Kant, Paul Ehrlich, Empathy, and the Birthrate Crisis

Can your worldview pass this simple test?

Paul Ehrlich recently died at the age of 93. Ehrlich was one of the most prominent neo-Malthusians¹ and the author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb. Convinced that Earth was heading towards food shortages and general misery, he advocated compulsory population control to alleviate the oncoming damage. His influence in the late 1900s was immense to the point of inspiring China’s destructive one-child policy, but as more and more of his predictions fell woefully flat, his influence and scientific credibility waned.

The United States birth rate (TFR) fell to 1.57 this past year. There is the usual handwringing about what has caused this, and what we should Do About It. I’m a staunch supporter of Occam’s Razor, and that applies here: people aren’t having kids because they don’t want to have kids. Yeah, the nuclear family and the breakdown of marriage and the cost of living and suburban living spaces yada yada. If they wanted to, they would. And the strong general trend of modernity has been that as soon as women can easily prevent pregnancies and aren’t economically incentivized to have children, they don’t.

More precisely, they do less often. Because my second insightful observation is that lots of people are still having plenty of kids, and that doomerism about the birthrate is a little bit pointless. There are eight billion people in the world, and even if that starts to decline, I’m sure there will be some uncomfortable economic effects, but nothing catastrophic. Not while I’m alive, anyway.

But generally, we think of kids as being a good thing, right? And now we are told fewer kids are being born. The Number is going Down. Which means less of a good thing, hence, this declining birthrate is Bad. Unless you’re Paul Ehrlich, anyway.

Immanuel Kant famously gave us the categorical imperative, a definition of morality most well known in its first formulation: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” But more relevant here is the second: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

Always treat humanity as an end. Humanity itself. It’s such a concise way of conveying the idea that we should all inherently realize. There is something sad about a culture slowly dying out, failing to produce enough people to replace itself. Because that is the goal. Humanity itself is a goal, an end, something we value for its very sake.

I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Kant’s imperative is de facto a Christian moral code, or surely compatible with it. It’s essentially the Golden Rule, derived from reason instead of Scripture. (Was not Christ treating humanity as an end when he came to earth to die for us?) It’s a rephrasal of the imago Dei; the idea that humans are inherently valuable, merely because they are. But what interests me is that Kant’s imperative and its implications aren’t necessarily or exclusively Christian. Kant’s imperative is an attempt to derive a moral law from reason alone, or to believe that humanity should be its own end.

We hear a lot these days about “empathy”. If you’re empathetic, that means you value the other person, you sympathize with their feelings, understand they are living their own life, making their own choices, believing their own beliefs, just as you are, etc. The idea’s natural conclusion is that we ought to respect that. Even if you disagree with someone, you should be able to empathize with the way they arrived at that decision, given their priors, their situation, their life experiences. That’s the argument, anyway, for the principle that undergirds a lot of modern-day secular thought. This principle is no longer Christian, but it is still Kantian. How can you be empathetic to your fellow man without this principle of humanity as something worth respecting? Specifically, why should you be? It presupposes the idea that the humanity around you is something inherently of value, not something to be used, not an irrelevant detail, but itself an end to preserve.

Empathy is not a utilitarian ideal, and I say that approvingly. While it is a way of dressing up a Christian virtue in secular terminology, that doesn’t change the fact that it is a Christian virtue. But more relevant to what I’m arguing here is that empathy is also diametrically opposed to the needs-of-the-many utilitarian reasoning seen in arguments like Ehrlich’s. Empathy is necessarily individualistic in the sense that it has no point if you don’t value each person as their own individual.

Kantian ethics are thus the final rebuttal to men like Paul Ehrlich. If humanity is an end, how can you be anti-human? How can you so openly and vocally oppose the very life of the human race? If you value humanity, if you think humanity is worth respecting and preserving, how can you argue there should be fewer humans? It’s a self-defeating argument. We cannot sacrifice the few for the many, or trade the inconvenient for our own comfort.

But that’s not the only ramification of a Kantian worldview. For if we take “treating humanity as an end” to its natural conclusion, what better way to fulfill this mission than to … create more humans? If humans are inherently valuable, shouldn’t we want more of them?

This discovery won’t help us fix the birth rate, of course. If someone doesn’t want to have kids, I doubt quoting Kant at them will change that. (I guess you could give it a shot.) Having a baby is a major decision, frankly, a life-changing decision: babies are a very big deal on the individual level, but a very small deal when viewed from the state level. Incidentally, this is why governments should not be allowed to adopt a utilitarian line of thinking. Governments need to be Kantian too. The American Founding was based on this rational, Enlightenment-era concept of individual liberties (Kantian²), not the more utilitarian concepts of socialism or collectivism.

