[reflexive]

There is an implicit assumption that maximizing the number of people who can be squeezed on to the planet is "good" for humanity. I have never heard a reasonable justification for this. Anyone who's taken a long car trip in an automobile packed to maximum passenger capacity will intuitively understand the counterargument.

I'm more sympathetic to the idea of maintaining a population level within which people can live with some amount of dignity e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones#Inscriptio...

[collyw]

I sometimes wonder if curing cancer and other diseases is such a noble cause. More people consuming more of the finite resources that we have. Its a difficult question, and I am thinking of lots of outliers as I type this. Extending a 70 year olds life by a few years is different from curing a child leukemia sufferer.

[solipsism]

The only difficulty is deciding how to define "noble". Such questions appear hard because we vacillate between many different optimization functions, and in conversation we lack precision.