may have or excuses, which is that, you know, demographic momentum, you know, means that, you know, we're going to, we're going to have baked the planet before we get any of the benefits of of behaving morally in the bedroom.
Travis Rieder 30:18
Sure. So this is one of the reasons that we have to do both, right? Focus on population and consumptive behaviors. But it's also not the case that we won't see any benefit. So a guy named Brian O'Neill and his colleagues published a paper in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences in the last few years that looked specifically to this larger aggregate level. So you can kind of think of the Murtaugh and Schlax paper as, you know, what is my responsibility when it comes to the environmental effects of having a child? And you can think about this Brian O'Neill paper, as kind of what are the aggregate effects of reducing global fertility? So this gives us a nice, you know, kind of bookend to looking at the policy level. And they had, they found pretty striking results. So their question was, if we could drop fertility such that we don't hit the UN median projection, but rather hit the UN low projection - so at the time that they were writing this paper, I think the UN median projection had us not leveling off until close to the turn of the century at, you know, almost eleven billion or something like that. And then falling short of ten billion, you know, before the end of the century with the low projection. And this corresponded to a difference of about half a child per woman, right? So if globally, we reduced fertility such that the average change was minus one half child per woman, then that would amount to sixteen to 29% of the global emission savings that we need in order to avoid two degrees Celsius warming by 2100. So it's kind of a mouthful, but the basic idea here is that, you know, depending on lots of factors in there, that's anywhere from, you know, a sixth to almost a third of the work that we need to do to avoid dangerous climate change. Right? So it's true that demographic momentum means that we can't turn things on a dime, we can't get down to, you know, four billion or two billion people, you know, in a few decades, right? It's gonna take a lot longer than that for old people to die off. But it does mean that we can, we can still make progress, right? By lowering fertility. Because every child that we don't have now is going to be using fewer resources - well, is not going to be using resources, right? It means the planet is going to have to provide for one fewer person immediately.
Dave Gardner 32:48
Yeah, if you and your wife decide tonight not to conceive a child, then nine months, that is one less carbon emitter running around the planet.
Travis Rieder 32:56
Exactly. And, you know, we, depending on how pessimistic you are about the climate change problem and our projections, we have baked in already a decent amount of damage to the planet. And we just need to make peace with this and focus on what we can change. But there's still reason to think that we have until about 2030 before we have passed the complete point of no return for, you know, two degrees Celsius plus rise in global temperatures. Now, because of the time that it takes to implement any change, whether population policy or consumptive policy, we may have already baked in that will hit it hit that dangerous level eventually, right? But right now, we're not going to hit it until 2030. What that means is, while it's not a huge amount of time, and it should scare us, it absolutely should, it means that we still have, you know, fifteen yearsish, fourteen yearsish, thirteen yearsish to make a genuine difference to the emissions. Right? So I don't have a child tonight, you don't have a child tonight, four people who are listening don't have a child tonight. In nine months, that's six fewer people emitting into the atmosphere, right? And six fewer people who are, you know, not going to be emitting for the next fourteen years or whatever. So there is time for fertility rate dropping to make a genuine difference. It's not going to do at all, it has to be paired with consumptive reductions, but there is time to make some difference.
Dave Gardner 34:35
All right, I've been distracting you for half an hour here from the from just getting to the morality of this and and so let's go let's circle back to that and talk about, it seems like in this this book, toward a small family ethic, you kind of take us through the journey, your journey, you know, which is a pretty disciplined one, of trying to figure out what are what is the moral equation here? What are our obligations or our or our duties and, and you do a fascinating job of distinguishing between an obligation and a duty, which is pretty interesting. But I'm, I really can't even think of what is the the best line of questions to help you take us through that. So I'm just gonna kind of open it up to you, I bet you probably would love for me to just shut up and let you take it away. So that's what I'm thinking about doing, Travis.
