Why would we want to let anyone choose to cause too much strain on our resources? There's no back-up planet.
Imagine you're standing in front of a bear cage. Imagine if that bear cage was going to open in the next ten seconds. Imagine there was a button on the wall that you could press to keep that cage closed. Would you press it? Would you want other people to be able to press it if they were your situation?
The example doesn't even have to be that drastic, imagine any good or bad consequence at all. It would be advantageous to have a button that controls whether it happens. Right now we are not in control and humans have always striven to have control.
My sense of self-preservation it not just for me - I feel it for all of humanity, present and future. If you still disagree with me that's fine but if you're going to be logically consistent while espousing the belief that humanity shouldn't exist because we use too many resources the generous thing to do would be to off yourself first. Please don't though, instead help the rest of us figure out a way for more humans to live happily while improving our current world. There is no reason we can't. None. We just haven't figured it out.
I'm not sure why hoping for the best is supposed to be a wise decision when we're talking about basic things like 'survival of the human race' and whatnot.
I'm also rather uncertain how your 'caged bear button' example is relevant here. The only dangerous bear I can see in this context is the overuse of resources. In which case the example seems to be advocating that the best course of action is to expose people to the danger by default, unless people take constant action to keep the danger contained. I'm not sure how this argument is supposed to attack the "keep populations controlled" line of thought.
At any rate, the obvious solution here seems to do both. Figure out how we can reasonably and ethically keep populations in the range we know we can support, while at the same time working to expand that limit. We don't have to pick one or the other. If you believe this to be a real problem, it seems reckless to simply hope we figure it out before the problem becomes too serious.
>I'm also rather uncertain how your 'caged bear button' example is relevant here. The only dangerous bear I can see in this context is the overuse of resources. In which case the example seems to be advocating that the best course of action is to expose people to the danger by default, unless people take constant action to keep the danger contained. I'm not sure how this argument is supposed to attack the "keep populations controlled" line of thought.
The dangerous bear in this case is our reproductive capabilities declining. A human that is prevented from coming into existence when it would normally be able to is the same as removing an existing one.
We will solve it, we just need to start and provide incentives for it.
I'm still confused about the bear. How is a human not existing a danger to others? A human not existing is really only dangerous to the human race once it reaches some critical mass that will essentially prevent any new humans from existing. I don't see how this is at all analogous to unleashing a bear in a populated street. Each instance is inherently not dangerous by itself. You can't say that for the bear.
By that reasoning, why should we do anything to reduce green house gas production or any kind of pollution? We'll figure out how to remove it from the environment or make it otherwise non-harmful eventually. May as well go full steam ahead now in that case, right?
I also highly contest the notion that preventing a human from coming into existence is anything like removing an existing one. If you were forced to chose between killing somebody or destroying a viable embryo scheduled for implantation, would you seriously have all that much trouble deciding?