Human Extinction
An Even More Modest Proposal
Would it matter if the entire human race became extinct?1
I ask this question not because of any hostility towards human beings – as is fashionable in some circles, humans being seen as the poisonous curse of the Earth it would be better without, nor any generalized misanthropy – rather the opposite. The essay is built on the premise that human beings have been and are singular and remarkable creatures. Their physical creations like cities, technological inventions, the richness and depth of art and science, the huge reach of their vision of the universe and their place in it, all these are staggering and something to be highly valued, and not remotely matched by, indeed not really comparable to, anything produced by any other creature on the planet Earth. People may of course disagree with that, though I would do so with difficulty. Even those people who disagree, all but the most extreme, tend to say that the end of human life on Earth would be a bad thing, yea even a tragic occurrence. Indeed, the prospect of our extinction, along with other animals, other living things, is used as an argument for us having to change our ways. Whether we have to or not is not the topic here.
The reason why it may not matter if human beings became extinct tells us, I shall argue, about values, and whence they are derived and what they depend on for their existence.
If human beings ceased to be, who would bewail our demise? If there is no-one to do so, it is hard to see how it would make sense in a world without us for our extinction to be a bad thing. The total lack of human beings looking upon the situation of absolutely no human beings existing is hard to summon up without contradiction. The tendency is to consider the total absence of human beings as something that could nevertheless still be viewed or considered after it has happened. But of course it could not. There is no-one to do the looking. It takes an effort of imagination to summon up literally no-one viewing the world where human beings are completely extinct. One might feel that there is still a view after we are all gone – perhaps drawing upon a dubious idea that there is some God or metaphorical God-like perspective looking down on things. This idea would, to be able to see the extinction of human beings as a bad thing, have to posit a literal existing God, and not just a metaphorical God’s-eye perspective. It could well be argued that any allusion to God would in any case be question-begging, for God could well be seen as really an extension and speculative enhancement of the human view, and that if it were said to exist after all literal human beings had ceased to exist, we would still in a sense exist. So let us not smuggle God in by the back door, but say simply for the sake of argument that there is no literal God, nor would it make sense to say that any such metaphorical nonliteral view could continue to make sense and exist after the last human had died. And of course so long as one human exists it may still be said that the virtual extinction of all humans could be seen, and make sense as being seen, as a bad thing.
A good analogy here with is with our own personal death. Difficult to grasp perhaps because of its blinding horror.2 The horror of our not being here at all is hard to understand; so difficult that there is a powerful tendency to suppose that although not alive, we are still here, existing, ‘looking down’. That we may then still be bothered and value what might follow our death after (and it is most important to get the point here right and correctly understood, that it is after) our death. But our view has gone completely. We are not sort of gone in one sense, but still here is another, looking at, say, our own funeral in a pleased or disapproving manner, or how people go on to live their lives, get married, have children, choose certain jobs – no, we are simply not present at all, not even as a view on things. There is nothing of us to value as good or bad anything that happens after we are dead. But of course as there are still other human beings alive there would be others to view and value things.
Although our personal non-existence helps us to understand what it would be like for us no longer to be around to look upon the world and judge things as having a certain value, the complete non-existence of human beings would be something quite different and fundamentally more radical. All values, and anything that could make sense of the value of the extinction of humanity after it has happened, would cease to exist. After that event, it would make no sense to say that it would be a good or bad state of affairs. Indeed, it may be argued, it would make no sense to say anything is good or bad, that value can be applied to anything at all, once all humans have gone.
A short digression is needed here concerning aliens. This thought is similar to the one concerning God. It might be the case that there is some kind of alien intelligent life capable of comprehending values, and doing so after all humans have ceased to be might, should they be in suitable proximity, look upon the Earth, and remark to one another that they notice that those creatures we call humans have ceased to exist totally, and that is rather a bad and sad thing, or alternatively a good thing, depending on their point of view. But as far as we know there are no such creatures – let us say they would qualify as persons, though they are not human – capable of making such value judgements in the universe. Even if they did exist, they would have to be close to view us. So let us set that aside as something we do not have to take into serious consideration.
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Let up suppose that we humans are completely alone as creatures capable of judging things good or bad, right or wrong, valuable or not valuable, and that after we are gone totally there are no other creatures capable of making any such judgements, let alone encompassing the goodness or badness of utter human extinction.
The question that will be asked now is why values die with our death as a human species. The answer is not uncontroversial, but it is one that is plausible and defensible. And it is a view that has a good legacy of supportive history in philosophy.3 The simple statement of the case is: no valuers no values. That things have value, greater or lesser, is something created by a special normative way human beings engage with the world. By normative here I mean that unlike other creatures, we are capable not just of thinking and acting in accordance with a rule, but of choosing freely to follow a rule.