But here’s the good news: this problem is self-solving, for readily apparent reasons. The people still having kids are going to be the ones who reproduce. It is their offspring who will make up the next generations. This is a really easy way to check if your worldview passes this Kantian test. For example, the fertility gap between liberal women and conservative women is now so large that (assuming these rates hold, in a frictionless vacuum, etc) by 2100, conservatives’ descendants would outnumber their liberal counterparts 4 to 1.³ Even if that example is a little far-fetched, understand the point I’m making: one of the easiest ways to further your worldviews and eclectic musical tastes is to bestow them on a large number of children. Worldviews are self-replicating. But not all of them. And that is the point we’re here to make.

Paul Ehrlich’s narrow, short-sighted, anti-humanity worldview is, in a grand sense, suicidal. It is hopeless and cold-hearted. (But don’t take my word for it. Take his!) We should measure beliefs by their results (should we? How about:) We can measure beliefs by their results. And a belief system that leads you to discourage and despise the very creation of life itself cannot be a good one. A worldview (explicitly or otherwise) that instantly withers away and dies (literally) is doomed to deserved failure.

To this point, we’ve kept this discussion on a rather esoteric, philosophical level, but these ideas have tangible, real-world effects. States where it’s cheaper to live and find housing (states where it’s easier to start a family) have seen marked population growth, as Americans move away from their more bureaucratic, expensive counterparts. These effects will likely be significant enough to affect the electoral map next census:

Red states may gain as many as ten electoral votes by virtue of doing exactly nothing except making it easier to live there.

To live there. Shouldn’t that be one of the primary goals of a state? To have people in it? Without its people, what is it? States are created by the people for the people. If they fail to treat their inhabitants as an end, they have failed their purpose. But this applies to more than just electoral votes.

Statecraft is a common conceit in the modern day. We’ve all got lots of time and leisure, and we’ve all got opinions on how we could Do It Better. Some of this is a natural result of the Founding and the liberal tradition: the Founders designed a government from scratch and did a great job! But we are prone to a callous arrogance when we discuss too carelessly how people and populations are to be governed.⁴ Soon, the state ceases to be For the People and starts to exist for its own sake.⁵ Instead of protecting the humanity entrusted to us, we think of how we can enact the most efficient tax rates and fund the most effective social programs: we trade the rights of the individual for the good of the collective. All of which leads me to say this:

There is a real problem with the comfortable, liberal-consensus, lightly-socialized, subsidized-healthcare states that make up the West. The problem is this: 37% of healthcare spending is on old people (aged 65 and up). This group is 17% of the population but incurs 37% of the cost, five times as much (per person) as children, and 2.5 times as much as working adults. And with the birth rates what they are, this problem will get worse before it gets better.

So if you’re a government looking to cut healthcare costs, improve efficiency, and lighten the tax burden on your working people who actually foot the bill, what’s the obvious answer? Wouldn’t it be convenient if some of those fragile, elderly citizens just…stopped incurring their burgeoning hospital bills? If we decided those last declining years weren’t worth the strain on our overtaxed healthcare system? How high a quality of life would those years contain anyway? The solution is disconcertingly obvious. MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) is already far too common in places like Canada. But if you fail to treat humanity as an end, how do you arrive at any other result? It is a necessary conclusion of the state that has developed its own incentives and interests, rather than protecting the interests of its citizens. That state has become utilitarian, rather than Kantian, which cannot be permitted.

The Kantian ethic gives us a moral yardstick with which to measure beliefs. If life is worth living, we will value life: since life is worth living, we must value life. Paul Ehrlich’s ideas were transparently reprehensible, a cartoonish illustration of worldviews we intuitively recognize as evil. But the danger remains. Human nature is selfish. Human nature wants to trade others’ good for our own. It is self-love that tears us apart. But it is loving others as ourselves that will create good families, good societies, and good cultures. Realizing each human is inherently valuable and empathizing with their personal thoughts and struggles — their person — is what allows us to build each other up. And that, more than any policy, is what our countries need.

1. No, I didn’t know what that meant before I visited his Wikipedia page. Apparently, Thomas Malthus was one of the first men to publicize population-explosion fears, when he did so way back in 1798.

2. Kant was a contemporary of the Founding and wrote slightly afterwards, but these guys were all drinking from the same Enlightenment philosophical stream. The Founders’ focus on individual rights and liberties is clearly consistent with Kant’s categorical imperatives.

3. That number does feel a little bit preposterous to me, and is subject to the usual shortcomings of the data and the survey method. I think it illustrates the point, but as with all readily-digestible statistics, please take it with a grain of salt.

4. Plato is a famous example

5. This is the leap Woodrow Wilson made, jumpstarting modern-day progressivism: the supreme arrogance that We Know Better, as opposed to the Founding-era focus on self-governance and individual autonomy. For more information, I believe George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility and Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions are both great introductions to the topic.