James Fanciullo, “Why Prevent Human Extinction?”
Forthcoming, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Why should we prevent human extinction? One reason, which might seem obvious, is that we can expect that future people will have good or valuable lives, or lives with positive well-being or welfare. To see why this matters, imagine that humanity had ended in, say, the year 1900. The great number of people who have led good lives since then—ourselves included (or so I hope!)—would then not have existed, and a great deal of value would have been lost. It seems like a good thing, then, that this didn’t happen. If humans were to go extinct, an analogous point would be true of all future people. A truly immense amount of value would be lost.
To see the importance of well-being in this picture even more clearly, we can imagine a scenario that isn’t so rosy. Specifically, we can imagine a scenario where we knew future people wouldn’t have good lives. So suppose that, for whatever reason, all future people would have truly miserable lives, full of nothing but intense, constant suffering. It would be reasonable to think, and I think right to think, that things would be better here if humanity instead simply went extinct. After all, if these lives would be inevitably, uniformly miserable, with no chance of future improvement, then it’s hard to see how we could prefer humanity’s continued existence to the more merciful alternative of extinction. At the very least, then, it seems very hard to deny that the quality of people’s lives is one key constituent of humanity’s value (or disvalue), and so that it’s one key factor as to why (and whether) we should prevent human extinction.
This thought may lead us to a more general view. Taken to its limit, this line of thinking leads to the idea that the value of humanity’s future existence just is the total amount of goodness contained in future lives. That is, the value of humanity’s future existence is just a matter of the total well-being (or ill-being) of the lives that make it up. And our reasons to prevent extinction are just a matter of whether future lives would have positive well-being, on aggregate. We can call this the “welfare aggregation view.”
Despite the attractive line of reasoning that led to it, many will likely balk at this view. It will probably remind many of cold, utilitarian views on which the only thing of axiological concern is aggregate welfare. These people may insist that, much like other utilitarian views, the welfare aggregation view has a blinkered conception of value, capturing one important source of value at the cost of neglecting others. They might then go on to claim that, while welfare is no doubt one part of what makes humanity’s continued existence good, there are additional values, beyond welfare, that also partly make humanity’s continued existence good. Given just how natural this line of thought is, it’s perhaps unsurprising that several theorists, such as Johann Frick (2017) and Samuel Scheffler (2018), have in fact developed views of this kind. They’ve argued, for instance, that humanity also has “final” value, or (as a separate view) that humanity also has value “in itself,” outside of the value of the lives making it up. On these views, then, while the value of humanity’s continued existence partly consists in the value of future lives, it also partly consists in these “additional values”—such as humanity’s “final” or “intrinsic” value. We can call these views, as a group, “additional value views.” (Of course, there are many possible views of this kind; for now, we can just think of them in terms of the two I’ve just mentioned.)
Additional value views leave us with a broader conception of value than the welfare aggregation view. We can see this by considering an analogy with wonders of nature, great works of art, or cultures. The value of these things, you might think, cannot be entirely explained in terms of the enjoyment people get from them. Instead, the things also seem valuable in themselves, regardless of whether people enjoy them. In the same way, you might think that the value of humanity’s continued existence cannot be entirely explained in terms of whether people enjoy their lives, or whether their lives are, on aggregate, good. Instead, humanity’s continued existence also seems valuable in itself. On additional value views, we can accept this intuitively plausible thought. On the welfare aggregation view, we apparently cannot.
As I see it, and I suspect others will agree, additional value views have greater initial plausibility than the welfare aggregation view. On reflection, though, I think additional value views actually end up seeming the less attractive option. My argument for this is slightly involved, but the basic idea is this: there will inevitably be cases where the value of people’s welfare must be weighed against these views’ proposed additional values. That is, there will inevitably be cases where these two proposed kinds of value come into conflict. I think that additional value views, at best, can offer very little guidance as to how to settle these conflicts (and, at worst, will yield implausible verdicts). In contrast, these conflicts will not arise for the welfare aggregation view, since this view does not posit any additional values. This gives us reason to reject additional value views, and to prefer the welfare aggregation view.
Let me give an example of the kind of conflict I have in mind. Consider three possible scenarios:
GOOD: People continue being born into the indefinite future, with lives that are all moderately high in well-being (the lives are good, worth living).
BAD: People continue being born into the indefinite future, with lives that are all moderately high in ill-being (the lives are bad, not worth living).
NEUTRAL: People continue being born into the indefinite future, half with lives that are moderately high in well-being, and half with lives that are moderately (and correspondingly) high in ill-being.
We can compare each of these outcomes with extinction. Presumably, both of the above approaches—and we ourselves—would agree that GOOD would be better than extinction, and BAD would be worse than extinction. Regarding NEUTRAL: on the welfare aggregation view, NEUTRAL would be equally as good as extinction. And, presumably—since NEUTRAL would contain the putative additional values they posit, on top of neutral total welfare—additional value views will imply that NEUTRAL would be better than extinction (though, I should emphasize, even this is not obvious, given just what additional value theorists explicitly claim). None of these verdicts, at least as I see it, are obviously implausible.
Here, though, is the thing. Even if we grant that additional value views will say that BAD would be worse than extinction, and that NEUTRAL would be better than extinction, the line must be drawn somewhere. Take, for instance, one more possible scenario:
BARELY BAD: People continue being born into the indefinite future, half of which, minus one, have lives that are moderately high in well-being, and half of which, plus one, have lives that are moderately (and correspondingly) high in ill-being.
On the welfare aggregation view, BARELY BAD would be worse than extinction, since the aggregate welfare would be negative. What do additional value views say? It’s unclear. Again, we might grant that they say that BARELY BAD, given it would contain their putative additional values, would be better than extinction. Of course, even here, some may object: should we really prefer that this one additional person lives a bad life, a life that isn’t worth living, just as a means to securing humanity’s putative additional value? Setting this aside, though, there is a deeper worry. This is that we could repeat this exercise, and consider increasingly, barely worse scenarios. (In each successive scenario, one additional person would have a life that was bad, and one less person would have a life that was good.) At some point, additional value views will have to say that we have gone from an outcome that’s better than extinction, to an outcome that’s not better than extinction. And ultimately, proponents of these views don’t seem to have any way of justifying a claim that, at this particular outcome, rather than any other, the disvalue of negative welfare suddenly outweighs their putative additional values.
Certainly, all of this is very quick (and if you’re interested in the details, check out my paper—it’s open access!). But the general point is this. Additional value views, at the very least, do not seem to tell us enough about the additional values they posit. We can ask, for instance, how much additional value humanity’s continued existence is supposed to have, how this value compares to the value of welfare, and what happens when these values conflict. While the lack of clear answers here is one issue for the additional value theorist, the more worrying issue, as I see it, is that it’s unclear what could ultimately justify any particular answers they might give. The answers, it seems, are bound to seem arbitrary. Now, to be perfectly clear: even if I’m right about all this, I don’t take myself to have shown that additional value views must be false. For all I’ve said, I admit, an additional value view may still end up being true. What I take my arguments to show, though, is that we should be particularly wary of these views, despite their initial appeal. Without further justification, additional value views themselves may face extinction.
References
Frick, J. (2017). “On the Survival of Humanity.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47: 344-367.
Scheffler, S. (2018). Why Worry About Future Generations? Oxford: Oxford University Press.