The (Newest) Population Problem: Part II
“Imagine a life that, from birth till death, consists only of agony and anguish,” writes Oxford philosopher William MacAskill; “imagine, for example, someone who continually felt like they were being burned alive. And imagine that you know you could have a child who would live such a life.”
Would you have that child?
In the preceding essay, I claimed that today’s Longtermists and Climate Malthusians belong to the same genealogy of modern thought. Now, I turn to the issue of suffering, to identify how MacAskill applies a cognate moral calculus to the value of human life, ultimately reducing it to the sum of pleasure versus pain. I argue against this oversimplification of human life and explore the alternative account of suffering and social responsibility presented in Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian film Children of Men (2006).
In Chapter 8 of What We Owe the Future, MacAskill asks and answers his own question. For him, it is “entirely obvious” that having a child whose life was filled with suffering “would be a bad thing to do.” The question is posed in the context of a chapter in which the central claim is that “having one extra person in the world is good in and of itself, if that person is sufficiently happy.” While in the first part of the statement MacAskill attempts to distance himself from the instrumental account of the self that undergirds his chapter on climate and stagnation, here I am interested in the final “if” clause of the sentence, which suggests that human lives are worth living only if their pleasure outweighs their pain. This “if” statement, along with the assumption that happiness is calculable (which even MacAskill concedes is fraught), has given rise to an area of philosophical inquiry known as “population ethics,” which evaluates “actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be.” The method of population ethics (of which MacAskill’s Longtermism is an offshoot) assumes that quality of life can be rated on a scale from -100 to 100, and that for those with lives below neutral well-being of 0, “it would be better… if they had never been born.”
If we grant this, we have to wonder how many human lives there have been, are, and will be that are not worth living. Think first of any number of tortured artists like Ludwig van Beethoven or Robin Williams, then of political leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela—individuals who, despite their sufferings, created priceless works of art or contributed to a great cause. Then think of those who experienced the most extreme forms of pain, violence, and dehumanization—individuals who endured chattel slavery or survived the Holocaust. Can we really say that because their pains outnumbered their pleasures, the lives of Frederick Douglass or Victor Frankl were not worth living? One might counter that these extraordinary lives are the exceptions that prove the rule, but even the most mundane life under such circumstances is a remarkable testament to human resilience. This is no doubt why so much contemporary scholarship and art continues to meditate on and recover the modes of resistance and meaning making found among oppressed peoples.
Another counter could be that this argument is not sensitive enough to how horrible human suffering can or could be. Without dismissing the tremendous suffering people are experiencing today and will experience in the future, it might also be the case that we aren’t sensitive enough to how great human suffering has already been. As Ezra Klein points out, “To bring a child into this world has always been an act of hope” because “across most of human history, 27% of infants didn’t survive their first year and 47% of people died before puberty.” Moreover, until just a few centuries ago, nearly every human lived in conditions we would today describe as “extreme poverty.” “Was the world so bad,” Klein asks, “that our ancestors shouldn’t have made our lives possible?” Surely the quality of life of our forebears, which is below today’s “extreme poverty” threshold, would also be beneath MacAskill’s neutral well-being point of 0. But perhaps that “neutral” point is constantly on the move as history marches on.
One might argue that MacAskill’s “pure pain,” the sensation of being burned alive for an entire life, might be something different, a suffering beyond the reach of any historical method. Still I hesitate to say with MacAskill that these lives are not worth living. MacAskill’s narrow understanding of human flourishing is as much as the rationalist can hope for, as much as modernity can offer. Population ethics has no theodicy, and MacAskill has no framework of meaning into which suffering could mysteriously fit.
It is here, at the limit of the rational, that art illuminates. The power of narrative enables a study in contrasts that can reframe the Longtermists’ and Climate Malthusians’ valid questions about human suffering and population. So let us imagine the opposite world of the one Climate Malthusians are concerned about; let us consider the world presented in Cuarón’s Children of Men, in which the major problem facing humanity is not overpopulation but underpopulation.
Children opens in a mundane setting, a regular London coffee shop. But the year is 2027, and patrons gather around the television because the youngest person in the world, Diego Ricardo, has just died at eighteen. His death is mourned across the globe, as it epitomizes the existential dilemma facing humanity—that, for reasons scientists cannot identify, humans have been infertile since 2009. Human life without children is grim: the global reproductive crisis has precipitated the collapse of the social order. All nations have fallen into anarchy except Britain, though a refugee crisis jostles its borders. In response, Britain has assembled a massive, militarized border patrol force and infrastructure to quell any unrest. Confrontations between border police and refugees make up some of the most haunting scenes of the film (as many have noted, Children has been prescient on the centrality of the issue of migration to 21st century politics).
Collapse is accompanied by a crisis of meaning. Except for a gathering of fundamentalist doomsayers who believe infertility is divine retribution and some muffled Buddhist prayers, there is little mention of God or any unifying religious, philosophical, or national figure, faith, or principle. Instead, the government distributes assisted suicide kits called “Quietus” which boast the tagline “You Decide When.” One character, Miriam, who was a midwife in an antenatal clinic before widespread infertility began, captures the mood of the moment best: “As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd what happens in a world without children's voices.”
Miraculously, an African immigrant named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) has conceived a child (Cuarón’s homage to the “Out of Africa” theory).With the help of ex-activist Theo Faron (Clive Owen), she hopes to give birth with the “Human Project,” a mysterious scientific group seeking to restore human fertility. But Kee goes into labor before they reach the meeting point and gives birth in the most humble and dangerous conditions imaginable, a refugee camp mid-uprising and counterinsurgency.
Soon after, Kee and her baby girl—the first child born in eighteen years—are nearly abducted by a border guard and then a radical activist, but in an incredible scene that echoes the Nativity, mother and child escape with Theo’s guidance, and the soldiers and refugees behold the child, whose cries momentarily dispel the chaos of the world.
This scene makes an argument about human life, its inherent dignity and worth. It operates on a plane that is beyond the rational: this is a moment when it makes no sense to put down your weapons. But, at their peril, refugees and soldiers—oppressed and oppressor—crane their necks to have just one glimpse of the baby girl. A flash of recognition surfaces on their faces; they see that their lives are entangled with the child’s. She is the daughter every human in this dystopia has longed for, the heiress to all human history (a theme echoed in “Mother and Child” from John Tavener’s haunting score). Momentarily, the mystery of new life has brought about a “peace which surpasses all understanding.”
But then a shot is fired, and we are back on guard.
There is a latent kind of Longtermism in Children, though it predates MacAskill’s modern formulation. Folded within every human life is every other human life, and also the potential for a world of future lives. Science tells us this at the level of genetic material, but it is another thing to recognize it at the level of being. As a famous passage from the Talmud puts it, “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” Implicit in this wisdom saying is a sense of the incalculable—that one person is the whole world. This incalculable value transcends the rationalist’s quality of life calculations. It is this idea of the self that is missing from MacAskill and population ethics; it is this we glimpse in Children.
Anthony Shoplik is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Loyola University Chicago. His current research explores the confluence of U.S. environmentalism and conservationism with American accounts of national and racial identity.