I have a lot of respect for you, and I usually read your posts more carefully than most - but this is without doubt the stupidest thing you’ve ever posted.
Wow. I’ve got well over 17,000 posts. And that’s the stupidest? Man, it must be filled with a world of stupid.
So much so that actually erxplaining the stupid should be no trick at all, right?
Try not to take the fundie route here – you know, the one where you can’t even get the fundie Christian to question the underlying assumption that the Bible is unerring truth?
Here, of course, I am suggesting you are holding on to certain underlying assumptions that cannot so much as be questioned. But please – explain the stupidity. Perhaps the mistake is mine.
No, no – that’s a good point. You didn’t say every should use the same; I read that into your statement. My bad.
But l do take issue with this “people having the share they deserve.” How does one calculate the share they deserve?
Your general point is valid. Attempting to draw some sort of comparison between “reducing resource consumption to match that of other countries” and “reducing justice to match that of other countries” is not.
You know it isn’t, and you know why, but since you asked, the supply of resources is finite. The supply of justice isn’t.
Finite, yes. The number of kisses I can give my wife in our lifetime is also finite, but I don’t try to ration them, nor should I.
So perhaps “finite” is not the right category.
I think a more accurate analogy would be that everyone in the world wants to kiss your wife, and every minute you take up kissing her is a minute less for everyone else.
The TFR of the entire world is 2.58
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html
About 40% of the nations in the world are below replacement rate.
That includes many of the most populus nations on the planet, such as China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, EU, Brazil, and Turkey.
The top 10 highest fertility rate nations, have a death rate of more than 10 per 1000 except for Yemen.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2066rank.html
The statistics don’t seem to support the notion that we are rapidly over-populating the Earth.
The United States is precisely at replacement rate at 2.1.
Well, I don’t pretend that it’s easy. But if you have a world of 6 billion people, using resources more rapidly than the world can sustain (e.g., releasing greenhouse gases rapidly enough to cause AGW), and a nation of merely 300 million is making an overwhelming contribution to this environmental degradation, then the people in that nation are taking more than their fair share of the common resources.
I understand, I think, the source of your dismay. A person with libertarian or conservative leanings isn’t going to like the phrase “someone’s fair share”, as for a libertarian one’s fair share is not distinct from the share one can acquire through fair market transactions. “Fair share” is associated more with quasi-egalitarian theories of justice (like Rawls). But even a libertarian can agree that resources and burdens ought to be redistributed to some extent, and that we have a moral obligation to do so; they just deny that the government has the right to mandate this redistribution. I am saying that ignoring the role of government, we have an obligation to take a smaller piece of the environmental pie, because the amount we are taking is harming the common environment which is shared by all.
Only two statistics you mentioned in this are relevant at all:
Global TFR: 2.58
Replacement rate: 2.1
One of these is bigger than the other.
All we can hope is that demographers are correct that birth rates inevitably decline when a country goes through industrialization. And that all countries go through industrialization soon. Oops, except industrialization is terribly polluting! So I guess we’re hosed either way.
Birth rates do decline, but not for quite a while after industrialization - Britain and Japan were the first two nations to experience a sustained period during which the mean age of the population declined, and that didn’t happen until the late 70s or early 80s, depending on who you ask.
What we don’t know is what the “fifth stage” of a population model will look like, because we haven’t gotten there yet.
It’s funny how you say only two of the statistics are relevant, and then in your closing paragraph validate the statistics that you disregarded. 
I guess you can’t imagine a post-industrial society.
But the reality is that birthrates all over the world are declining, not just in the first world. There are many countries that are not first world nations there that have lower than replacement rate birthrates.
Right, but as a whole the world is still above the replacement rate - and the larger the total population gets, the quicker it grows.
I appreciate all of the arguments regarding resource allocation, but I don’t see the Duggars as being some kind of flashpoint for that. Every one of us uses way, way more than we need…the fact that we are all typing away on our electricity-guzzling computers proves that. There are plenty of rich people living in houses that probably consume far more natural resources than the Duggars do, even with their 200 loads of laundry. I have less begrudging of a natural resource used to feed, house, and clothe one more child than used to heat & cool enormous houses (way bigger than the Duggars’ house) that only have 1 or 2 people living in them. How is having lots of kids any more selfish resource-wise than that? And they certainly aren’t going to singlehandedly drive the birth rate up. They do eat more food, but from what I understand, the biggest problem with hunger worldwide is not with food production or availability, it’s with distribution. The Duggers could have had no kids at all and it wouldn’t change that.
I think their lifestyle seems a little strange, but people do all kinds of things I don’t really understand and wouldn’t want to do…doesn’t bother me as long as it isn’t hurting anyone else, and this doesn’t seem to be doing that.
I just wanted to point out the incongruity of stating, in the same post, both that we are not overpopulating the earth *and * that the world-wide fertility rate is well above the replacement rate. Like I said, demographic theory points to a drop in fertility as nations industrialize. But the drop isn’t overnight; and industrialization is a dirty process. And it creates more wealthy consumers who want to consume more resources. So I can imagine a post-industrial society, but hell if I can imagine how the Earth survives *getting * to a post-industrial society.
No actually I pointed out that the TFR is barely above replacement rate at 2.58 children per woman, and that the bulk of the nations where they are having a high birthrate they also have a high death rate. All of that amounts to a population growth that is moderate at best. Also, that not only Industrialized nations are seeing a decline in TFR.
You found no incongruity in my post whatsoever.
But I criticized people who live in unecessarily large houses above. They are resource-wasters. I draw no distinction between a couple who lives in a McMansion and a couple who has too many kids. Both are overburdening the earth.
Of course, no one person’s overuse of resources hurts anyone. But that type of thinking leads each person to think that it is okay for him or her to overuse resources. Then we’re all screwed, because if lots of people overuse resources, then it does hurt people. It’s a well-known phenomenon called the tragedy of the commons. The fact that my individual overuse of public resources like clean air and fresh water doesn’t hurt anyone is not a justification for me to overuse public resources.
A replacement rate of 2.1 already takes the median death rate into account. That’s why it’s 2.1, and not… 2.
It’s still all relative, though. They are burdening the earth more than you, but you are probably burdening the earth more than most other people who live on it, based on your status as an American. I have two kids, neither of which I need for any reason other than emotional satisfaction (don’t need them to work on the farm or anything like that). My point is that we are all selfish and for the most part we live way above a subsistence level. Where does it cross the line into unacceptability?
Right, but see we already live in a society where that mindset has led to an unprecedented level of overuse of resources. As I said, the fact that we all obviously think it’s acceptable to use electricity to run our computers to talk to each other for no other reason for our own entertainment illustrates that. As far as I can see, they have no more need to justify themselves as you or I have to justify ourselves.
I don’t see how these are anything other than fallacious slippery-slope arguments. “If allegedly permissible acts and allegedly bad acts exist on a continuum, and you cannot draw a precise line on the continuum where it goes from permissible to bad, then actions at both ends of the spectrum must have the same moral status.”