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ON BECOMING EXTINCT 253

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JAMES LENMAN

Abstract: From an impersonal, timeless perspective it is hard to identify good reasons why it should matter that human extinction comes later rather than sooner, particularly if we accept that it does not matter how many human beings there are. We cannot appeal to the natural narrative shape of human history for there is no such thing. We have more local and particular concerns to which we can better appeal but only if an impersonal, timeless perspective is abandoned: only from a generation-centred perspective do such concerns help to make sense of our concern for the timing of our own extinction.

Everybody dies. Perhaps, though there are grounds for doubt1, this is a bad thing. There are fewer grounds for doubting that, given that we all die, it is a bad thing when we die prematurely, before we have lived out the natural span of a human life. A long life, for one thing, is something that we all tend to want. Not only do we want this but we want many other things that presuppose it: to bring certain projects to completion, to support our children – if we have them – until they grow to independ- ence, and so on. Of course we may also want things that would presup- pose a two or three hundred year life-span but we want these latter things more or less idly. The tragedy of not living to be twenty-five or twelve is of a different order from the tragedy of not living to be five hundred: the difference is that between wanting to be happy human beings and wanting to be something else.

When we think of human wellbeing – as I suspect we should – in terms of the constitutive goods of human life we see clearly what is tragic in an early death. These constitutive goods may include the pleasures of play- ing with our grandchildren and witnessing their early development, of

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relaxation in retirement after the longer-term analogue to a hard day’s work and other good things that belong properly to the later years of a life no less than the goods and pleasures that may attach more naturally to childhood and youth.2 Up to a point then, and other things being equal, we may sensibly think that, while human lives must end, it is better to prolong them, when possible, to their full span. Only up to a point perhaps, because sometimes the quality of someone’s life may become so irreversibly bad that it becomes at least unclear whether it would be a good thing to prolong it further. And only other things being equal, because most of us believe there may be things worth dying for. But so qualified, there seems little to argue with in the thought that it is better if our lives are longer rather than shorter.

At work here perhaps is some notion of the narrative shape of a full human life. Such a life has a certain narrative structure: a beginning, comprising childhood and youth, where we spend much of our energy in learning and developing in ways that will stand us in good stead for what comes afterwards; then there is adult life where we may make some con- tribution to society through work or assemble a family and raise children; and then there is old age when (if we are fortunate) we may relax in the fruition of all this. To have one’s life truncated is to miss out on parts of this progress in ways it makes great sense for us not to welcome.

It is not only individuals who die. Species also die or die out. Today there are no longer any sabre-tooth tigers or Irish elk and, one day, certainly, there will be no human beings. Perhaps that is a bad thing but, if so, it is a bad thing we had better learn to live with. The Second Law of Thermodynamics will get us in the end in the fantastically unlikely event that nothing else does first. We might perhaps argue about whether and how much this inevitability should distress us but that it not my present purpose. Rather I want to ask whether, given that any given species will at some time disappear, it is better that it disappear later rather than sooner. More particularly, given that it is inevitable that our own species will only endure for a finite time, does it matter how soon that end comes?

We are naturally disposed to think it would be a bad thing were our extinction imminent. In popular movies like Armageddon, everyone is very unhappy with this prospect for an obvious and extremely under- standable reason – they are all going to die very soon. The trouble is that if we take a timeless and impersonal perspective, this might seem to be no big deal. For, on such a perspective, future people matter no less than do present people. And this fate is waiting for some generation or other.

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Of course it needn’t be quite this fate. Rather than getting wiped out in a nasty catastrophe, we might just fade away. Something in the water might make us all less fertile with the result that human population dwindles away, over a few generations, to nothing. Even this would not be painless: it would mean loneliness and hardship in the last years as the final generation grew old without the emotional and material support of their children. Or if the catastrophe were unexpected and killed us all outright, there would be no pain or suffering but many lives would be prematurely cut off – a real harm, on any plausible view, to those concerned.3

To isolate the central question, let us simplify things. Suppose it is written in The Book of Fate that one day we will be wiped out in a nasty catastrophe. Many millions of people will die in terrifying circumstances involving great pain and distress. The only thing the Book of Fate is silent about is when this is going to happen. It may be next year or it may be many thousands of years from now. The question is – Should we care? Does it matter how soon this happens?

One natural thought here is that the existence of human beings has intrinsic value, impersonally regarded.4 And that therefore it is a good thing that human beings should continue to exist for as long as possible. This thought, though natural, is problematic. For one thing, it is not easy to be very clear what the premise means – but as I want the conclusion of this essay to lend some modest support to such scepticism, I’ll let this pass for now and beg no questions. For another, it is by no means obvious that the conclusion follows from it. It may be intrinsically good that great works of music or literature should exist. But it is by no means obvious that these works contribute more value by being longer.

