NYT: would extinction be a bad thing?

The New York Times pops the question that's clearly on a lot of SJW minds.

There are stirrings of discussion these days in philosophical circles about the prospect of human extinction. This should not be surprising, given the increasingly threatening predations of climate change. In reflecting on this question, I want to suggest an answer to a single question, one that hardly covers the whole philosophical territory but is an important aspect of it. Would human extinction be a tragedy?

To get a bead on this question, let me distinguish it from a couple of other related questions. I'm not asking whether the experience of humans coming to an end would be a bad thing. (In these pages, Samuel Scheffler has given us an important reason to think that it would be.) I am also not asking whether human beings as a species deserve to die out. That is an important question, but would involve different considerations. Those questions, and others like them, need to be addressed if we are to come to a full moral assessment of the prospect of our demise. Yet what I am asking here is simply whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might seem puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing.

The author, one Mr. Todd May who the NYT assures us  is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, is going to suggest human extinction is a Good Thing. Oh, and that global warming is the thing that's going to kill us all.

Of course he is.

Mr. May is an American academic in 2018. If he didn't hold this view he wouldn't have a job. And what is the core of this view, anyway? What notion could view the extinction of Humanity to be a good thing?

One could press the objection here by saying that it would only be a loss from a human viewpoint, and that that viewpoint would no longer exist if we went extinct. This is true. But this entire set of reflections is taking place from a human viewpoint. We cannot ask the questions we are asking here without situating them within the human practice of philosophy. Even to ask the question of whether it would be a tragedy if humans were to disappear from the face of the planet requires a normative framework that is restricted to human beings.

 Emphasis mine. The issue is that Mr. May does not restrict his "normative framework" to humans. In other words, he's a bunny hugger.

So, then, how much suffering and death of nonhuman life would we be willing to countenance to save Shakespeare, our sciences and so forth? Unless we believe there is such a profound moral gap between the status of human and nonhuman animals, whatever reasonable answer we come up with will be well surpassed by the harm and suffering we inflict upon animals. There is just too much torment wreaked upon too many animals and too certain a prospect that this is going to continue and probably increase; it would overwhelm anything we might place on the other side of the ledger. Moreover, those among us who believe that there is such a gap should perhaps become more familiar with the richness of lives of many of our conscious fellow creatures. Our own science is revealing that richness to us, ironically giving us a reason to eliminate it along with our own continued existence.

Yes, we should all die so that nice cows and bunnies and timber wolves will be happy. I can see you doubting me out there. I can see your eyebrows going up with skepticism. Nobody could be such a dick to think Humanity should die because bunnies. Sadly, dear reader, yes they could:

One might ask here whether, given this view, it would also be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering. Although I do not have a final answer to this question, we should recognize that the case of future humans is very different from the case of currently existing humans. To demand of currently existing humans that they should end their lives would introduce significant suffering among those who have much to lose by dying. In contrast, preventing future humans from existing does not introduce such suffering, since those human beings will not exist and therefore not have lives to sacrifice. The two situations, then, are not analogous.

 So we don't have to kill ourselves, really. But we do have to stop breeding. But killing ourselves would probably be a plus, and we should strongly think about it.

That's what passes for Post Modern Philosophy at universities these days, ladies and gentlemen. These clever fools like Mr. May think themselves very erudite, very enlightened and Avant Garde for having these anti-Human views, but it has all been done before. If you look at the kind of vile writings current in the Germany of the 1920s, you'll see ideas very similar, differing in minor detail only.

How else does one justify mass murder?

The Phantom

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