Travis Rieder 35:27
No, no, not at all what I want, but I'm happy to do it. Okay, so the basic idea here is there are multiple grounds for thinking that we might have an obligation not to have any given child. Right? And to say that there are grounds for that obligation is not to say that the obligation is automatically definitive, right? So there are there's always a grounds for me not to lie, right? That's because lying is generally wrong. Philosophers like to say, "Prima facia wrong," you know, on its face is a good thing to not lie. But that doesn't mean it's always wrong to lie, right? If someone that you love has had a really hard day and comes in and says, "You know, I can't believe I had this important meeting today. And I've been so tired, have been able to get to sleep. And I looked like hell. And I'm just sure that my boss, you know, thought I was unprepared." And you're sitting there thinking to yourself, yeah, you do look like hell, I wonder what your boss thought. Here's a really, really bad idea. Saying what you're thinking. So it's a flippant example. But the idea is supposed to be that if my wife, you know, spares me from that pain when I come home and I say, "You know, I looked like hell, and my boss didn't take me seriously." And she looks at me and she says, "Sweetie, you always do a great job. I'm sure you nailed it. And you look great," right? There's nothing wrong with that even though there was grounds for thinking that lying is generally wrong. Okay. So that's a long way of saying, I want to investigate what these grounds are that could potentially give us obligations not to have a child. And I identify at least three of them. So we could say that when I have a child for all the reasons you and I have been talking about so far, I contribute to this massive systematic harm of climate change. And we could expand that, obviously, to include the other resources that you're interested in, say, I contribute to overpopulation. And that is a contribution to food shortages and freshwater shortages and biodiversity loss and climate change, right? And generally, it seems to me and I have a little bit of an argument for this, but most people find this plausible - you have an obligation not to contribute to massive systematic harms. So if you have, you know, garbage in your hand and it turns out it's recyclable, and you walk up to the two cans in your office and one is recycle and one is trash, and you just kind of like - eh - and throw it in the trash rather than the recycling, I think you've done something wrong there. And that's because you contributed to this massive systematic harm of climate change and other environmental degradation when there was virtually no cost to do the other thing, right? So that's one principle. And so when you have a child, not only are you contributing to this massive systematic problem, this massive systematic harm, you're doing it to a really great degree. So for the reasons we talked about, it turns out that when you procreate, you increase your carbon emissions by so much, you increase your carbon footprint by several times, right? So it's like one of the worst things you can do vis-à-vis this principle.
Dave Gardner 38:45
You almost make, you almost give us an excuse to not worry about whether we recycle or whether we you know, get a, ride a bicycle instead of a car because we're just one of billions of people and it's so insignificant. I really hated you for that.
Travis Rieder 38:59
Yeah, so so this was me playing philosopher, right? Because I have colleagues who like to say this, you know, "Travis, you're wasting your time because you're one of 7.4 billion, I'm one to 7.4 billion, nothing you do actually matters to a problem of this scale and complexity." And so I think that that's compelling and it gets a lot of people motivated and it makes us feel like we're off the hook. So that's why I had to feel like, that's why I felt like I had to address it. But I think that objection is just kind of obviously missing the point. And my recycling case is supposed to show us that we actually don't believe this objection. So we actually do believe that even when our individual action doesn't make a real difference to the scalar of, sorry, to the problem given the scale, we still often think that you have an obligation not to make such a contribution. And so my, my kind of philosophical meanderings on this point is that I think that in the era of these global, complex, collective action problems, we need to think about our moral principles in a different way. So philosophers would have no problem recognizing this as a harm or as a wrong, rather, if we weren't so wedded to the idea that there are only a few relevant moral principles. So I say, "Hey look, here's a moral principle that we seem to already accept - don't contribute to massive systematic harms." But if you believe that in some cases, then it's, then it implies that we ought to believe it in other cases, you know, we're kind of held to the standards of consistency. So that was seemed to imply that maybe you shouldn't have children if you have a strict obligation not to contribute and having a child contributes more than anything else, then that looks like grounds for thinking we have an obligation not to have a kid. That's the one that I really kind of hang my hat on. But I do mention others. So I also think that there's a serious consideration of justice. And it's one that's actually pretty difficult to formalize in a philosophical argument, but that people recognize as an issue of fairness. So philosophers often think that issues of justice are tied up with issues of fairness, some people think that justice just is fairness. Others that justice is tied up with fairness in various ways. So here's something that seems unfair. In a world of 7.4 billion people, given the lack of resources, my child can only kind of have the kind of life that she is going to have by virtue of being, you know, a globally wealthy person living in America, if there are some number of other people who are living in absolute destitution. And this is just a requirement of the strict limits. So the ecologist tell us that we're in an ecological overshoot. So every year we're, you know, using 50% more resources than our planet can replenish. And so the population of 7.4 billion people with the distribution of resource users that we actually have is unsustainable. So my adding a new wealthy person who's going to be one of the highest consuming resource user in that world seems unfair because it requires that some other people have to be far below the level of say, having basic goods - the sorts of things that we owe people. So that's in a reason of justice, I think. So if if we think that you're obligated not to commit an injustice, then it looks like having a child may also be committing injustice.
