2The usual answer is that we should change the way we produce and consume goods and services but what about population control, and not only in countries where the fertility rate is well above the replacement rate?

3In One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? Sarah Conly argues convincingly that population control should be a pillar of our individual and collective response to these environmental issues.

4More controversially, she claims that we should limit ourselves to one child, but also that this duty is enforceable and that we should implement a coercive “one-child policy”.

5As the Chinese one-child policy or worse scenarios immediately come to mind, Conly’s prescriptions require clarification, which is the purpose of section 1. Section 2 gives an outline of the structure of Conly’s argument and section 3 and 4 question whether it succeeds, and especially whether it shows that we have an enforceable duty to refrain from having more than one child.

Towards a one-child policy?

6Regarding our individual responsibility, Conly claims that we are currently not morally permitted to have as many children as we want, and that even if we treat them well and take responsibility for the cost of their upbringing. More controversially, she claims that

“we should limit ourselves to one child until overpopulation is no longer a danger, at which point we can allow ourselves replacement value—two children per couple” (p. 219).

• 3 Conly does not pretend to know when this level might be reached but she thinks that “we should prep (...)

“two people who procreate should limit themselves to one child between them… until we have reduced our population to a sustainable level” (p. 2)3.

11Second, Conly claims that the state should institute a “one-child policy” (p. 213) that includes “a coercive law, a law that has sanctions attached” (p. 129).

12Here, Conly is well aware that “for most people, the idea of restrictions on how many children you can have immediately conjures up pictures of China, and the fear of forced sterilizations and forced abortion” (p. 20) but she does a good job at distancing her proposal from them, and from other “horrific things” (p. 131) that people have imagined when it comes to one-child policies. For example, she rightly emphasizes that

“The fact that forced abortions and sterilizations are wrong doesn’t mean that all state constraints on childbearing are wrong. It means there are ways of regulating childbearing that are immoral. Even if you don’t have the right to have as many children as you may want, you have the right to be treated decently. That doesn’t mean you can’t be sanctioned at all. Sanctions need to discourage dangerous behavior, but without violating the rights of those who have acted wrongly” (p. 20-21).

13Or, as some “people think of abortion and sterilization because they are the only way to literally prevent a pregnancy”, she rightly reminds us that

“when we pass laws, we don’t generally try to literally prevent anyone from breaking the law. . . either because of moral limitations or because of the practical costs of prevention.” (p. 135).

• 15 See also Cripps (2015): “Directly coercive policies forcibly interfere with couples or individuals (...)

“policies that involve straightforward violations of citizens’ autonomy or bodily integrity. Cases from history and dystopic fiction involving practices like forced abortions and sterilizations come to mind. Coercive fertility-reducing interventions typically involve biomedical interventions on the body without informed consent, and constitute clear human rights violations. They cause significant harms and their wrongfulness has often been exacerbated by their regular targeting of, and disproportionate effect on, vulnerable and oppressed populations” (Hickey, Rieder and Earl 2016, 853-854)15.

A right to no more than one?

18In order to show that we have an enforceable duty to refrain from having more than one child, Conly proceeds in three steps.

“(1) having biological offspring in itself—merely having people out there who bear part of one’s individual genetic code; (2) having a family—not so much producing children, but raising them, living with them, having them as fellow travelers through life; and (3) equality—being treated as just as worthy as others to reproduce and have a family” (p. 39).

21Second, Conly argues against the view that a right to have more than one child is entailed by our right to “control our own bodies” or “to a certain control over the way we live” (p. 65). To do that, she considers the three “most plausible grounds of the right to complete control of the body …

first, … as John Locke famously said, it is our property; second, … control over the body is essential to autonomy, to our being able to function as persons who can live according to our own decisions and own values; and third, … the denial of bodily autonomy results in an unjust denial of equality” (p. 66).

23Third, Conly rejects the view that limiting ourselves to one child, whether voluntarily or not, would have such serious undesirable side-effects that it would not be “beneficial on the whole” (p. 177). She does that by discussing “the fears that reducing population growth will

(1) be ruinous to the economy, including in particular the maintenance of retirees; (2) result in the numbers of girls and women growing disproportionately small, through sex-selective IVF, sex-selective abortions, or even sex-selective infanticide; (3) lead to the loss of certain cultures altogether, as the number of practitioners falls below what is sustainable for a unique culture and they are subsumed into the culture of the majority; and (4) be unfair to those children who will be born, insofar as they will be deprived of siblings” (p. 178-179).

26Yet Conly claims more than that, and I have several doubts about the first two steps of her argument in favor of the view that we currently have an enforceable duty to refrain from having more than one child.