Thus we may follow rules about things having greater or lesser value. We do not look upon the world as something flat, all of equal significance, disinterestedly. Rather we judge things differentially because our interests. We do so interestedly as a result of our contingent mental sensibilities and our contingent physical forms. What one might call our ‘form of life’.4 Moreover, we are able to raise this interestedness, this differential of significances and meanings, above their instrumental or practical value, to the realm of normative aesthetic and moral values and judgements, whereby we reflect on the world and our place in it. People are creatures that can take a valuing stance upon the world. Persons are the locus of values.
It is this that would be required in order to judge whether the extinction of human beings would be a good or a bad thing, without which, once we are gone, it makes no sense, because there is no-one left to make sense of it, that our being gone, extinct, is a state of affairs that is either good or bad. One might say, there is no-one left to care, or indeed to potentially care. Of course, there might one day on this Earth evolve new creatures with human capabilities, who find our remains, our cities, our technology, our artworks, our scientific knowledge, look back upon us and judge our destruction a terrible and tragic loss (or the opposite). But until then, and an unlikely then, there is no sense in which our going may have a value at all one way or another for anyone. The last creatures capable of making such a judgement have gone.
Human beings are not just figures in the landscape, nor even just shapers of the landscape – they are reflectors on the landscape.5 They are in that like no others. They can stand back and panoramically see the landscape and their place in the landscape, and reflect on and express its meaning, significance, and value, or try to. People can look beyond the patch of ground on which they are standing. Humans torment themselves analysing their own situation in the world and yet despite this burden produce wonderful creations, not only technological wonders, but masterpieces of intellectual and artistic worth, that transcend the analysis and torment. These creative works reflect and reflect on our condition in the world, the human condition. Only human beings can do this.
If indeed we are the only such valuing creatures in the universe, and we cease to be, values would cease to exist in such a universe as a whole, and not just on this Earth. For values to exist there have to be creatures capable of freely choosing some things as having more significance than others, as being of greater or lesser value than others. And from that it would follow that it is possible to get the value right or wrong, to be correct or incorrect, to make a mistake or not, to judge well or poorly. But in a universe without such creatures no such considerations can exist – thing just either exist or happen, or they do not – no idea of one way things might exist and happen is better or worse than any other. Such a universe is devoid of all value and meaning. A star explodes or shrinks and dies, say, or indeed the Earth itself is swallowed up in the sun going nova, there is no sense in which what happened was good or bad in such a universe. It would be universe totally stripped of values. So stripped because that universe is stripped of all valuers.
To return to the more localized consideration of human extinction. There would, with humans extinct, no-one to look upon our non-existence, at our ingenuity being no more, the loss of all the great works of music, literature, paintings, the libraries full of the human hopes, aspirations, and knowledge, the reflections on the human condition, such that it would be a sad and terrible loss. And that, for whatever it may be worth – to bring things in a full self-reflective circle – applies to this very discussing itself of the extinction of human beings – and of course any similar writings on the subject. They would be neither a loss nor a gain, their existence neither good nor bad, for no-one one would be there to value them as such. It would not matter if human beings became extinct, because with them gone nothing would matter, there would no longer be any mattering.
So perhaps, to return directly to the opening question, the extinction of human beings would not be such a bad thing, indeed it could not be said to be a bad thing at all, for that requires such a value having meaning, and that would have vanished with us.
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Dr John Shand is a Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at the Open University. He studied philosophy at the University of Manchester and King’s College, University of Cambridge. He has taught at Cambridge, Manchester and the Open University. The author of numerous articles, reviews, and edited books, his own books include, Arguing Well (London: Routledge, 2000) and Philosophy and Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2014).
Contact information:
- Dr John Shand, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, MK7 6AA, United Kingdom.
- https://open.academia.edu/JohnShand
- http://fass.open.ac.uk/philosophy/people
John Shand on Daily Philosophy:
Notes
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The title alludes to the essay by Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729). I do so because of what may seem the outlandishness of my suggestion in my essay rather than any direct support of it by Swift’s essay. Nor should my essay be taken as satirical, unlike Swift’s. Swift’s essay suggested that in order to alleviate the social and economic difficulties of poor families, the best idea would be for them to sell their children for food. ↩︎
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This, our death, what it means, is perfectly captured in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Aubade’ (1977).
‘But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.’ ↩︎ -
This we find in: David Hume, through Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche, to Martin Heidegger, to name but some. ↩︎
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See Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) and On Certainty (1969). ↩︎
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I adapt and extend Jacob Bronowski’s remarks in The Ascent of Man. (1973). ↩︎