Dave Gardner 42:40
I've just, that just blew me away. I have never read anyone else, you know, who put it that way.
Travis Rieder 42:47
Well, I mean, hopefully, that's not because it's a terrible point.
Dave Gardner 42:51
I don't think so.
Travis Rieder 42:52
Yeah, I mean, so when I give this talk, I have a, I have a picture that I put up for this point where it shows some picture that I found on Creative Commons of, you know, an average American's bedroom, a child's bedroom, and it's this like, pink princess castle, right? It's this kind of fantastically decorated bedroom that costs some insane amount of money, but wouldn't actually look all that strange to a lot of American parents, right? And then a picture of a child from Bangladesh, who was sitting on top of the rubble from one of, from her house after one of their terrible floods in the delta region from a few years ago. And she's covered with mud. And she's sitting on, you know, what could have been her bedroom, and it's just a pile of mud and wood. And so the point is, that if the first room is my daughter's bedroom, right? Her having access to that kind of ridiculous amount of resources in a world that only has so many to go around requires that there be some number of people who look like the girl from Bangladesh, if we're going to have 7.4 billion people on the planet.
Dave Gardner 44:07
That's powerful. Powerful.
Travis Rieder 44:09
Yeah. So so those are the two kind of altruistic sorts of reasons. And then there's one that is more selfish in a broad sense. So not for me, but for the people I love. Right? So first two reasons are don't have a child because it makes the world worse. So this reason is don't have a child because it might not be good for the child. Right? And this is, this is maybe one of the parts that made your head explode when you were wondering if you ever took a philosophy class, right? There are deep philosophical problems here, because it's really unclear what to say about the situation of a child who either exists in the world with dwindling resources or never exists at all. And so some philosophers want to say, "Hey, look, as long as their life is worth living, by creating them, you've done them a favor, right? They get existence when they otherwise wouldn't have had it." I find that totally uncompelling. I think that we really should only be creating people if we think that we can give them the kind of life that that people deserve. And when I'm looking into the future over the next several decades to maybe a century, and I'm looking at our political action or inaction, I'm really unsure whether the people born over the next several decades are going to have the kind of life that we think people ought to have. I mean, the richest people are going to be fine, they always are. But there are going to be a whole lot of people who are dealing with massive refugee crisis - crises, political instability as a result of wars over resource shortages, land disappearing to rising sea levels, massive food shortages, freshwater shortages. I mean, there is a version of our world in thirty, fifty, to a hundred years that's not totally scary. But it would require unprecedented action. And then there's a version of our future that's really pretty terrifying. And that's the one that we're we're headed at full steam with our current level of action. And, you know, I'm not sure I'd want to introduce a person to that world. So that's the the less altruistic, more kind of selfish reason, and selfish in the sense that when you create a child, you're creating the person that you will predictably love most in the world and want to protect from harm. But with the current state of things, you might be introducing them into the world, into a world that you don't want them to have to live in.
Dave Gardner 46:48
Now, there's a slightly less complex version of that that I don't think you really got into in the book. I found myself thinking about this. And that would be that, let's say you, you have one child already and you're deciding whether to make another one. It seems to me that then the question is, wow, if I make another one, I'm actually doing an injustice to my existing child.
