Responding to my post on how the government has no legitimate interest in people's reproductive choices, Philosophy etc asserts:
That can't be right. It would clearly be a bad thing if the entire human race died out, for example.To which I think I have to echo Moore and ask "would it"?
I'm not trying to make the deep green ecological argument here. Rather, I think its all down to the manner of our passing. It would be a Bad Thing if the human race was killed. It would be a Bad Thing if there was pain and suffering. But if OTOH the entire human race freely decided to off themselves quickly and painlessly tonight, I fail to see how that would be a moral problem. It would be tragic, in the sense that that choice would rather permanently foreclose others, and it would presumably make the universe a poorer, emptier place. But I don't actually see what moral reason we could possibly have to object, or what moral basis anyone would have to justify intervention. People's lives are their own, to live and die as they please. Likewise, if people decided that they just couldn't be bothered anymore, and chose the slow extinction of childlessness (think Children of Men, only voluntary), then again, I see no moral reason to object, and no basis for intervention by those who disagree. The survival of actual people might justify something. But the "survival of the human race" contrary to the wishes of actual people doesn't justify anything at all.
Stepping away from questioning the stakes and addressing Richard's actual point, I'm not denying that individual choices have aggregate effects, or that government can often have legitimate interests in preventing those effects and thereby in implementing policy. Climate change is an example of such an effect, stemming from all our individual choices to drive cars and use electricity (or, in NZ, from the choices of a few to enrich themselves by growing too many cows), and I support action on that. But the core of liberalism is the belief that there are some areas in which no government intervention can ever be justified. What you believe. Whether you worship. Who you spend your life with. Who you fuck. These choices are intensely personal and define our lives for us. Respect for our choices and our right to direct the course of our own lives means keeping government out of those areas at all costs.
People's reproductive choices are in that zone. Quite apart from their vital importance in many people's life-plans, they are also a matter of our fundamental sovereignty over our own bodies. Interfering in those choices is deeply invasive (often literally so), and would make life unbearable - a point frequently made in dystopian fiction.
So, while government can interfere in a lot of things, I deny in principle that it can legitimately interfere in the domain of reproductive choice. Such interference might very well be "socially beneficial"; so might "encouraging" marriage or adherence to a particular religion. It doesn't matter. It would simply be wrong, a gross invasion of choices which are purely the domain of the people concerned. And that is true no matter what the ultimate aim or supposed stakes are.
