But why is it good and necessary for the earth to have more than 4 million people on it? Sure, from the perspective of people in industrial societies, we think larger human populations are better, but that moral/ethical standard is a product of social life in an industrial society. Societies with large populations are not "better" than societies with small populations, unless you arbitrarily use the standards of industrial societies to decide what's better.
> To go back to a hunter-gathering society now, you would have to identify
> which 394 million of the six billion were to be killed, like Pol Pot did
> when he pushed the Cambodians out of Phnom Phen into the countryside.
As I have said many times on this list, when I bring up these examples of human cultural diversity, I am not making an ethical argument that we should live one way or the other. Rather, I am pointing out again and again that (a) social relations generate certain patterns of moral/ethical standards, (b) those socially produced standards are falsely treated as universal, and (c) the actual social relations that produced the standards become obscured. (For Marxists playing along, this argument should sound pretty familiar!) --To be as dramatic as James, I'll argue that most significant source of human misery in the world is people like Bin Laden or Bush who are certain they're right and assume that their ethical/moral value system is or should be universal.
Miles