What exactly is wrong with human extinction? 2020

Talk to St Andrews Philosophy Society, 2017

Most people agree that human extinction would be bad. But 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. I explore the approaches to extinction risk of two moral theories: Scanlonian Contractualism and Rule Utilitarianism. I argue that even the most consequentialist-friendly Contractualism and the most moderate Rule Utilitarianism weight the importance of extinction risks very differently. 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 – including the possibility that human survival has a final value over-and-above the value of individual lives, and pluralist views that combine Contractualism and Utilitarianism.

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.

Extinction, 2023

This review provides an overview of the ethics of extinctions with a focus on the Western analytical environmental ethics literature. It thereby gives special attention to the possible philosophical grounds for Michael Soulé's assertion that the untimely 'extinction of populations and species is bad'. Illustrating such debates in environmental ethics, the guiding question for this review concerns whyor whenanthropogenic extinctions are bad or wrong, which also includes the question of when that might not be the case (i.e. which extinctions are even desirable). After providing an explanation of the disciplinary perspective taken (section "Introduction"), the concept of extinction and its history within that literature are introduced (section "Understanding extinction"). Then, in section "Why (or when) might anthropogenic extinctions be morally problematic?", different reasons for why anthropogenic extinctions might be morally problematic are presented based on the loss of species' value, harm to nonhuman individuals, the loss of valuable biological variety and duties to future generations. This section concludes by also considering cases where anthropogenic extinctions might be justified. Section "How to respond to extinctions?" then addresses a selection of topics concerning risks and de-extinction technologies. Finally, the section on "Extinction studies" introduces other viewpoints on the ethics of extinction from the extinction studies literature, followed by the "Conclusion". Impact statement This is an overview review article of the ethics of species extinctions drawing on the environmental ethics literature. While most people seem to believe that extinctions are morally bad or wrong, no systematic review of the moral philosophical literature that can support or question such intuitions on this subject matter has been provided to date, which is the gap that this review article aims to fill.

This paper explores what could be wrong with the fact of human extinction. I first present four reasons why we might consider human extinction to be wrong: (1) it would prevent millions of people from being born; (2) it would mean the loss of rational life and civilization; (3) it would cause existing people to suffer pain or death; (4) it would involve various psychological traumas. I argue that looking at the question from a contractualist perspective, only reasons and are admissible. I then consider what implications this limitation on reasons has for the wrongfulness of various forms of human extinction.

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

The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy. Vol. 3. Human Rights. Zeynep Davran & Stephen Voss (Eds.). Ankara: Philosophical Society of Turkey, 2007, 179-83.

Natural species are the primary expressions and repositories of organic nature’s order, creativity, and diversity. They represent thousands of millions of years of evolution and achievement. They show incredible functional, organizational, and behavioral complexity. Every species, like every person, is unique, with its own history and destiny. When people take so many resources or degrade so much habitat that another species is driven extinct, we have taken or damaged too much, and brought a valuable and meaningful story to an untimely end.

2006

No one really knows the rate by which species go extinct by the hands of human beings. The estimations differ,1 but they seem to agree that it is a matter of extreme proportions. According to the Worldwatch Institute, we are now experiencing the worst case of mass extinction since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago.2 For most of us, this is a depressing insight and many people seem to agree that to knowingly cause or significantly contribute to the extinction of entire species is (at least prima facie) not only bad, but morally wrong. For someone with a philosophic curiosity, the question that immediately arises is: 'Why is it wrong’? Intuitively it seems obviously true that it is wrong, but why is it wrong, and how does it fit with formal ethical theories? These questions are more complicated than they may seem at the first glance and they have been the object of a heated debate among both ethicists and environmentalists. This fact alone should be reason enough to pursue the question, but there are other reasons too. The clearness of and the wide agreement about the intuition that what we are doing is at least prima facie wrong, makes the extinction problem an excellent test case that any theory should be able to deal with in order to be taken seriously as a moral theory. Another quite obvious motivation for studying the question of why it is prima facie wrong to cause extinction, is that a better understanding of the ethical aspects of the extinction problem would increase our chances of dealing with the problem. Bryan G. Norton points out that environmentalists often put much effort in trying to explain why a species is instrumentally important for human beings, and they often use different approaches. This is a ‘strategy’ that usually gives a bad impression however. It also makes it harder to reach the common goal of saving the species.3 Failures of the environmental movement that can be traced back to the difficulties in agreeing on why different species and ecosystems are important enough for us humans to be worth saving, leads Bryan G. Norton to conclude that we need what he labels “a coherent rationale for environmental protection.” This is underlined by Lori Gruen and Dale Jamieson who declare that: It is ironic that the destruction of biodiversity, which may be the greatest of human crimes against nature, is also one of the least understood. We do not have a good philosophical account of why biodiversity matters, and the steps that would have to be taken to protect it are, in the present climate, politically impossible.5 Both Norton’s and Gruen/Jamieson’s remarks, tell us that there is quite a great deal of work to be done in the field, and they also tell us that the work is very important. Finally, the problem of human-caused extinction also seems to be a good battleground for the more general question of what should count as criteria for moral standing. Actually, most of the ethical debate surrounding the extinction problem is concerned with this question, and this will also be salient in this investigation. The present debate around this question is mostly performed in polemic between advocates of holistic theories on the one hand, and advocates of individualistic theories on the other. The advocates of the holistic approach claim that we have moral duties directly to the species. They are primarily concerned that without a direct moral standing for the species, we will have to depend on its the instrumental value for us humans. The individualists on the other hand claim that only individuals can be moral objects. They are sceptical to the holistic approach, and to the possibility of ascribing moral standing to species. They especially find it difficult to comprehend how species can have morally relevant interests for us to consider. This book is the first part of an investigation that will scrutinise both the holistic approach and the individualistic approaches.

Social Choice and Welfare, 2020

Ramsey famously condemned discounting “future enjoyments” as “ethically indefensible”. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion which, when social choice is utilitarian, implies giving equal weight to all individuals’ utilities. By contrast, Arrow (Contemporary economic issues. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1999a; Discounting and Intergenerational Effects, Resources for the Future Press, Washington DC, 1999b) accepted, perhaps reluctantly, what he called Koopmans’ (Econometrica 28(2):287–309, 1960) “strong argument” implying that no equitable preference ordering exists for a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility streams. Here we derive an equitable utilitarian objective for a finite population based on a version of the Vickrey–Harsanyi original position, where there is an equal probability of becoming each person. For a potentially infinite population facing an exogenous stochastic process of extinction, an equitableextinction bia...

Environmental Ethics, 2019

Existence value refers to the value humans ascribe to the existence of something, regard­less of whether it is or will be of any particular use to them. This existence value based on preference satisfaction should be taken into account in evaluating activities that come with a risk of species extinction. There are two main objections. The first is that on the preference satisfaction interpretation, the concept lacks moral importance because satisfying people’s preferences may involve no good or well-being for them. However, existence value can be based on a restricted version of the preference satisfaction theory, which is not vulnerable to the skeptical arguments about the link between preference satisfaction and well-being. The second objection is that even if preference satisfaction can be linked to well-being, understanding existence value in terms of individual preference satisfaction is incoherent, because existence value reflects disinterested preferences that involve no bene...