You should let the human race die out

Many people are worried over population decline. Do we have an obligation to continue the human race?

Much of the world is below “population replacement” level of TFR (total fertility rate)

Years ago, on a BBCode forum (web 2.0 tech), I was arguing with an older conservative about marriage and birth rates. He had taken the position that lower marriage and birth rates were a sign of the “moral decay” of American society, and that we had an “obligation” to perpetuate the species. While I have long since forgotten that dude’s forum handle, I still think about his viewpoint from time to time, even after about 15 years.

I have also since learned a ton about philosophy, ethics, culture, and history.

What do you mean by “obligation” or “duty”?

In deontological ethics, you might say that all behaviors are justified if they are motived by duties or obligations. A society might create a set of virtues that it abides by and elevates. I saw this first hand in my girlfriend’s family at the time. She came from a very religious family, and her younger sister was elevated in the eyes of their community once she produced a child. Suddenly, she was treated like a ‘real woman’ and a ‘real adult’ and my girlfriend, focusing on her education, was marginalized by both her family and her church. (Ironically enough, you see this sort of religious value coding in fictional works such as the Twilight Saga, where Bella is not a “real woman”—beautiful and immortal—until she is both married and produces offspring).

My position way back when that old conservative fuddy duddy declared that Millennial failure to produce ample progeny was a sign of moral decline, as it is today, is that it is impossible to make such universal declarations. I later learned of David Hume’s is-ought problem.

David Hume’s is-ought problem is the philosophical challenge of deriving a normative statement (what ought to be) from a descriptive statement (what is).

What is empirically true: if people don’t make babies, population declines (it is not immediately entailed that humanity goes extinct, as population decline trends are not permanent and would likely reverse eventually.)

What you ought to do about it: Iff (if, and only if) you assign a negative moral value to “population decline” then you might say that it is virtuous to make babies. Many religious folks shorten it to “Because God said go forth and multiply” in which case the referent is an axiomatic divine mandate.

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But this forces us to evaluate several other values—is population decline actually a moral bad? What if it’s actually a moral good? After all, humans are destructive to the environment (and each other), and if you value peace, harmony, and flourishing of all life, then perhaps the morally optimal number of humans is somewhat less than 8 billion? This entails many other concerns, though—who gets to judge a human as “worthy of continued existence” or not? By what means would you enact a population cap? Who gets to decide the “optimal” number of humans in the first place? And so on, and so forth, ad nauseum.

This blog post’s title is a normative statement—the strongest kind, a strong positive affirmation of what you ‘ought’ to do. Let me unpack why.

First, no one person is even capable of letting the human race die out. Even on the face of it, the title is preposterous beyond measure. But the underlying point is this; you have no singular, heroic duty to save the human race by procreating. Not that you even could if you wanted to. Elon Musk has this delusional mission and has produced something around 13 children. Thirteen whole, abandoned, fatherless (mostly) beings, some of whom want nothing to do with them. If the wealthiest man on the planet cannot afford to be a good father to a baker’s dozen progeny, what the hell makes anyone else think they can do better? (Don’t answer that rhetorical question, as it would require unpacking how dysfunctional of a human Elon is).

Second, there is a larger ethical concern going on—humans have a propensity to produce offspring. Call it “biological imperative” or “sex drive” or whatever you like. People make babies on accident when times are good. When we feel safety and abundance, we tend to form families which then produce offspring. Now, you might say “Dave, the graph you shared shows that Africa is the most fecund continent by a mile, and yet it is also the least financially secure.” Security comes in many forms. Family bonds, community, tribal identity. The developed world has been atomized and scattered by several decades of Neoliberal policies, favoring “workforce flexibility” and “social mobility.” JFK’s Presidential Report on the Economic Status of Women suggested that American workforces were being unnecessarily deprived of female participation, and recommended that we reform banking, employment, and education laws to equalize their footing—all in the name of the economy. Some people may blame “feminism” for the downward trend. The Pill gave women more control over their bodies, no-fault divorce, the right to open bank accounts in their own name, and take out mortgages. This leads many right-wing nutjobs to go so far as to suggest the “solution” to this “problem” is to repeal the 19th amendment (rescind women’s right to vote). But there’s another layer to this.

When you treat humans like chattel (I mean this in the literal sense—productive animals whose primary reason to exist is to produce economic output) they tend to feel less safe. Less safety means less security, and ultimately, less horny. And that is exactly the project that the entire developed world has been embarking on for the last few decades—to reframe your entire raison d’être is to boost GDP. Jordan Peterson complains about the same thing, although more obliquely, chiding the death of Christian tradition and belief in God as a lost moral referent. And thou shalt render the fruits of thy labor and lay them upon the altar of the LORD THY GOD, the Economy. In many respects, economics and GDP serves many of the same purposes that religious scriptures did for centuries; a coordinating narrative that serves as the bedrock of social justice, the purpose of a civilization, and an ordinal method of ranking piety. Your credit score is how holy your life has become. This is terminal Calvinism baby! White collar crimes getting lighter sentences than poor-people-crimes is just the modern form of indulgences.

So, therefore, I arrive somewhat belatedly at my point: first, unless you appeal to divine mandate to procreate, you really have no ground to stand on to say “yeah but what about the human race!” Even if you worship in the Church of Neoliberalism, the best argument you can make is “market incentives so that the tax base doesn’t dry up” but where is the incentive to procreate when the State hates your existence and wants to suck you dry like a bovine milk supplier? If the cows and pigs could strike, they probably would. This leads to my final point: economic withdrawal. One of the primary levers of power that we the People have is the labor strike. Failing that (which the State has systematically undermined for decades) one of our only remaining levers of influence is economic withdrawal. We cannot “seize the means of production” because the police state is too powerful, and the capitalist elites have consolidated too much power.

But we can cripple the nation in other ways.

And we are doing so through entirely naturalistic protest. The reason that a labor strike is so effective is because it is a credible threat to productivity. What greater threat do we have to the productivity than to ensure there are no laborers, voters, or consumers in the future? Sure, by all means Mr. Billionaire, keep using your money and influence to shut down labor unions, support gerrymandering, and scooping up federal funds for your revolving door relationships. Good luck selling your products to anyone in a couple decades.

Short term thinking is causing an epochal shift away from fertility, and my reading of the situation is that it has less to do with women’s empowerment, and more to do with the underlying motivation behind women’s empowering; worship of the Almighty Dollar above all else. The question is no longer “Childless By Choice” so that we can spend more time having fun and “finding ourselves”—the goal is now a form of civil protest in the form of absolute economic withdrawal. This goes beyond labor strikes and boycotts. This is the ultimate strike and boycott, all rolled up into one.

Now, you may be inclined to shoot the messenger, I am after all, vindicating, validating, and encouraging this form of economic withdrawal. But more importantly, and accurately, I am simply making the observation of what-is. My ethical imperative, as hyperbolic as it is, is utterly powerless in the fact of real life incentive structures. I did not cause the birth rate to decline globally, I’m merely characterizing this trend and offering a descriptive explanation as to why. More importantly, I am not going to sit here an nihilistically cheer for the end of humanity. My aim is to awaken voters, the state, and capitalists to say “enough is enough, it is time for us to priority real life humans above corporate interests.”

We’ve tried the Neoliberal experiment long enough. We’ve tried unbridled capitalism for long enough. The net effect is clear: sky high GDP, but collapsed birthrates. As the kids say these days: Which way, Western man? We can doubled down and keep praying and sacrificing to the Lord thy God: GDP. Or we can decide to be humans again.