The scenario: Scientists in a country seriously threatened by overpopulation invent an additive that, when added to a water supply, reduces the fertility of the consuming population by a controlled percentage.
This additive has no lasting or side effects and the government has no agenda (ie wiping out specific groups) other than population reduction.
In an effort to avert a perceived catastrophe associated with overpopulation, would it be unethical of the government to use the additive to control numbers or would it be unethical NOT to use the additive?
Also should the government be open and honest about what it is doing/contemplating or should it be a covert operation?
What do we think?
for it to be a covert operation you would need the medical industry in on it, otherwise they would find out when runnign tests on ‘infertile’ couples trying to conceive.
Majorly unethical in my view.
Very unethical.
If there is a serious problem with overpopulation, the government should address it in a public forum and take action from there. The government should not, under any circumstances, conduct a covert operation of population reduction.
Why not?
If governments are justified in taking a country to war, in which many people will inevitably be killed, to, say, secure a water supply - a scenario that is quite likely at some point - and avert a national catastrophe, why would the seemingly less harmful act of reducing a population’s fertility (remember, with no side effects) to avert another catastrophe be any less acceptable?
It’s not right to mess with people’s bodies without their knowledge. Besides, what if someone had a reaction to the drugs? Although I’d still feel the same way even if it were impossible that any bad reactions would happen. If there is a serious population problem, the government should increase public awareness and push the use of birth control, possibly subsidizing the birth control.
And if that didn’t work and the impending catastrophe was drawing ever closer?
To do it covertly would be grossly unethical. Government runs things on the citizens’ behalf, and should be subject to their control.
If it’s done openly, it’s better - especially if some political parties/candiates announce their intent to do this before an election, others announce that they won’t support it, and the pro-birth-control-in-the-water-people win the election. It’s still somewhat problematic, as you could avoid it by only eating and drinking imported stuff. If imported food is more expensive than home grown, the population control would affect poor people more than rich people, which would IMO make it unethical. And if everybody can afford imported food, the measure is pointless.
Forced population control can be ethical if it’s done fairly, and - of course - provided it’s subject to democratic control. One example (taken from the planet Beta Colony in Bujold’s science fiction novels): All citizens get a contraceptive implant before reaching puberty. If you want to have a child, you have to apply for a child permit. If the child permits were distributed according to fair and open criteria, I think such a measure would be ethical.
Not only is it grossly unethical, it’s not feasible.
Some people would still have to have children, so that the whole of society didn’t fall apart in 20 years, when there were no young people to take over the jobs. For that reason alone doping the water supply wouldn’t work. Look at Italy and Singapore, their governments are trying to get people to have more children to keep the economy viable.
Also, some people may have reasons why they should have a child RIGHT NOW, rather than delaying. For example, a women with endometriosis might want to have baby, before she has a hysterectomy.
By all means have tax incentives or financial rewards for small families, but don’t take the choice completely out of people’s hands, or decide who is “worthy” to be a parent.
The OP stipulates that the additive would have a broad effect across the whole population. If, for example, enough was added to reduce fertility rates by 30pc, all women would still be able to get pregnant but just have a 30pc less chance of conceiving each time they had intercourse. If you think about it, a 30pc drop in fertility would equate to a much less drop in birth rates as those who did not fall pregnant when they otherwise would have done, would get to try an X number of times more.
Fertility rates range widely in the natural world. This would merely be a way of depressing them slightly in the interests of the community as a whole – ie to avert a catastrophe.
How about if they added something that had to be neutralized, with the antidote available on request. The population only drops by the number of ‘accidents’ and the number of people who don’t bother asking their doctors for other reasons.
I think you ought to read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.
The government should tell the population; there would be many who would be happy to go along with it.
Just to put this all in perspective – in the real world (as opposed to the hypothetical worlds of the OP) the industrialized nations are worried right now about a “birth dearth” and a “graying population.” Even the U.S. faces this problem, to a lesser degree than the others.
Why does the OP postulate that people are reproducing like crazy, and it will take force to get them to stop?
I think it has been very well demonstrated that such is not the case. In every first world country in existance, natural population growth is at or below replacement levels. Even in the United States we would be within a whisker of zero population growth if we stopped allowing immigration. So rather than postulating a coercive magic bullet, how about allowing people all over the world to control their own fertility, like we can in the first world?