Defining and distributing well-being

28Here, Conly could simply reply that these definitions are mistaken but does she really endorse an objective list definition of well-being? From what we have seen so far, she relies on one, but apart from that, she only says that this way of defining well-being is “fairly popular” (p. 60), especially among rights theorists. The paradox is that, in Against Autonomy, published three years earlier, she clearly rejects objective list definitions of well-being. She claims that “it’s not clear that the objective notion of well-being … makes much sense”, that “objective views about welfare … are implausible in general”, and she endorses as her “standard of welfare … what is typically termed a subjective one – based on the desires of the subject.” (Conly 2012, 107, 11-12 & 102-103).

29Anyway, Conly does consider desire theories in One Child, and she briefly rejects an objection based on the case of people who claim that, given their desires, they “can’t be happy, even minimally happy, without something most people do just fine without” (p. 60). She does so in a way that also applies to hedonism, and she claims that “we have trouble believing” them, that “our common reaction is to direct to” them a therapist (p. 60), and that

“in practical terms, there is a limit to how much difference society can accommodate …, even where people have truly deep and different needs … and desires. We generally need to make rules for everybody” (p. 61). 

30Leaving aside a possible role for therapists, it is certainly relevant to inquire whether these people are sincere, and if we endorse some kind of informed or rational desire theory of well-being, whether they are confused about their desires. However, while I think that Conly argues quite convincingly that many, if not most, people do not need more than one child to reach a basic level of subjective well-being, I also think that we cannot exclude the possibility that there are people who do, people who cannot have a decent life unless they have more than one child. If one adopts a subjective definition of well-being, the moral right to what they need for a decent life that Conly envisions gives them a moral right to have more than one child, and that, whatever the cost or difficulty of determining who they are. The practical considerations invoked by Conly are certainly relevant, but if we inquire whether these people have the moral right to have more than one child, and not whether a coercive one-child policy is justified given that they have that right.

“It’s reasonable to think that we shouldn’t have to give up what we need for a reasonable chance of being happy, of being fulfilled, of having self-esteem and the feeling that we are esteemed by others, at least where that isn’t too burdensome on society as a whole [emphasis added]” (p. 61-62).

32If I am correct, Conly could still argue that those who would need several children to reach a basic level of subjective well-being would not necessarily have the (all-things considered) right to have them.

33However, the fact that we are dealing with pro tanto rights makes it problematic that Conly takes the view that we have a pro tanto right to what we need for a decent life as being “the interest-based theory of rights” (p. 36). She does not discuss other ways to ground rights in our interests, and it is problematic if we are thinking about pro tanto rights.

34What about the view that we have a pro tanto right not only to basic well-being, but to well-being simpliciter? The fact that having more than one child would contribute to someone’s well-being, even if it is not necessary for her to reach a basic level of well-being, seems to me to weigh in favor of her right to have more than one child. Thus, her having that right cannot be defeated by the mere fact that she does not need more than one child to reach a basic level of well-being. Something else has to do the job, for example others’ equal pro tanto right to well-being, or other values. If one adopts the view that we have a pro tanto right to subjective well-being, since having more than one child is an important aspect of the subjective well-being of many people, there is still some way to go before concluding that we have an enforceable duty to limit ourselves to one child. The same holds if we give up the view that we are owed something in terms of well-being and adopt instead the view that well-being matters for its own sake.

35Here, it is relevant to move on to the second step of Conly’s argument because it provides the kind of justification needed.

Greenhouse gas emissions, serious harms and the non-identity problem

36As we saw in section 2, Conly claims that our right to control our body does not give us “a right to make choices that inflict serious [emphasis added] harms upon others” (p. 19), something that she thinks we would do if we were to have more than one child in current circumstances. Elsewhere, the idea of a serious harm is expressed in (much) stronger terms, for example when Conly claims that

• 27 See also “significant harm” (p. 144), “really great harm” (p. 87), “devastating harm” (p. 3), “seri (...)

“Liberty is a good thing, and we should have as much of it as is consistent with living in a society of many billions of other people, all of whom have interests equal to our own, will allow. But that does not entail the right to use our bodies in ways that will have disastrous consequences to the lives, liberties, and happiness of others” (p. 99)27.

37Things would be different if the harm were below a threshold and, for example,

“when it comes to actions that do … almost no harm—the theft of a daisy, or paper clip, or putting the tip of your toe onto my private lawn—we don’t think interference, much less punishment, is justified” (p. 144).

