One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? by Sarah Conly (review)

There are too many people on the planet. This isn’t a popular thing to say, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s true, and that we need to do something to address it. Even in our radically unjust world, where billions of people do not have adequate access to food, water, energy, and other resources, we’re still living unsustainably—overcharging our ecological credit card and torching the climate. But discussing the link between these environmental problems and the population is uncomfortable, because many people believe that procreation is an essentially private act that is morally and politically off-limits.

In her new book, One Child, Sarah Conly argues that this belief is false: If it is true that overpopulation is a massive problem (she believes it is, and I think she’s obviously right about this), then the world’s governments may be justified in restricting their citizens to one child per couple. Although many will find such a conclusion implausible on its face, Conly’s argument is thorough, often persuasive, and worth taking very seriously. In what follows, I will quickly summarize the structure of her main argument, before raising two concerns that I have with the project.

The background premise of Conly’s book is (1) that overpopulation is a major driver of climate change and other environmental degradation, which now threatens to be utterly catastrophic. Since Conly is a philosopher and not a scientist, she tells us that we should take her argument to be conditional on the truth of this premise; she thinks it’s true now, but if not, then the rest of the argument follows if and when it becomes true (4). She then argues (2) that we do not have a moral right to more than one biological child per couple. In an attempt to mitigate the harms of overpopulation, then, (3) we should adopt a suite of fertility-reducing interventions, which, if necessary, includes a one-child policy. Of course, Conly has much more that warrants analysis in this nuanced book, including helpful discussion of the philosophical difficulties concerning future generations, and moral worries with the actual construction of a permissible one-child policy. In this brief review, however, I’ll focus on what I take to be her core argument. [End Page E-29]

Many readers will already be trying to get off the train at (1) (even in its conditional form!), because discussing population is unpopular; however, not only did I open Conly’s book already believing (1), but I found her discussion of the threat of overpopulation utterly convincing. That left the core of the argument resting on her defense of (2) and (3), and while I think she does important work here, I want to raise some worries. These are friendly worries to be sure, because I think a weaker version of her argument goes through relatively easily—something of the form: “Given the environmental threat from overpopulation, we morally ought to be addressing population growth through individual, group, and government action.” This weaker version of Conly’s argument—though still quite contentious—acknowledges the two worries that I have with her argument: first, that it may be more difficult than she thinks to limit procreative rights; and second, that a one-child policy seems less likely to be necessary than she acknowledges. I’ll take each of these concerns in turn.

For those of us who think that dangers like climate change imply that we ought to address population in some way, perhaps the major challenge is the wide-spread belief that persons have strong procreative (moral) rights that would be violated by government intervention like a one-child policy. The heart of Conly’s book is her sustained, two-chapter evaluation of this view, and this detailed discussion is a valuable contribution to the literature. In short, she argues that procreative rights must be grounded either in one’s basic interests, or in one’s bodily autonomy. Chapter...