Travis Rieder 47:09
Oh, interesting. I've never thought about it that way. Yeah. But that's exactly right. So for the same reason that, you know, we should be moved when we think about the poorest people in the world who won't have access to the resources because our children do, we could think about our currently existing children or our nephews and nieces or our neighbors. And think that, you know, my adding a wealthy resource user to the planet is going to, in some small way, decrease the availability of resources for them.
Dave Gardner 47:44
Yeah. So the thing standing in the way of, of everyone just giving this one big bear hug and saying, "Of course," is, would you say the one thing standing in the way a little, the big hurdle, is this notion of reproductive freedom?
Travis Rieder 48:02
Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's totally fair. It's reproductive freedom in a totally positive natural sense that, you know, humans would have come up with this, because reproduction is intimate and deserves to be protected. But then it's also reproductive freedom in the particular history and context of our world, in which violations of reproductive freedom in the past have been terrible and often racist and sexist. And, you know, coercive and violations of basic human rights. So we live in a world in which, you know, there have been mass sterilizations and forced abortions in various countries throughout time where China adopted the family planning policy that became called the one-child policy and its enforcement mechanisms were hugely flawed and it led to massive human rights violations. Yeah, so we live in that world. And so even more so than just, hey we have reproductive rights, and that's a check on your ability to have this conversation, we are having a conversation of, "Hey, we have reproductive rights, and as a result of the, you know, flawed human beings that we are, we live in a world where every conversation about limiting these rights has led to, you know, massive harms and violations of justice." Now I will say that that's the version that's often said to me, that every version, or every time this conversation comes up, it leads to massive injustices and one of the first responses is that that's not true.
Dave Gardner 49:44
Yeah.
Travis Rieder 49:45
That there are cases in our past where we have we have had important conversations about population limits that haven't led to this. But the sentiment is understandable. Right? The sentiment is tied to the high visibility of really terrible things that have happened.
Dave Gardner 50:05
Yeah, but I think you're, you know, it's important to point out that there, you know, there are examples of very humane, voluntary, and very successful programs to, on a public policy level really to address this.
Travis Rieder 50:19
Yeah, absolutely.
Dave Gardner 50:20
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you've kind of start with the assumption, or you end up with the assumption that yeah, we do have this, this right. I think you even quote The United Nations as, you know, where they declared that parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children. That's seems to be unquestioned in your mind.
Travis Rieder 50:42
Yeah. You're asking a philosopher whether something's unquestioned, so. We're pretty good at questioning basic stuff.
Dave Gardner 50:52
Everything.
Travis Rieder 50:53
Yeah. For me, what I will say is the most important thing is that it seems fair to assume reproductive rights and so I grant it to my opponents. And then the question becomes are those rights unlimited? Because if you try to use reproductive rights to block any conversation about procreative norms or reproductive policies, then you have to be saying something much stronger than we have reproductive rights. You have to be saying something like we have unlimited reproductive rights such that you are never allowed to call into question whether or not someone has the right to have another child or to have eleven children or, you know, whether entire cultures have the right to intentionally propagate themselves as quickly as possible so that they aren't outmatched on the battlefield, for instance, right? And I think it's kind of clearly false that there's no such thing as unlimited procreative rights. All rights are limited by considerations of harm to other people and well, in this case, say resource shortages, right? So reproductive rights don't entail unlimited reproductive rights.
Dave Gardner 52:06
So that opens us up to go somewhere, which I think we'll have to do in the next Overpopulation Podcast, which is to talk about what kind of public policy prescriptions there might be. You've done some interesting work on that, you know, I think it deserves its own conversation. I don't want to try to cram that into the last minute or five minutes even or ten minutes even of this podcast. So I'm hoping you might agree to have another one of these conversations where we talk about that end of things.
Travis Rieder 52:35
Yeah, I'm absolutely happy to and I will probably be more coherent if I, you know, take a nap between now and then, so.
Dave Gardner 52:41
Yeah, that's not a bad idea. But I guess the easier ground is to just kind of, you know, talk about the morality of your procreative decisions.
