Abstract
My hope in, and readiness to accept, the establishment of a global despotism that saves the human civilization and humanity as such from extinction relies heavily on the assumption that it matters if we go extinct. It relies on the assumption that it is bad if we go extinct and on the assumption that this is no little thing. Yet, several influential philosophers have argued that it doesn’t matter if we go extinct, and according to some of them it is even desirable that we do. Their arguments, from pessimism, actualism, and deep ecology, are discussed and rejected. However, the claim that we ought to hang around as long as possible comes with an intellectual price. We have to accept what has been nick-named “The Repugnant Conclusion”.
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Notes
- 1.
Bertrand Russell, “The Future of Man”.
- 2.
Bertrand Russell, “The Future of Man”.
- 3.
For a historical review of pessimism, from the seventeenth century and up to the present, see Mara Van der Lugt, Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering.
- 4.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, p. 590.
- 5.
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World, p. 11.
- 6.
David Benatar, p. 61.
- 7.
Derek Parfit, “Equality and Priority”.
- 8.
I discuss this aspect of prioritarianism in Torbjörn Tännsjö, “Utilitarianism or Prioritarianism”.
- 9.
For an overview of actualist or person-affecting moralities, see Nicholas Beckstead, On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future. Timothy Campbell drew my attention to this important dissertation.
- 10.
Arne Naess and George Sessons, 1984, in “The Basic Principles of Deep Ecology”.
- 11.
A speculative possibility is of course that if the human species continues up to the end of our solar system, it can somewhat prolong the time where both human beings and other species remain safely. This possibility has been taken seriously in Kim Jebary and Anders Sandberg, “Ecocentrism and Biosphere Life Extension”.
- 12.
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, OP: http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html.
- 13.
Boucher, J. and C. Osgood, “The Pollyanna Hypothesis”.
- 14.
There exists a vast literature on this, both confirming and questioning the phenomenon. There is no need to go into this in any detail in the present context.
- 15.
Daniel Kahneman has given us many telling but also often exceptional examples of this, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, about this.
- 16.
In Ingmar Person and Julian Savulescu, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement, the authors elaborate on this point.
- 17.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 31.
- 18.
See Alan Fisk and Tage Shakti Rai, Virtuous Violence, about this.
- 19.
I develop this argument in Torbjörn Tännsjö, “Utilitarianism or Prioritarianism”.
- 20.
Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons, p. 395, discusses an example of this kind and claims that it leads to contradiction, but this means that he overstates the (real) problem with the view. For a general discussion about it, see Krister Bykvist, “Violations of Normative Invariance: Some Thoughts on Shifty Oughts”.
- 21.
See Torbjörn Tännsjö, “Conservatism”.
- 22.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1.4.6.4.
- 23.
Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality. An Introduction to Ethics.
- 24.
Torbjörn Tännsjö, From Reasons to Norms. On the Basic Question in Ethics.
- 25.
For example, in Torbjörn Tännsjö, “Who are the Beneficiaries?” Torbjörn Tännsjö, “Why We Ought to Accept the Repugnant Conclusion”, Torbjörn Tännsjö, “Why Derek Parfit Had Reasons to Accept the Repugnant Conclusion” and most recently in Geir Asheim et al., “What We Should Agree on about Repugnant Conclusion?
For an introduction to the discussion on this topic see Gustaf Arrhenius, Jesper Ryberg, and Torbjörn Tännsjö, “The Repugnant Conclusion”.
- 26.
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, ibid., p. 422.
- 27.
Gustaf Arrhenius, “An Impossibility Theorem for Welfarist Axiology”.
- 28.
Toby Ord, The Precipice. Existential Risk and The Future of Humanity, p. 38.
- 29.
I put forward this argument in “Why We Ought to Accept the Repugnant Conclusion” and a similar argument has later been put forward by David Huemer in “In Defense of Repugnance”.
- 30.
Gustaf Arrhenius forthcoming book Population Ethics: The Challenge of Future Generations bears witness to this.
- 31.
See Torbjörn Tännsjö”Why Derek Parfit Had Reasons to Accept the Repugnant Conclusion”, ibid., about this.
- 32.
William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, p. 87.
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Tännsjö, T. (2023). Does It Matter if We Go Extinct?. In: From Despotism to Democracy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5559-6_5
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