Curing all diseases: an ethical problem
- Thread starter mageroel
- Start date
Well the government could put some sort of sterilising serum into dart guns and have guys driving down down the street doing drive bys on every 1 out of 10 people with it.mageroel said:
If you met the quota for births, you wouldn't be getting abortions. You'd get fallopian tubes tied and vasectomy. But it reminds me of a similar thought in China where some guy had like 21 children secretly. An official, I believe.mageroel said:
Curing all diseases and such had another problem I'd like to put out there. Most people die for being unhealthy, weaker immune systems. When they die, they lose all future opportunity to breed leaving only the healthy genes to procreate. Unhealthy people are generally less attractive. (Symmetry) If you cured all diseases, there will be a lot more ugly people. And I mean record breaking ugly. Being cured of a disease doesn't mean you are now unsusceptible to them. These people will breed their weak genes into the population.
With this theory, humanity would devolve or hit some unchanging equilibrium (eventually). And I think it was Darwin that says species that do not change, die out. During all diseases and such would cause our demise. It's horrible to fathom perhaps, but it's better WITH these horrific diseases killing off SOME people while others survive. Not fair and I'd certainly not to be willing to risk being a non-survivor. It's even likely to say that without modern medicine, I'd myself be dead already so it's hard to refute my own logic.
Or hunger or thirst or cancer or heart attacks or brain haemorrhages or genetic deformities or alien abductions... But whatever. Or, since you mention it, abortions (also technically a loss of life).mageroel said:
Still, I don't see any ethical issues with the curing of "all" diseases. If it really happened, there would be no need to suddenly impose birth quotas - especially since people would still be dying every day from the above causes.
If Earth DID start to get overpopulated (face it, we're still a long way off), it could really only inspire a new sort of "Space Race" - the race to find/teraform another planet on which to colonise. You don't suddenly over-populate a planet like Earth overnight.
Also, mothers who wish to have children will generally do so regardless of compulsory birth quotas. They'd probably pay black market midwives or just deliver in the back of a car or some such. Point is, people always find a way to circumvent the most ridiculous restrictions.
And once the baby is born, killing it is murder, not abortion. Another ethical problem for you.
Sure is 1850 around here...
"Hey Marge, can you imagine a world without polio?"
"Oh Howard, that sounds terrible, think of how many poor people there would be!"
"Hey Marge, can you imagine a world without polio?"
"Oh Howard, that sounds terrible, think of how many poor people there would be!"
Well curing all diseases would probably make scientist shift focus and start working on other stuff that would benefit mankind (or make them rich) and thus making us capable of sharing the world with x billion people.
Seriously, seriouslyYmpulse said:
Where do you get your information - some conspiracy website?!
Yes the "One child only" policy of China is extreme and totalitarian, without a doubt, but do you honestly believe the government has been systematically killing off families for the past two decades because they were having more than one child.
I'm sorry that's retarded
First it's a policy to stabilize population growth.
Lots of people are allowed to have more than one child - If both parents are single children, if the first child has been born ill or with disability, if they are from a farming region or small village, if their first-born is an adult, etc.
And if you want to have more than one child, no one is going to shoot you or force an abortion.
Simply, if you have more than one child you will have to pay a fine.
Which depending on your location can vary from insignificant for the more dispress populated regions, to a large fine for overcrowded cities and it's also a one time fine.
P.S. Just because a culture or a government is different from yours, that doesn't immediately make them villains.
Especially stupid Bond villains as you suggested
The thing is, surely more diseases would evolve- besides which, the west has tons of antibacterial stuff and the rate of autoimmune responses and allergies increases. Gotta keep the diseases, maybe just eradicate the mass killers, because you need to keep your immune system on its toes.mageroel said:
Curses, you have beaten me to it, I had been meaning to make a post about this for some time.
There are a lot of factors to take into account for a situation like this, such as increasing rate of teen and unwanted pregnancies, falling health standards, increased numbers of people living to extreme old age, couples who have multiple children, falling fossil fuel resources, shrinking biodiversity, balance of living space to cultivatable land, increased rates of genetic diseases due to larger population, (to quote Mordin Solus "too much intel!"). Taken at face value and todays' current laws and regulations, a miracle cure drug looks to have one of two possible outcomes.