Travis Rieder 52:52
Yeah, so this might be a good place to end for now to set up the policy conversation. So I said that, you know, there are grounds, multiple grounds, for an obligation not to have children. And if you say, "Well, look, but we have really strong procreative liberties or reproductive rights," that actually calls into question the grounds of those obligations. So it's taken largely to be a philosophical truism that if I have a right to do something, I don't have an obligation not to do that thing. Right? So if I have a right to have a child, I don't have an obligation not to have a child. Right? So rights and duties are supposed to correlate in this important way. So if we really have strong reproductive rights, here's one thing that I think is just kind of immediately true. No one has an obligation to remain childless. Right? So having a first child is something that probably is permissible immediately once we established that there are reproductive rights. Now, because we just said that reproductive rights aren't necessarily unlimited, we then have a new question about whether it's permissible to have more children once you've had this kind of incredible, life changing experience of creating new human life. And I actually think that it's much harder to justify having the second child than the first child. And it gets harder with each one, in fact, but I think that jump from one to two is particularly hard. Because before you had a child, you were childless, right? You weren't parents. And then after you have a child, the question of having another one is about being a parent of a certain sized family. And that's a much smaller difference, right? So when we say you have good reasons not to do something, that demands a response, it demands a justification. And when you're childless and I say, it would be kind of rude to say this, but I was like, "Why do you want a kid," right? And you say, "Look, it will change my life, it will alter the kind of thing I am, I will get to be a parent, I'll engage in this process of, you know, creating a new human. And this is massively meaningful and valuable." That's pretty tough to argue with. But when you've done it once, you've gotten all of those goods. And now your response is, "I want to do it again." And I think that kind of provides less of a justification basically. So the reason the title of my book is kind of vague, I say, toward a small family ethic, I don't say one child or never more than two or something like this, right? Is because I'm not sure that there's a super obvious answer here. But what I want to end up with is that the decision to have a child is, you know, a contribution to massive systematic harms, it's contributes to injustices and it might expose your child to a future that's not particularly nice to live in. And that requires justification. And so the burden is on those of us who want to make a new person to come up with those justifications.
Dave Gardner 56:13
Well, I think you take a very generous approach. And I'm going to just kind of highlight that because there might be that temptation on some people's part to think that you are heartless or a child hater, or something like that. And we know you're not. In fact, you have a child.
Travis Rieder 56:28
Indeed, I do. Yeah. So this is the funny thing. When I am, you know, slammed on social media or people write up nasty op-eds about me and usually, you know, right-wing nut job baby hater or something like this, or sorry, left-wing. Left-wing-nut-job-baby-hater. And yeah, that's hilarious because everyone who knows me knows that not only do I have a daughter who I adore, but I'm just kind of baby crazy in general, you know. I was super excited to be a dad. And whenever my colleagues or my friends bring their new baby over into work, I'm the first one to jump up and, you know, speak gibberish to it and pick it up and tickle it. And so, yeah, I'm, I'm pretty big fan of the small humans. But, you know, I'm also a big fan of all sorts of emitting activities. And I don't think that I have a free pass to do those in a world with finite resources. Right? So the the issue here is not whether we love something, whether we think it's valuable, whether we think it's interesting and good. It's whether we think it's justifiable in a world of finite resources.
Dave Gardner 56:31
Well, I don't think I'd do as good a job as you but I always try to, you know, portray my interest in sustainable population advocacy as really coming from the fact that I do love children. I want them to, I want them to have a wonderful world, not a crummy world to live in.
Travis Rieder 57:52
Yeah, that's exactly right. And one thing, one thing that I've said in print that I think is really important is I think that it is more important to make people happy than to make happy people. And so I do love children, love children even more than I love adults. And I'm pretty big fan of some adults. And there are a bunch of children and adults in the world who are starving, who have needs, who lack access to fresh water, who lack access to medication for easily preventable diseases. And we have resources that we could direct to them to make these people happy. These people who already exist, right? We can also make happy people. And that takes a lot of resources, right? You know, I'm pretty well off. I live in America in the twenty-first century, I have a good job. Presumably, if I had another kid or another one or another one after that, those kids would all be happy. But I think that while I do have an obligation to make existing people happy, I don't have anything like an obligation to make happy people. And that's really important to keep in mind.
