Oh get off your high horse for just a moment. Has anyone in your circle lost a child to dysentery, or are they also just as privileged? The beauty of relativism is that it applies to everyone. Claiming your moral superiority over me is no different than me claiming my superiority over Romney or an Ethiopian claiming his over you.
I wasn't claiming to be part of that circle myself, nor was I claiming they were morally superior. I was defending the notion that different people can choose to give back in different ways, and that accepting lower pay in order to have a more meaningful job is no less valid a way than donating money. I was never the one who claimed that if a person doesn't do
this one very specific action that I do (donating money) they are immoral.
Don't have (biological) children. If you already do, fine, of course an existing person has inherent value. But don't have more. If you want to raise a child, adopt.
While we're on the topic of value systems, this point is one I take issue with. It is valid if you assert that environmental health is more important than human happiness, but I tend to think all systems of value, ethics, and morality exist solely in relation to humanity. I would gladly see the entire planet go up in flames if it ensured the continued survival of the human race. I would voluntarily push an entire species to extinction to save an entire ethnic group. I value people more than nature, not solely because I'm innately anthropocentric but because I think it is people who have made up the value system in the first place and thus people who get to decide how to apply it.
Your point about population control is a good one, if interpreted in the context of "more people will reduce the quality of life of those people who are already here". It seems less defensible to me if interpreted in the light of "people are inherently bad because they consume resources". The former need not be a mandate for population control if quality of life does not go down. The latter requires population control a priori.
First, I believe that anything with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain deserves recognition as being part of a system of morality. I doubt it is what you mean, but it sounds like you would approve of torturing animals so long as it amused at least one human. For that matter, if we get to "decide how to apply it", wouldn't that suggest that we needn't have any value system at all, and that if any person decides on me-my-mine that is neither good nor bad?
Second, I meant it in terms of "more people will reduce the quality of life of those people who are already here" anyway.
Remember the whole infinite growth on a finite planet thing? Us humans having children, that's the growth. Its billions of individual couples who want to have the experience of producing and raising children. All it takes is an average of 2.2 children per couple, and you have exponential growth.
Even as frugal and environmentally conscious people, we still - as you just pointed out - consume far more resources per person than the third world, and when you factor in the relative resource use, US effective population growth is many times higher than that of the developing world. If we tend to use roughly 20 times the resources, than having "just" the replacement level of 2 kids is equivalent to having 40 kids - ones that aren't likely to die of dysentery before they have a chance to have 2 (40) kids of their own (each).
There would be plenty to go around if we kept up economic development but halted population growth (actually, James made an entirely feasible argument that we have too many people already), but currently, even in the developed US, population is still increasing (not considering immigration).
Of all the things in my list, that is the biggest impact.
I put them in the order they were in for a reason - they are, more or less, in order of significance.
