Controlling Population Control
With
hopes of easing the mayhem of the new millennium, Richard Branson and Peter
Gabriel pressed Nelson Mandela with a classic idea: to restore global leadership with wisdom. As a result, in 2007, Mandela gathered a group of seasoned global thinkers who called themselves ‘The Elders’. They vowed to embrace the spirit of Mandela’s South African ‘Ubuntu’: “that profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of other human beings.” Private interests were set aside, and the wise men were encouraged “to follow paths they deem right, even if hugely unpopular.” With heaps of issues, and despite their exceptional skills and virtuous intentions, The Elders are not without their controversies: perhaps the most divisive concerning population control. Former head of the World Health Organization, Gro Brundtland, former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, and even archbishop Desmond Tutu have been criticized for their initiatives on population, including intermittent support for what Princeton’s professor Robert George calls the most ‘unsettled and unsettling’ issues in politics: abortion and euthanasia. Population control is employed in various ways, from providing reproductive education to mass genocide. Its political reach affects us all because it deals with the basic right to procreation and is linked to degradations in the environment and business.
Equal consideration
Though there are many ways of dealing with population control, there is one morally competent way that is not always exercised by leaders: equal consideration for the entire human race, even in the continuous struggle to keep infrastructure in line with population numbers. Equal consideration requires respecting the autonomy of other breathing, decisionmaking agents with inalienable rights. But economists, and too many politicians, see people in terms of their algorithms and statistics. Individuals are thus callously and