If there were truly no alternative between demographic disaster and coercive birth control measures, then perhaps we might have a debate about what to do. But of course no such false dilemna actually exists. Population control can be be achieved as a side-effect of doing things that are good in and of themselves. That is: gender equality, economic development, and improvements in human rights.
What Lemur866 said.
I would add that - given current world-wide demographic trends - even in many of the underdeveloped or non-insudtrialized world, the prospect of a graying population on the horizon will become problem as well. While the developed or industrialized world have (for the most part) the resources to deal with an incresingly aging population, poorer countries do not. They face the prospect of graying without the resources to deal with it.
Check out this article: The World Turns Gray
Also Lemur866 makes a very good point. I think a crucial element in dealing with population growth is focusing on women’s issues. Giving women a greater say and providing them more opportunities (economic, social, political, etc.) will IMHO go a long way in addressing population concerns.
Apologies, I seem to have missed the rule banning theoretical debates in GD.
Yes, I agree we can have debates about hypotheticals. But the hypothetical you posed doesn’t have much relevance in the real world. There is no need for any liberal democratic government to undertake such a project, let alone in secret.
If the government in your hypothetical were a typical third-world dictatorship/oligarchy, and the country were an impoverished shithole, then it might make sense to debate what the government should or should not do. But of course, the best answer in that case is STILL the one I gave…the government should liberalize, encourage gender equality and human rights, establish the rule of law, and develop economically. That is what would fix their population problem. Even if the bioltechnology to produce the drug you imagine were available, it wouldn’t be easy to implement the system in a third world country…many people don’t drink from public water systems but from wells, the drugs would undoubtably be expenisive, especially since most of the water is going down the drain for cleaning, agriculture, and industry, we can’t be sure that massively dumping the hormones into the water supply wouldn’t have an effect on the environment, how does the government keep it secret, etc etc.
Of course, we know that governments HAVE taken coercive steps to reduce population growth, look at China. They didn’t need any high-tech hormonal solutions, just good old-fashioned totalitarian government.
You postulate a problem and propose a theoritical solution and ask us to debate the ethics of the solution. But the proposed solution isn’t needed, and the problem doesn’t exist. I understand why you included the disclaimers that the drug was harmless with no side effects, and that the government has so honest that it wouldn’t use the drug to target specific groups, since you wanted a pure discussion of the ethics of coercive population control.
But of course such a situation is impossible in real life. There are always side effects, the people in charge of such programs always have their own agendas. I have no problem discussing hypotheticals, but the hypotheticals have to have some connection to a real-world problem, or they aren’t very interesting.
But if you want a straight answer to your question, the answer is of course it would be unethical to dose the population in secret, and it would also be unethical to dose the population openly. If the government really is a liberal democracy, then the correct course of action would be to ask people to voluntarily take the drug, make it available over the counter, provide other options–condoms, implants, birth control pills, and surgical sterilization–for free, and perhaps even ban fertility treatment. Of course the drug itself doesn’t sound very useful in that context. Generally people either want to create a child, or they don’t want to create a child. Either way they want to control their fertility. So if people are taking a drug to control fertility, what they usually want is either 0 or 1, not 0.7. Since we already have treatments that do that or at least come close, there is no medical or social need for your postulated drug, given the liberal democracy you postulated in your first post.
Lemur, why does your “real world” exclude the third world? Your arguments seem a little Western-centric.
I appreciate you have offered your opinion for the situation as applied to a third-world scenario but you are very dismissive of my presenting this subject for debate on the grounds it is too far-fetched to be “interesting”.
Please provide a cite that backs up your assertion that population growth is not a problem **anywhere ** in the world.
It is my opinion that it is unethical for a government to operate without the consent of the governed.
Further, although the substance might not have any physical side effects in you hypothetical situation, I can not yet imagine a hypothetical situation in which there is a way to predict with certainty the psychological side effects of failure to impregnate or failure to conceive.
If the program would not result in a drop in the birth rate, then the government would have no reason at all for trying the program. But an increase in the frequency of sexual intimacy does not necessarily result in increased rates of conception. Sperm count build up has to be considered.