If the human race kept it's current rate of reproduction, then the strain on planetary resources would become phenomenal. Assuming the drug was cheap enough to export to Third World countries, that would result in a phenomenal population boom, as families in deprived countries are used to having multiple children, but many of these children die, usually from water borne infections. If all these children were suddenly to survive, this would be more than enough to counteract people in First World countries choosing not to have children or the displacement of the homosexual community. Added to illegitimate births and couples who choose to have multiple offspring, all of whom would have an increased chance of living to old age, the resultant population increase could crush a lot of the remaining biodiversity out of the planet, as humanity started looking for fresh land for building and farming, exploiting resources in areas previously overlooked. There could be the possibility of us, quite literally, wiping out the world.
On the other hand, if a population cap was to be brought into effect, then it could result differently. For arguments sake, let's say at the moment, 3 people in a thousand live to the age of 100. A cure-all could up that to maybe 15 in a thousand. That might not sound a huge increase, but replicated across the 6.9 billion people in the world it would lead to a staggering O.A.P heavy society, if less people chose to have children but lived to older ages, there wouldn't be enough "fresh blood" so to speak to provide necessary care industries AND persue technological advancements.
As such, a drug with the cure for all diseases could precipitate a population crash in the human race, one we would probably then recover from, but it would then most likely result large areas of cities becoming unoccupied, as people would still be needed to produce food and so would need to transfer to the countryside.
Personally, I think the best option in this scenario would be the development of interplanetary travel and widely available hydrogen fuel options. This would reduce strain on the planet and natural resources, allow a resultant increase in natural biodiversity, and facilitate the next stage in humanities evolution.
By the way, there's an internet site I found during a web trawl called Breathing Earth, sthowing the Birth rates, Death rates and fuel consumption of the entire human race. It helps put this sort of thing into perspective, if anyone's interested, I'll add a link.
http://breathingearth.net/
Your statement seems to assume that the solution will always in quick succession to the problem. I know necessity is the mother of invention, but this can sometimes take years, we've still not hit upon a viable replacement for fossil fuels yet, and (refering back to the OP) if a "miracle medicine" were to be discovered, the strain on planetary infrastructure and resources would be increased further.
There are a lot of factors to take into account for a situation like this, such as increasing rate of teen and unwanted pregnancies, falling health standards, increased numbers of people living to extreme old age, couples who have multiple children, falling fossil fuel resources, shrinking biodiversity, balance of living space to cultivatable land, increased rates of genetic diseases due to larger population, (to quote Mordin Solus "too much intel!"). Taken at face value and todays' current laws and regulations, a miracle cure drug looks to have one of two possible outcomes.
If the human race kept it's current rate of reproduction, then the strain on planetary resources would become phenomenal. Assuming the drug was cheap enough to export to Third World countries, that would result in a phenomenal population boom, as families in deprived countries are used to having multiple children, but many of these children die, usually from water borne infections. If all these children were suddenly to survive, this would be more than enough to counteract people in First World countries choosing not to have children or the displacement of the homosexual community. Added to illegitimate births and couples who choose to have multiple offspring, all of whom would have an increased chance of living to old age, the resultant population increase could crush a lot of the remaining biodiversity out of the planet, as humanity started looking for fresh land for building and farming, exploiting resources in areas previously overlooked. There could be the possibility of us, quite literally, wiping out the world.
On the other hand, if a population cap was to be brought into effect, then it could result differently. For arguments sake, let's say at the moment, 3 people in a thousand live to the age of 100. A cure-all could up that to maybe 15 in a thousand. That might not sound a huge increase, but replicated across the 6.9 billion people in the world it would lead to a staggering O.A.P heavy society, if less people chose to have children but lived to older ages, there wouldn't be enough "fresh blood" so to speak to provide necessary care industries AND persue technological advancements.
As such, a drug with the cure for all diseases could precipitate a population crash in the human race, one we would probably then recover from, but it would then most likely result large areas of cities becoming unoccupied, as people would still be needed to produce food and so would need to transfer to the countryside.
