Why culling Earth's human population isn't rational
I. In a discussion on Facebook tangentially related to my last blog post (insofar as it was about how political views aren't rational for a lot of people), my friend Briana made the following comment: I've never seen it [politics] as rational... there is an ideal that it can be, but I've never seen it in practice. Otherwise, we'd have started culling our own populations by now. I objected pithily that we don't need to cull humans because humans are capable of using birth control (including the decision not to reproduce), to which she elaborated: No, we cull other animals because we don't mind killing them from a moral standpoint (i.e. we are less repulsed emotionally). If we did mind as much as we do for ourselves, we'd find other ways to manage their populations like we do for ourselves. Culling is the rational choice (most economical, quickest and easiest). Finding other ways to appeal to our personal security that are less effective, ta...