Todd May was an advisor to NBC’s recent television sitcom The Good Place. He is a philosopher and one of the original contributors to the New York Times philosophy blog, “The Stone.” He currently teaches philosophy at Warren Wilson College.
Below, Todd shares five key insights from his new book, Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times. Listen to the audio version—read by Todd himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Human extinction is a moral issue.
Suppose you were thinking of having a child. And suppose you somehow discovered that your kid was destined to cause irreparable harm in the world when they grew up—that they would be a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Pol Pot, or some such. But you knew, you just knew, that you would love this kid anyway, even when they became an adult that caused all this harm. Wouldn’t you have an obligation, a moral obligation, not to have the kid? It wouldn’t be enough that you would love them or that there are others around them who would love them as well. You would be morally obliged to forego having that child.
Now, suppose that all of us human beings were to give birth to kids who, when they grew up, would cause irreparable harm to the world. They would not only torture one another in small ways, they would also cause enormous suffering to the world around them: the non-human world of animals and the environment. Suppose that there just wouldn’t be enough on the other side of the moral scale to balance it all out. The good they would bring into the world would be outweighed by the harm and suffering they would cause. Wouldn’t that be a reason, perhaps an overriding reason, for none of us to have kids?
Sure, sooner or later, the human species will go extinct. It’s inevitable. But there’s a moral question we need to ask: Should we go extinct? Are we morally obliged to erase our future existence from the planet?
2. We actually do contribute a lot to the world.
The good news is that there are things we bring to the world that no other animal can, at least to the degree that we do. Here’s a simple one: happiness. Of course, many animals are capable of happiness: dogs tail-wag, cats purr, and other animals seem to, well, smile. But it’s different for human beings. We can be happy about accomplishing a project that we’ve worked on, having our sports team win, or even thinking about future happiness. So far as we know, other animals can’t do that, or at least not very much. So, we bring happiness into the world. To be sure, we also bring unhappiness in our disappointments and regrets. But for most of us, the happiness we bring over the course of our lives outweighs the unhappiness.
“The world would be impoverished in significant ways if we went extinct.”
But there’s more than just happiness. We bring a certain depth to the world through our enjoyment and creation of art and beauty generally, our engagement in science, and our use of reason to seek to understand ourselves and our surroundings. If we value these things—and surely most of us do—then our being here contributes something important. The world would be impoverished in significant ways if we went extinct.
And there’s more still. We’re creatures who can envision and create lives for ourselves. We craft our lives in ways that other animals can’t. The world would lose something if it no longer had a species whose members could reflectively consider who they are and mold life journeys accordingly.
3. But we also cause a lot of harm and suffering.
On average, roughly 130 million pigs per year are slaughtered in the United States. Add to that eight billion chickens and 32 million cows. Each American consumes, on average, one-third of a pig, 24 chickens, and a cow yearly. Assuming that a typical American lives around 75 years (65 of which are taken up with meat consumption), this is equivalent to nearly 22 pigs, 1,560 chickens, and 65 cows. Granted, the U.S. is a meat-consuming society. However, other societies, especially India and China, are increasing their meat-eating rapidly.
How are these animals treated at the factory farms on which they’re raised? Let’s take pigs, an intelligent species, for example. Here’s a description from the MSPCA-Angell, an animal welfare group: “On factory farms, piglets are taken away from their mothers after just three to four weeks. They are then crowded into metal-barred and concrete-floored pens in giant warehouses where they will live until they are separated to be raised for breeding or meat. More than one million pigs die annually just during transport to slaughter, and as many as 10 percent of pigs are ‘downers,’ animals who are so ill or injured that they are unable to stand and walk on their own. Factory farmed male piglets are frequently castrated without anesthesia or pain relief…” And so on. And that’s just pigs, and just factory farms.
In addition to factory farming, there’s deforestation, cruel and needless scientific testing on animals, and, of course, the climate crisis. All of these cause deep suffering among the non-human animals with whom we share the planet. Many other animals, especially predatory ones, kill their prey in often very painful ways. But nobody matches human beings when it comes to the scope of suffering inflicted on our fellow creatures. Were we to go extinct, the level of suffering endured by non-human animals and general environmental devastation would radically decrease.
4. There are things we can do to make our being here more justifiable.
It isn’t necessary that we cause so much suffering to our fellow creatures. We can lessen and, in some cases, prevent the harm we bring to the planet. There are challenges to overcome, but it’s not impossible. For instance, we can certainly cut back on factory farming, which is a major source of animal suffering. The complication, however, is that factory farming is a source of cheap meat. It costs a lot more to raise an animal humanely than it does to treat it as a cog in a machine. Impoverished people often can’t afford to buy humanely raised meat. So, alongside reducing the number of factory farms, there need to be policies addressing poverty and food deserts in marginalized neighborhoods. Difficult, yes. Impossible, no.
“Reducing deforestation requires reducing population growth.”
Another example is deforestation. Deforestation is, in good part, the result of the need for more farmland. This, in turn, is the result of population expansion. Reducing deforestation requires reducing population growth. The most successful way to do that is to offer opportunities to women for greater education, employment, and, in general, greater agency. This, in turn, requires overcoming misogynist practices, which are often embedded in cultures and traditions. It can be done, but it requires sensitivity to cultural practices rather than just imposing policies from the outside. That, itself, requires changes in how people view other cultures.
None of this is impossible. To diminish or eliminate these and other practices—that is, to make our continued existence on the planet more justifiable—we’ll need to take a good look at ourselves and commit to being a better planetary species.
5. These things become more urgent in the face of the moral question of extinction.
Some might look at what we’ve just discussed and say that they’re good ideas on their own—why do we need to discuss the issue of whether we should continue to exist? Can’t we justify these proposals, and others, without dragging in the question of our extinction?
We can, of course. We can address the challenges we face along with the policies that must be enacted alongside them without asking ourselves whether our continued existence is morally justifiable. However, there is a reason to face the question, even if we can’t come up with a simple answer. The question of whether it would be better for us to go extinct adds a moral urgency to these challenges that they might otherwise lack. It’s one thing to say that it would be better for us to engage in practices that are better for our fellow creatures. It is another, more disturbing thing to say that if we do not do so, it might be better for us not to be here.
Most of us like to think of ourselves as morally decent. It is emotionally difficult for us to consider that we might be acting immorally. That’s why, when confronted with evidence of bad behavior, we are often quick to rationalize. The question of whether humans should continue to exist is the ultimate test of our collective moral decency. It puts the issue in front of us in the starkest possible way. What should each of us individually, and all of us collectively, do to make the further existence of our species more justifiable?
To listen to the audio version read by author Todd May, download the Next Big Idea App today:
