an essay on the population control

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) demonstrated perfectly the propensity of each generation to overthrow the fondest schemes of the last when he published An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), in which he painted the gloomiest picture imaginable of the human prospect.

Population control refers to the practice of intentionally managing the number of inhabitants in a region to mitigate social and environmental issues. Rapid population growth can strain resources, intensify poverty, and exacerbate environmental degradation.

reduce the overall global population, but also limit the amount of ecosystem services used globally and allow for a higher quality of life for the remaining human population. Keywords : climate change, energy overuse, human population growth, reduction in population, ethics, policy, human rights.

An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter II, p. 19 in Oxford World's Classics reprint. Malthus also saw that societies through history had experienced at one time or another epidemics, famines, or wars: events that masked the fundamental problem of populations overstretching their resource limitations:

An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condor cet, and Other Writers in 1798.

However, with a title formulated to be deliberately provocative, political theorist Diana Coole unflinchingly tackles the notion of population control and makes a welcome and persuasive argument, subject to appropriate ethical safeguards, for its inclusion on the political agenda.

The focus is on the contemporary philosophical discussion of population policies, or more specifically on whether one can justify policies that aim to limit the size of populations. This is a normative investigation and it is the ethical justification we are interested in analysing and scrutinising.

An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus (1798) is a book widely viewed as having profound impact on the biological and social sciences by recognizing basic biophysical, demographic, and economic principles that can lead to population growth and possible collapse.

In this essay I differentiate between (a) coercive methods of controlling population growth (e.g., a one-child policy), and (b) passive methods of population control (e.g., family planning).

This essay will endeavor to show what might be gained if these different ap-proaches were brought into dialogue and set in an international and compara-tive perspective. It will describe population control as a precociously interna-tional movement that served as a platform for an array of ideological projects.