Individual liberty would guarantee persons the right to have as many children as they wanted, while environmental protection might limit the number of children persons could have in order to prevent such results of overpopulation as food shortages and depletion of other vital resources.
In my opinion without a sustainable environment, we will not have individual liberty. Therefore, I say Environmental Protection comes first.
Kirk, this is a really good question and hope many respond and will be interested in reading more answers!
Dear sir
Link may be help you
Appreciate your efforts… best wishes http://www.debate.org/opinions/do-you-think-the-rights-of-the-individual-are-more-important-than-national-safety
It has to be a balance, like in most things. You won't have any individual liberty (privileges) without a viable environment, and at the same time, you can't have a viable environment without individual responsibility.
It's really nothing new. Societies for all of time have developed their moral codes, their mores, for exactly this reason. The local mores have always aimed to make it socially unacceptable to do what is detrimental for the majority. Therefore, relating specifically to your question today, practices such as having huge families, in today's reality, become frowned upon. And it's not hard to understand why. In many parts of the world today, families with too many children cannot sustain themselves, cannot afford to provide to their children what the children need to prosper, let alone eat, and therefore become a burden on the rest of society.
When the majority understand this fact of life, the moral code of that society adapts. Large families become not something to feel proud of, but something irresponsible and reckless, and a drain of resources. O tempora, o mores.
Having individual rights, people can create safety community. Everyone has right to create better condition for themselves. It can help the community to be safety and to be a better condition. On the other side when the people don't have rights to do as they wish, they many find the solution in wrong ways by harming others and it could create worse condition in community.
I believe individual rights are more important than national safety, because without individual rights, our national safety is meaningless Paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin, those who would give up safety for liberty deserve neither safety nor liberty. I believe that a nation without individual rights is not a free nation, and on its face is not a safe nation to begin with. Therefore, I believe that the rights of the individual take precedence over national safety.
This is a false choice: If Women were allowed to have Full Individual Liberty (equal with men) and able to exercise their full reproductive rights throughout the world many problems, including environmental protection, would be greatly alleviated. The rate of human population growth would slow, educational levels would rise, economic and health conditions would improve, and environmental problems would be less severe.
Your liberty would be equal to theirs - that's what "equal with men" in my response means.
Indeed, individual liberties if left unchecked will be misused to the detriment of the environment. An old-fashioned adage in Ghana says 'Cut your coat according to your size'. Our population size must correlate with our resources. Liberties of people should be offered but regulated to save the globe.
Let's hope there is a happy medium. Can't we meet in the middle? Let's compromise. Does it have to be 11 children or no plastics at all?
Can't we have 1 or 2 children and use some plastics, but recycle them?
As a general rule of thumb, when there are two competing ethical principals, once a decision has been made which is going to be prioritized (this is done according to the rules of whatever society you are dealing with - so, by vote, by regulator, by executive order) you seek to infringe the other as little as possible while still getting the desired outcome. So, if protection of the planet is deemed to take priority over individual reproductive liberty, you don't automatically ban having children. You start with education: can you get the desired result by educating people why reproductive causes environmental problems? If not, you turn to persuasion: can you utilize methods of (non-coercive) persuasion to convince people to have less children? Then, not necessarily in this order, you employ other strategies: taxes, stigma, context alteration (for example, changing dwelling size that so that more than 1 child would be uncomfortable), etc. Only as a last resort would you actually ban having children (either at all or above more than X level). This is termed employing the least restrictive alternative, and it is commonly used in public health policy settings.
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