Abstract
Population ethics is the subfield of philosophy that focuses on the moral aspects of how actions affect who exists in a particular population and what quality of life they have. The choices regarding what policies are adopted in response to climate change will affect the identities of those who exist in the future, the size of future populations, and the quality of life that future people will have. This chapter examines the nonidentity problem, various theoretical outlooks on population ethics, some recent policy proposals aimed at reducing fertility, and the relationship between population reduction and the impacts of climate change. After summarizing the relevant issues, the relevance of the discourse to climate policy is highlighted, and points of consensus and dissensus are noted. Disagreement on some of the key theoretical questions in population ethics is significant and poses a challenge for deriving meaningful conclusions about climate policy. Fortunately, emerging points of consensus on other aspects of climate policy and its relationship to population provide reasons to think moral decision-making about these matters is far from hopeless.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, M. R., Frame, D., Huntingford, C., Jones, C. D., Lowe, J., Meinshausen, M., & Meinhausen, N. (2009). Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth ton. Nature, 458(7242), 1163–1166.
Archer, D., Eby, M., Brovkin, B., Ridgwell, A., Cao, L., Mikolajewicz, U., Caldeira, K., Matsumoto, K., Munhoven, G., Montenegro, A., & Tokos, K. (2009). Atmospheric lifetime of fossil fuel carbon dioxide. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 37, 117–134. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100206
Arrhenius, G., Budolfson, M., & Spears, D. (2021). Does climate policy depend importantly on population ethics? Deflationary responses to the challenges of population ethics for public policy. In M. Budolfson, T. McPherson, & D. Plunkett (Eds.), Philosophy and climate change (pp. 111–136). Oxford University Press.
Benatar, D. (2006). Better never to have been: The harm of coming into existence. Oxford University Press.
Benatar, D. (2013). Still better never to have been: A reply to (more of) my critics. The Journal of Ethics, 17, 121–151.
Benatar, D. (2015). The misanthropic argument for anti-natalism. In S. Hannon, S. Brennan, & R. Vernon (Eds.), Permissible Progeny?: The morality of procreation and parenting (pp. 34–59). Oxford University Press.
Boonin, D. (2014). The non-identity problem and the ethics of future people. Oxford University Press.
Broome, J. (2012). Climate matters: Ethics in a warming world. W. W. Norton.
Budolfson, M., & Spears, D. (2021). Population ethics and the prospects for fertility policy as climate mitigation policy. The Journal of Development Studies, 57(9), 1499–1510.
Cafaro, P. (2022). Climate ethics and population policy: A review of recent philosophical work. WIREs Climate Change, 13(2), e748. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.748
Campbell, M. (2012). Why the silence on population? In P. Cafaro & E. Crist (Eds.), Life on the Brink: Philosophers confront population (pp. 41–55). University of Georgia Press.
Caney, S. (2020). Climate justice. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-climate/. Accessed 20 December 2022.
Casey, G., & Galor, O. (2017). Is faster economic growth compatible with reductions in carbon emissions? The role of diminished population growth. Environmental Research Letters, 12(1), 014003. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/12/1/014003
Chappell, R. Y., Meissner, D., & MacAskill, W. (2022). Population ethics. In R. Y. Chappell, D. Meissner, & W. MacAskill (Eds.), An introduction to Utilitarianism. https://www.utilitarianism.net/population-ethics. Accessed 27 December 2022.
Conly, S. (2016). One child: Do we have a right to have more? Oxford University Press.
Dasgupta, P. (2019). Time and the generations: Population ethics for a diminishing planet. Columbia University Press.
DeGrazia, D. (2012). Creation ethics: Reproduction, genetics, and quality of life. Oxford University Press.
Elliot, R. (1989). The rights of future people. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 6(2), 159–169.
Gosseries, A., & Meijers, T. (2022). Animal population ethics. In G. Arrhenius, K. Bykvist, T. Campbell, & E. Finneron-Burns (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of population ethics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190907686.001.0001
Greaves, H. (2017). Population axiology. Philosophy Compass, 12(11), e12442. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12442
Greaves, H. (2019). Climate change and optimum population. The Monist, 102, 42–65.
Hanser, M. (2008). The metaphysics of harm. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 77(2), 421–450.
Hedberg, T. (2019). The duty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the limits of permissible procreation. Essays in Philosophy, 20(1), 1–24.
Hedberg, T. (2020). The environmental impact of overpopulation: The ethics of procreation. Routledge.
Hedberg, T. (2023). Climate change. In E. Di Nucci, J. Lee, & I. A. Wagner (Eds.), The Rowman & Littlefield handbook of bioethics (pp. 381–391). Rowman & Littlefield.