Dave Gardner 59:02
Great distinction. So we're running a little long, longer than we frequently do. But with your permission, I want to just run a couple more minutes. It's not often we have a really smart scientist with a really great heart right, right out there on his sleeve. So I want to take advantage of this opportunity. We you alluded a little bit to some of the, you know, some of the negative responses because you got good media coverage because you presented this at the right time in the right way, I think. Let's not even bore people with the, you know, the obvious ugly pushback that you might have gotten from a few people, but I'm betting that you also got some really positive feedback.
Travis Rieder 59:42
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the first really high profile piece that I was involved in was a piece for NPR with Jennifer Ludden that aired on All Things Considered.
Dave Gardner 59:55
Back in August, yeah.
Travis Rieder 59:56
Yeah, and you know, shout out to the NPR audience that of course, I got some of those boring, nasty emails, but ten to one, I got really thoughtful, hopeful, reflective, sometimes grateful emails. And they took a lot of forms. I kind of started categorizing them in my mind. But one of my favorites was the middle-aged hippie, is was what I was calling them. Right? So the folks who wrote and said, "I was part of this movement when it was a movement in the sixties and seventies, you know, and it went away. And that was a shame. And I've, I've been sad about that ever since because the situation hasn't gotten better, it's gotten worse. And yet, somehow, no one's allowed to talk about this. So thank you for having the courage to talk about it." And it was something like that email I must have gotten dozens of, and I thought that was really cool because there is this very striking history of the population conversation where it had a big kind of explosion with Ehrlich's Population Bomb, and then, you know, died a fairly quick death due to various reasons and over the eighties and nineties. And, yeah, when when I and when I and my co-authors were doing my work, we had to go back a couple of decades for most of our footnotes. So I thought that one was particularly interesting. The other side that I thought was particularly interesting was young people. So folks who said, you know, "I'm in college, I first came across something like this from any ecology professor or something. And as a young person, you know, who might otherwise have kind of unreflectively been making assumptions about my family in the future, I really appreciate the chance to deliberate, to have some data and some arguments to sit and think seriously about this really important decision." So all of those were really gratifying.
Dave Gardner 1:02:11
That is great to hear. And, you know, I want to mention that if everyone took you really seriously and we could have this worldwide morality explosion around around this decision that, you know, and we ended up with a global average fertility of, of one for a while, that it's amazing world population would be declining gracefully and humanely before the end of this century. You know, we'd be well back on our way down toward what the scientists like Paul and Anne Ehrlich have estimated would be a sustainable population of under three billion people. We could get there, we could get there if we got serious about it. So I think we've done a good job of not really spilling all the beans about all of what you, of the process that you take us through in that great book Toward a Small Family, Ethic How Overpopulation and Climate Change Are Affecting the Morality of Procreation. So our listeners still have a good reason to want to, to read that book. Can you give us any links for if people want to continue to follow your work? Do you have some recommendations for how they can stay plugged in?
Travis Rieder 1:03:21
Oh, that's a good question. I imagine that the easiest ways are for anyone who is a member@academia.edu. Since I am a faculty member, my large publications in my some of my higher profile media appearances go up on academia.edu. I'm also, as you said at the beginning, faculty at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins, and we have a blog there that I sometimes write for or cross publish things with. And you know, in general, in general, I'm really easy to find online, which when I'm getting the less hopeful, graceful, thankful emails, I wish I was a little bit harder to find online. But yeah, happy, I try to respond to every email I get. I'm more and less successful, depending on the time of year, but I'm always happy to talk with folks.
Dave Gardner 1:04:12
Well, hopefully, Travis Rieder, you'll continue to get some good positive press from places like NPR and we'll certainly have you back and, and report as we can on on any interesting revelations that you that you alert us to. So thanks for joining us today.
Travis Rieder 1:04:29
Absolutely. Thanks for the invitation. David, this was fun.
Dave Gardner 1:04:31
This was a great conversation.
