My Study Of The Ethical Thoughts In Malthus's Theory Of Population

Malthus's Theory of Population has far-reaching effects . People have various opinions about it and debate endlessly. The academia mainly discourse upon it from the aspect of politics and economy, but this article expound and analyze it from another aspect-the ethic.The first part of the article expatiates the main contents of the ethical thoughts in Malthus's Theory of Population. Malthus studied population from the aspect of pursuing the welfare and the self-consummation of the mankind,and the social advancement. But the two kinds of evils-crime and povertythat engendered by the principle of the population multiplication blocked this process, so the human being must obey the basic ethics that restricts our multiplication. Malthus, who opposed "the law of helping the poverty" which is being carried out in Great Britain and advocated the combination of controlling the population and developing the production, took on the value tropism that "limit the multiplication and help the poverty".The second part is the evaluation .One is its historical progress. Malthus reviewed the harm that would be brought by the population multiplication and reminded us to take consideration of the ethic in the harmonious development of population, resource and environment, from the stance of the utilitarianism. The other, undoubtedly, is its historical limitation. Malthus tried his best to defend the rationality of the existence of the capitalism.The third part dissertate its practical significance. Malthus's ethical thoughts of population warns us that if we cared our welfare, we should survey the relationship between human and the nature. The moral requirement of our country on the population multiplication is: limit the quantity of population and improve the quality of population. The ethic that human being should coexist with the nature requires that China must take the policy that population, resource and environment develop harmoniously. And China should change its mode of helping the poverty and fulfill the scientific developmental concept that bases on the human himself. This article also makes some correlative ethical analysis of the population development in Jiangxi province.