Hoegh-Guldberg, O., Jacob, D., Taylor, M., Bindi, M., Brown, S., Camilloni, I., Diedhiou, A., Djalante, R., Ebi, K. L., Engelbrecht, F., Guiot, J., Hijioka, Y., Mehrotra, S., Payne, A., Seneviratne, S. I., Thomas, A., Warren, R., & Zhou, G. (2018). 2018: Impacts of 1.5°C global warming on natural and human systems. In V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J. B. R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M. I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, & T. Waterfield (Eds.), Global warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/. Accessed 20 December 2022.
Hurka, T. (1983). Value and population size. Ethics, 93(3), 496–507.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (2013). Climate change 2013: The physical science basis. Working group I contribution to the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (2014). Climate change 2014: Impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. In C. Field, V. Barros, D. von Dokken, K. Mach, M. Mastrandrea, T. E. Bilir, M. Chatterjee, K. Ebi, Y. Estrada, R. Genova, B. Girma, E. Kissel, A. Levy, S. MacCracken, P. Mastrandrea, & L. White (Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lianos, P., & Pseiridis, A. (2016). Sustainable welfare and population size. Environmental, Development, and Sustainability, 18, 1679–1699.
Lougheed, K. (n.d.). Anti-natalism. In Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/anti-natalism/. Accessed 20 December 2022.
MacIver, C. (2015). Procreation or appropriation? In Permissible progeny?: The morality of procreation and parenting (pp. 107–128). Oxford University Press.
Matthews, H. D., Gillet, N. P., Stott, P. A., & Zickfield, K. (2009). The proportionality of global warming to cumulative carbon emissions. Nature, 459(7248), 829–832.
Narveson, N. (1967). Utilitarianism and new generations. Mind, 76(301), 62–72.
Nolt, J. (2011). Nonanthropocentric climate ethics. WIREs. Climate Change, 2(5), 701–711. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.131
Nolt, J. (2015). Casualties as a moral measure of climate change. Climatic Change, 130(3), 347–358.
O’Neil, B., Dalton, M., Fuchs, R., Jiang, L., Pachauri, S., & Zigova, K. (2010). Global demographic trends and future carbon emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(41), 17521–17526.
O’Neil, B., Liddle, B., Jiang, L., Smith, K. R., Pachauri, S., Dalton, M., & Fuchs, R. (2012). Demographic change and carbon dioxide emissions. The Lancet, 380(9837), 157–164.
Ord, T. (2020). The precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity. Hachette Books.
Overall, C. (2012). Why have children? The ethical debate. MIT Press.
Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and persons. Oxford University Press.
Porritt, J. (2010). Population and climate change. New Internationalist 429 (January). https://newint.org/features/2010/01/01/climate-change. Accessed 22 May 2023.
Rieder, T. (2016). Toward a small family ethic: How overpopulation and climate change are affecting the morality of procreation. Springer.
Sebo, J. (2022). Saving animals, saving ourselves: Why animals matter for pandemics, climate change, and other catastrophes. Oxford University Press.
Springmann, M., Mason-D’Croz, D., Robinson, S., Garnett, T., Godfray, H. C. J., Gollin, D., Rayner, M., Vallon, P., & Scarborough, P. (2016). Global and regional health effects of future food production under climate change: A modelling study. The Lancet, 387(10031), 1937–1946.
Tucker, C. (2019). A planet of 3 billion: Mapping humanity's long history of ecological destruction and finding our way to a resilient future a global citizen's guide to saving the planet. Atlas Observatory Press.
Woodward, J. (1986). The non-identity problem. Ethics, 96(4), 804–831.
World Health Organization. (2014). Quantitative risk assessment of the effects of climate change on selected causes of death. WHO Press. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241507691. Accessed 20 December 2022.
Young, T. (2001). Overconsumption and procreation: Are they morally equivalent? Journal of Applied Philosophy, 18(2), 183–192.
Zeebe, R. (2013). Time-dependent climate sensitivity and the legacy of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(34), 13739–13744.
Zuber, S., Venkatesh, N., Tännsjö, T., Tarsney, C., Stefánsson, H. O., Steele, K., Spears, D., Sebo, J., Pivato, M., Ord, T., Ng, Y., Masny, M., MacAskill, W., Lawson, N., Kuruc, K., Hutchinson, M., Gustafsson, J., Greaves, H., Forsberg, L., Fleurbaey, M., Coffey, D., Cato, S., Castro, C., Campbell, T., Budolfson, M., Broome, J., Berger, A., Beckstead, N., & Asheim, G. B. (2021). What should we agree on about the Repugnant conclusion? Utilitas, 33(4), 379–383.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Hedberg, T. (2023). Climate Change and Population Ethics. In: Pellegrino, G., Di Paola, M. (eds) Handbook of the Philosophy of Climate Change. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_64
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07002-0_64
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-07001-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-07002-0
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities