How Many People Should There Be?

Whether climate change, scarcity of resources, urbanization, securing pensions or the future of work – hardly any public debate can do without reference to demographic issues and the scenario of a growing world population. The groundbreaking work of Derek Parfit has established the philosophical field of population ethics. It reflects such scenarios in a philosophically highly differentiated manner and tries to thereby contribute to finding good responses to urgent global challenges. One major challenge that has been much discussed in the Recent literature concerns the reasons we have, and the costs we should Be willing to bear, to secure the long-term survival of humanity and prevent human extinction.

Within a short period of time, population ethics has had a remarkable intra- and interdisciplinary effect. Trying to solve questions of population ethics has resulted in important and far-reaching developments in normative ethics. And it has a become a field where philosophy collaborates fruitfully with other sciences, especially economics.

This colloquium presents latest philosophical contributions to population ethics and discusses their relevance for publicly discussed questions.

Speakers:

• Elisabeth Finneron-Burns (Western Ontario)
• Johann Frick (Princeton)
• Gustaf Arrhenius (Stockholm)

The colloquium is part of the 11. congress of the Society for Analytic Philosoph (GAP.11) and organized by Tim Henning (Mainz) and Christian Seidel (KIT).