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 …
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