Would Human Extinction Be Morally Wrong?

Daily Philosophy, 2024

The total extinction of human beings would not matter because with the extinction would go all values that could makes sense of it mattering, of it being a good or a bad thing. This arguably tells us about the source of normative values, how they arise and are brought into existence. That it is humans, persons, that are the locus of values.

2013

The paper's two theses are: First, that the historical and philosophical roots of argumentation are in ethics and politics, and not in any formal ideal, be it mathematical, scientific or other. Furthermore, argumentation is a human invention, deeply tied up with the emergence of democracy in ancient Greece. Second, that argumentation presupposes and advances concurrently humanistic values, especially the autonomy of the individual to think and decide in a free and uncoerced manner.

Biology & Philosophy

C. Schmidt-Petri and M. Schefczyk (eds.), Proceedings of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, KIT Scientific Publishing, 2020

Most people agree that human extinction would be bad. But competing moral theories disagree about why it would be bad and how bad it would be. These differences don’t emerge in implausible tales where one option leads to certain extinction. But they come to the fore in more mundane cases involving small risks of extinction. Extinction risks raise difficulties for both Consequentialists and Non-Consequentialists. Non-Consequentialists have difficulty explaining why extinction would be bad even if it harms no one. Consequentialists can easily explain the badness of extinction by citing the loss of future human happiness, but they then confront the objection that (due to the enormous number of future people who might otherwise exist) even the smallest risk of extinction must dominate our present ethical thinking. In this paper, I illustrate these differences between Consequentialism and Non-Consequentialism by asking how extinction risks impact on two representative theories: Rule Utilitarianism and Scanlonian Contractualism. I argue that even the most Consequentialist-friendly Contractualism must weigh the importance of extinction risks very differently from even the most moderate Rule Utilitarianism. Thinking about extinction thus puts pressure on Derek Parfit’s recent argument that Contractualism and Consequentialism can be reconciled. I close by exploring alternative approaches to extinction risk, including the possibility that human survival has some final value over-and-above the value of individual lives, and pluralist views that combine Contractualism and Utilitarianism.

Argument & Computation, 2021

Argumentation schemes have played a key role in our research projects on computational models of natural argument over the last decade. The catalogue of schemes in Walton, Reed and Macagno’s 2008 book, Argumentation Schemes, served as our starting point for analysis of the naturally occurring arguments in written text, i.e., text in different genres having different types of author, audience, and subject domain (genetics, international relations, environmental science policy, AI ethics), for different argument goals, and for different possible future applications. We would often first attempt to analyze the arguments in our corpora in terms of those schemes, then adapt schemes as needed for the goals of the project, and in some cases implement them for use in computational models. Among computational researchers, the main interest in argumentation schemes has been for use in argument mining by applying machine learning methods to existing argument corpora. In contrast, a primary goa...

Utilitas

In this article I make two main critiques of Kaczmarek and Beard's article ‘Human Extinction and Our Obligations to the Past’. First, I argue that there is an ambiguity in what it means to realise the benefits of a sacrifice and that this ambiguity affects the persuasiveness of the authors’ arguments and responses to various objections to their view. Second, I argue that their core argument against human extinction depends on an unsupported assumption about the existence and importance of existential benefits.

Philosophia

Earth is currently undergoing rapid, massive, and in many ways unprecedented environmental changes. Over the course of the twentieth century, the human population increased 300% while the size of the global economy ballooned 2400% (McNeill & Engelke, 2014). Industrial expansion in agriculture, manufacturing, fishing, mining, and energy production and use have radically transformed the land, seas, and atmosphere. The impacts of human activities are so pervasive-chemically, geophysically, biologically, ecologically-that the International Commission on Stratigraphy is considering formally recognizing the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, with its formal base around 1950. This Great Acceleration in human numbers and economic activity, which continues unabated, has been accompanied by pervasive ecological degradation and huge declines in Earth's biodiversity (IPBES, 2019). Across all taxa, vertebrate populations are estimated to have declined ~ 60% since 1970. There are more than 125,000 species on the IUCN Red List of threatened and endangered species, including 40% of assessed amphibians, 34% of conifers, 33% of reef building corals, 26% of mammals and 14% of birds. Current extinction rates are estimated to be 1000 times above the baseline rate and the synergistic impacts of habitat loss, pollution, overharvesting, and climate change are trending toward even faster biological depletion (Pimm et al., 2014). The consensus among conservation biologists is that we are entering a period of mass species extinction, the sixth in the 600-million-year history of multicellular life on Earth and the first to be knowingly caused by a single species: us. In recent decades, excellent work has been done in environmental ethics, environmentally informed political philosophy, and philosophy of biology related to spe

Argumentation 36 (4), 2022

This paper deals in detail with a fairly recent philosophical debate centered around the ability of the theory of natural selection to account for those phenotypical changes which can be argued to make organisms better adapted to their environments. The philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor started the debate by claiming that natural selection cannot do the job. He follows two main lines of argumentation. One is based on an alleged conceptual defect in the theory, the other on alleged empirical problems in it as well as empirical alternatives to it. Four philosophers and two biologists respond in a way that displays what might easily be described as fallacious. The paper relies on the ideal model of critical discussion of pragma-dialectics to offer a step-by-step analysis of the whole debate, which extended for four issues of the London Review of Books, from October 2007 through January 2008. This pragma-dialectical analysis is carried out by constant reference to the various questions (problems, issues) that arise in the debate. The analysis includes as much detail as possible both in Fodor's original argument and in the critics' various comments as well as Fodor's replies along two rounds of debate. Since a simple negative evaluation in terms of fallacies is out of the question in view of the proved argumentative accomplishments of the participants, an alternative explanation is offered: the undeniable derailments in strategic maneuvering are due to the fact that, whilst ostensibly discussing the theory of natural selection (and trying, fruitlessly, to discuss evolutionary psychology as well), Fodor's detractors are worried by an underlying issue, namely, the dangers of discussing the merits and demerits of natural selection as a theory of evolution in a venue as exposed to the general public as the London Review of Books, given the religiously inspired movements that threaten the teaching of evolutionary biology in schools.