38Conly relies therefore heavily on the amount of harm that having more than one child inflicts upon others, but she does not spend enough time clarifying the nature and causal path of this harm. It is frustrating, because a lot revolves around the fact that we create new sources of greenhouse gases by having children, and there is an ongoing and difficult debate about whether, and in what sense, each person inflicts serious harms upon others through her lifetime emissions.

39Do your lifetime emissions of greenhouse gases inflict serious harms upon others through their contribution to climate change?

• 32 Broome illustrates the view that “the harm we do by our emissions is serious” by giving estimates o (...)

“each of us is under a duty of justice not to cause the emission of greenhouse gas without compensating the people who are harmed as a result. Your carbon footprint ought to be zero, unless you make restitution.” (Broome 2012)32.

41Here, Brooms argues persuasively that we will not be able to compensate the very persons who are harmed by most of our choices, and the problem is that the compensation is owed to them - we cannot get off the hook by doing good to other people. As it is certainly true for the choice of having more than one child, it may look like a victory for Conly, but appearances are deceptive for two reasons.

42First, Broome would not say that we have a duty of justice to refrain from all these choices because we might have the opportunity to offset our emissions – Conly does not discuss that possibility:

• 33 People are harmed by climate change, and not directly by the molecules that we emit.

“Offsetting your emissions means ensuring that, for every unit of greenhouse gas you cause to be added to the atmosphere, you also cause a unit to be subtracted from it. If you offset, on balance you add nothing. Offsetting does not remove the very molecules that you emit, but the climate does not care which particular molecules are warming it.” (Broome 2012)33.

45If this analysis is correct, Conly fails to show that our right to control our body does not entail a right to have more than one child. Of course, it does not mean that we have that right, let alone a right to have as many children as we want. Our right to control our body could still be limited by something else than the serious harm we do to particular persons.

46For example, Conly could try to defend an unconventional harm principle, more precisely the view that we have an enforceable duty to refrain from doing serious aggregate harm. That being said, I am not sure that it can be done without ignoring “the separateness of persons” (Wasserman 2017, 315), as well as the

“significant difference between depriving one person of six months of life, and causing the loss of six months of healthy human life spread across so many people that each one loses only the most infinitesimal fraction of a second, which is how Broome characterizes the situation” (Cripps 2016, 125).

48Even if it is strategically better to avoid them, I wonder whether the best, although maybe imperfect, way to bridge the gap would not be to rely on positive enforceable duties. We could claim that we have a duty of justice or an enforceable duty to make a certain contribution to mitigating the massive harm of climate change or, more generally, to building a world in which well-being (among other values) is, and will be, distributed according to a certain distributive principle. Because it would contribute to the massive harm of climate change, having more than one child would be, all things being equal, a step in the wrong direction, but it would not be an injustice if we were somehow able to fulfill our duty by doing other things.

49That being said, the view that I am considering does not seem to rule out Conly’s one-child policy, at least not on an a priori basis. It could still be part of the package of coercive policies currently required if we have a positive enforceable duty to make a certain contribution to building a world in which well-being (among other values) is, and will be, distributed according to a certain distributive principle. Conly claims that we should currently reduce our numbers, and that we should do so to a degree that cannot be achieved without her one-child policy, but she does not pretend to establish that claim. I am not convinced, but I believe that this, and not the moral permissibility of taxing or fining people, is the main issue.

Conclusion

51Conly claims that a right to have more than one child is not entailed by a right to basic well-being, but it is not necessarily true if well-being is given by pleasure, or the satisfaction of our desires. Moreover, a prima facie right to basic well-being does not exhaust the way well-being matters. Conly also claims that having more than one child in the context of climate change would be too harmful to be entailed by a right to control our body, but we could maybe offset the emissions of greenhouse gases that would follow from our choice. More fundamentally, it is not clear that these emissions would seriously harm other people, at least in the sense in which serious harms are commonly understood. Yet, having more than one child contributes to the massive harm of climate change, and it remains to be seen whether it is compatible with our positive duties.

52A final word about what I think is the main purpose and success of Conly’s book. When consulted about a one-child policy or about coercive measures aimed at reducing population, many people do not engage into complex calculations to determine whether these measures are part of the best collective response to climate change available in the current circumstances. Instead, they are horrified by what they consider to be a violation of one of our most sacred and innocuous human rights. As I understand her book, Conly’s main purpose is to argue against these people, and she does it quite well. Having children is no longer a private matter, and it poses a moral challenge for those who wish to have many. In the words of Erik Magnusson (2016), how to do that in a way “which is consistent with respecting the morally relevant interests of others, including existing and future human beings who may suffer the adverse environmental consequences of unconstrained population growth”?