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Comment by jrs99 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying that it's a good policy to limit children. But more to spark dialogue. It's an interesting question. What happens when there are 100 billion people on this planet, and if possible, what happens if one day there are 1 trillion people.

Does it one day make sense to say you can't have more than 1 kid? Is it amoral?

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> Is it amoral?

Yes for two reasons. A) You're telling other people what they can do with their own bodies, and that is fundamentally wrong (see the ridiculous abortion debate in the USA). B) It's impossible to apply the rules evenly and fairly, creating (at best) destructive social imbalance and (at worst) an opportunity for slippery-slope eugenics.

I don't think eugenics will be the biggest issue. At that point, I'm pretty sure everybody will openly declare war on everybody else over limited resources. Basically the Civilization V/Minecraft experiments. It'll probably happen sooner than we expect over bodies of fresh water.

i understand why you think it is amoral. However, your definition of something being moral or not is very different from someone else's. Someone might think it is amoral to abort at 8 months, while there certainly are many that think it is perfectly fine to abort at 8 months. Other people are certain that you are killing a human being.

My own view is that none of us actually knows whether it is moral or amoral to abort at any given month.

You have to really think of a world with hundreds of billions on it and how that possibly would change the morality of something.

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