As I reported in this space, India and China, which together account for about 3 billion people are both below the replacement rate, which is about 2.1 children/women. India's population will continue to grow in the next decade, because the population is relatively young.
The bottom line is that the Earth's population will not double or triple.
Your proposed definition of morality of course, in extremis would not show respect for future generations; it would eliminate them.
As a practical matter, the planet was well beyond its carrying capacity for most of last century, and for all of this century. The population will not triple or even double.
It is well understood that meeting human development goals - i.e. addressing poverty - tends to reduce birth rates. This is why countries like Japan and Finland have long been below replacement rates. Without immigration, the US would be in the same place.
Population reduction via addressing poverty would have been, in the way I spent my overly long life, the way that I would have preferred. I now expect population reduction to occur primarily by tragedy:
The key to addressing poverty is access to clean and sustainable energy with high mass and land efficiency. In general, humanity is rather clueless about this point. The prevailing attitude is to providing energy unreliably, with high mass and land intensity, that is, using so called "renewable energy." This of course is a reactionary idea to return to the state of affairs that prevailed until the early 19th century. In many ways it is worse than what prevailed in the early 19th century, since it is a call to return to dependence on the weather precisely at a time when we have radically destabilized the weather.
Of course, this idea is absurd and predictably has failed, is failing and will continue to fail.
Things, however, do not need to be this way. I do see some hope for change however; in my long life I never, not once, saw an activist group quite like the one described in the OP.
One of the two sons I irresponsibly parented has announced his intention to participate in engineering the solution for which the activists in this case are calling. He's a very, very, very, very bright young man, with whom one can converse quite lucidly about energy and mass flows, thermodynamics, heat transfer, heat networks, materials science as well as about ethics. He has announced that his reasoning for choosing his career is to address, among other things like climate change, human poverty.
I take him at his word, since I know him better than anyone.
I was against having a second child; my wife prevailed on me to change my mind. I'm glad she did, and not just because, as Shakespeare had it in Lear "there was much merriment in the making," but because I more than a little pridefully believe that people like my son, a member of this young and exciting rising generation, have it in them to save the world.
At the end of my life, I retain some shred of optimism for the future. I guess I'm just a tired old liberal who holds on, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, some respect for humanity. Answers exist. We only need to embrace them.
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