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Global risks and population policy

Population policy in the sense of the active and targeted reduction of future life years is a potential mitigation strategy for global risks. We argue that even though population policy is almost certainly effective in principle, it is not necessarily practically viable or desirable, for three reasons. First, in order to be as effective as possible, population policy would necessarily (also) target Western developed nations, but debates on population policy, paradoxically, seem to focus on developing countries. Second, reducing future life years is potentially a great moral burden because it means reducing the total amount of future happiness; systematically preventing people from coming into existence is a difficult moral problem. Third, population policy as a risk mitigation strategy is somewhat self-defeating because the successful mitigation of some risk by means of population policy reduces the very utility of mitigating that risk. These three problem areas do not make population policy categorically unacceptable, but any use of population policy for the mitigation of global risks is in need of strong and evidence-based justification. Given that the resources available for mitigating global risks are limited, we believe that they should be used on more promising risk mitigation approaches and strategies.