OwlFancier posted:

I suppose you can argue that population control in ways other than "turn into a rich western country and have your population decline itself" is probably a complete nonstarter because the other ways introduce a shitload of direct problems and/or are just genocide.

But on an individual level I certainly think it is an objective good to just... not have kids, for shitloads of reasons but undeniably you are removing at least one whole human's worth of consumption from a future where consumption might actually be quite difficult to guarantee for a lot of people, and you're doing it without hurting anyone, so it's quite hard to object to.

It is certainly possible that the planet could host a lot more people but whether it can do so in the long term given the problems that human resource consumption is already causing... I genuinely don't know. So I would be hesitant to suggest that the planet can sustain as many people as we can put on it when human action can create delayed and potentially very serious problems for its habitability.