Personally, I think the best option in this scenario would be the development of interplanetary travel and widely available hydrogen fuel options. This would reduce strain on the planet and natural resources, allow a resultant increase in natural biodiversity, and facilitate the next stage in humanities evolution.
By the way, there's an internet site I found during a web trawl called Breathing Earth, sthowing the Birth rates, Death rates and fuel consumption of the entire human race. It helps put this sort of thing into perspective, if anyone's interested, I'll add a link.
http://breathingearth.net/
The population years ago (I'm not precisely sure what time scale you meant, so for the sake of argument I'll use forty years ago) was around 3.5 billion. World population today is tipping the scales at 6.9 billion people. That's almost double the number of humans living off the same amount of land, and scientific and technological breakthroughs aren't catching up fast enough, or in the cases of things like GM crops, are meeting up against ethical barriers. Building into the sky is all well and good, but when we can't build any higher we will continue to spread out, and a patch of land which before the advent of skyscrapers needed enough land to provide food for say 10 people, at most, that same building plot can now hold hundreds of people, but we can't yet provide the same sort of hot-housing for food, at least not on a large enough scale.The Unworthy Gentleman said:
Your statement seems to assume that the solution will always in quick succession to the problem. I know necessity is the mother of invention, but this can sometimes take years, we've still not hit upon a viable replacement for fossil fuels yet, and (refering back to the OP) if a "miracle medicine" were to be discovered, the strain on planetary infrastructure and resources would be increased further.
Population wouldn't dramatically rise, the most common reason people ever have for having about a dozen children is that they are living in an area with a high child mortality rate, so having lot's of children means that at least 1-2 will live to adulthood, if anything birth rate's world-wide would go down, and anyway, we still die in a million other ways, war, starvation, crime, and accidents, over time we would probably have a increase in population, but it would be a very slow rise and by that time resources will already be dwindling
Rimmer is indeed a great man. But I really don't think war is inevitable in the event of overpopulation. And even if it were, it would hardly be as brutal as you describe it. Remember how the National Socialist party in WW2 were so careful to hide all evidence of their atrocities? Remember how justified their decision turned out to be when the rest of the world ripped into them? Even today many people detest the Germans for what a small group of them did.Hagenzz said:
So no, I don't think a war over food would be quite as brutal as WW2 - which was, at least in Germany and Poland, a war against an unarmed minority demographic.
Think of the Cold War, and how Russia and the USA could have obliterated each other with nuclear weapons. That was decades ago. Now more than ever, the world's weapons of mass destruction are a powerful chess piece on the board, regardless of whether or not they're in a position to checkmate.
It was another great man who once said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." Albert Einstein was pretty much on the money when he said this. To briefly explain it, if there is a WW3, the devastation will be so great that we will all effectively be reduced to rubble; sticks and stones. Something that no major power in the world wants to happen. The day a whole nation decides to martyr itself is the day that Half Life 3 is released.
Which is why I am "bafflingly optimistic" about there being no war over overpopulation - or anything. I honestly believe that we've seen the last world war - for a long time, at least. And if I'm wrong, there will be no one left to tell me so.
The whole "Space Race" eventuality is a bit optimistic, though, I'll give you that.
We took humans out of the evolving equation for the most part, since we terraform, we shape everything around us so it can benefit us more - in itself making ourselves weaker to change (since we keep changing the other stuff around us instead of ourselves!). It kind of makes your argument invalid. Well, not entirely, but mostly. There are already those kind of things happening, but we don't have your apocalyptical evolution.Odbarc said:
Here's a fun thing for the "one-child-per-family" advocates to think about:
We don't have a giant army of robots doing our whims. Decreasing the population dramatically will cause economic destruction, abandoning thousands of services, knocking pretty much every corporation (except a few megacorporations) clean out, etc. Because these things run on PEOPLE.
We don't have a giant army of robots doing our whims. Decreasing the population dramatically will cause economic destruction, abandoning thousands of services, knocking pretty much every corporation (except a few megacorporations) clean out, etc. Because these things run on PEOPLE.