Justice Principle Meets Population Growth

Populations are increasing. As the world remains finite in size, new technology is steadily allowing us to fit more and more people on every mile of land. The invention of the Haber-Bosch process of creating ammonia to be used as fertilizers is what sustains a full third of the earth's population. The first thing China did after opening its borders to international trade in the early 1980s was to place an order for twelve enormous ammonia producing factories, which now greatly sustain China's growing population.

Nowadays, industrially prepared foods and genetically modified crops are the new technological driver catalyzing population growth. As we reach our ecological carrying capacity on this planet, time and time again technology has served to raise this capacity. But what happens when we're packed into cities as close together as corn is packed in the fields? What happens to quality of life as the population skyrockets? Some people believe that population growth will eventually limit itself because this is what regularly happens in nature. But in nature, this stabilization comes in the wake of massive death rates which characterize the initial population collapse. This is quite a bleak prospect- now that we have the capacity for thought and concerted population limiting, do we really want to rely on the merciless processes of nature to cut us down?

Rawls' justice principle makes sense in a finite society, or even in one which expands slowly. To redistribute a portion of the wealth and provide safety nets can be rationalized if it is raising the standard of living of portions of society. But resources are limited. Imagine attending classes at Brown if there were twice as many students, or even getting a meal in the dining hall. To simply increase the amount of people is in most cases to fundamentally devalue those resources which we hold so dear. When the world population increases, relatively few people are born into such lives of luxury. Statistically, most births occur on the lower end of the economic spectrum.

So what happens if the 'least well off in society' category becomes increasingly populated? Can we still justify such wealth distribution? Is it really in our interest to detract from our current quality of life to make room for more people? Remember: there is a big difference between wanting to limit future population growth and from withholding resources from those alive today. Rawls' justice principle certainly has its merits, but is it fair to implement it in the light of our growing society? Or can limiting population growth provide a vehicle for continuing to uphold this noble ideal?