To take a nearer analogy, consider some other species than our own – the white rhino say. Suppose we are agreed that it is intrinsically good that there are white rhinos. Does it follow that it is good if there continue to be white rhinos for as long as possible? It is by no means clear that it does. Imagine a bizarre possible world in which white rhinos are the only living things – bizarre because impossible on both ecological and evolu- tionary grounds but for the sake of argument let that pass. (In those worlds where there is a God, God can do what he likes. In this world, God miraculously brings white rhinos into being and miraculously stops them from starving.) Let’s agree, again for the sake of argument, that this is a good thing: this world is better for having white rhinos. Given that, is there any reason to suppose this world better if there continue to be white rhinos for longer – say for five billion rather than five million years?

It is hard to see that it does. Consider after all a simpler question. Does it matter, independently of how long white rhinos go on existing, how large their population is? We can distinguish here the claims:

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A. It is better if there continue to be things of type F for as long as possible.

B. It is better if there are as many things of type F as possible.

B is different from A given that there are both synchronic and diachronic ways of being numerous. Making things better according to A in par- ticular might be preferred if we suppose that, other things equal, the diachronic ways are better. Alternatively we might suppose making things better according to A is simply a means to doing so according to B – a way to have more Fs is to have more and more generations of Fs stretch- ing out into future time. But of course this is not the only way. However many Fs there are one can always have more Fs without having to have Fs for longer: one can simply have more Fs at a given time.

When we consider synchronically the size of the white rhino population it is not clear that it matters how large that population is. If what matters is the instantiation of the universal – white rhino or whatever – that is already, as it were, taken care of. Of course, if there were fewer white rhinos, it might be said that individuals of that species that might have existed will fail to exist and perhaps those individuals have intrinsic value.5

But it is unclear that anything follows from this. No matter what happens, we can always suppose there to be an infinity of possible individuals who never get to exist. But it is hard to make much sense of the thought that this a bad thing – either for those individuals themselves or otherwise.6 If it is unclear how it would make things better to stretch out, synchronically, in a single generation, the numbers of white rhinos, it is unclear why it should make things better to stretch them out diachronically by having more generations. Given that B is not very compelling, why suppose that A is?7

The suggestion might be made8 that, if we allow that a world is made better by the presence in it of some valued thing such as white rhinos, we might motivate the thought that A has plausibility independently from B by thinking of temporal parts of the world as, in effect, new worlds. Maybe; but now the burden is surely on friends of this suggestion to say a great deal more before it starts to look at all promising. For very evidently temporal parts of worlds are not worlds. It might nonetheless be claimed that temporal parts of worlds are in some relevant way world- like for axiological purposes. But what is supposed to motivate this thought? And, crucially, it stands in need not only of motivation but of some motivation that would not generalize to our also so viewing spatial parts of worlds. For that would, in the first place, restore A and B to an equal footing and, in the second place, be deeply implausible. Many people might view with regret the absence from a world of white rhinos but it is a hugely doubtful basis for regret that there are no white rhinos in northern Scotland.9 Indeed the plausibility of the temporal parts claim

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is questionable in similar ways. We may think it a wonderful thing that the world contains many examples of jazz music, but how much should we regret its absence from, say, the world in the sixteenth century?

It does not follow from these considerations that it is not a bad thing if, in the actual world, the white rhino becomes extinct sooner rather than later. For one thing, we may attach value to natural biodiversity.10 Given that there are living species in existence at a given time, perhaps it is better if there are a rich diversity of species rather than only a few. This diversity is diluted when the white rhino, say, disappears and that is why the extinction of the white rhino would be a bad thing.

If we focus on natural biodiversity, we can make some sense of why the ongoing extinction of countless species is to be regretted. Assuming this explanation is convincing, it does have a couple of limitations. For one thing, we cannot in this way make any sense of the thought that the eventual extinction of every species is an event that is better postponed. The value of natural biodiversity implies that, while there is life on earth, it is good that there should be a significant natural diversity of such life. It need not be read as implying that the inevitable disappearance of all life on earth is something that is better happening later rather than sooner.

Moreover the appeal to natural biodiversity is quite unpromising when we try to apply it to human beings. For the contribution to natural bio- diversity of human beings has, in recent times, been overwhelmingly negat- ive. Those who stress the value of natural biodiversity are alarmed in particular at the sort of catastrophically rapid mass extinction over which they fear we are presiding. As far as this good is concerned it would plau- sibly be just wonderful if human beings disappeared as soon as possible.11

Another quite general reason for regretting the extinction of any spe- cies might appeal to the more abstract – and more doubtful – value of plenitude. Perhaps we want to say it is a bad thing when possibilities go unrealized. Think in particular of the huge space of genetic possibilities, Dennett’s “Library of Mendel”.12 Were we to disappear from the scene, countless possibilities in this library would be cut off including perhaps many that might contribute great value in the world.

I doubt if this thought is at all promising in the present context. In the first place, at the most abstract level, it is unclear whether the principle is remotely plausible. In the vast logical space of possible chess games there are huge numbers that will never be played, a number of them no doubt rather beautiful (if you like that sort of thing). Do we really think this matters very much? It doesn’t amount to much of a reason why you and I, right now, should play a game of chess. And it would certainly be a reason altogether disconnected from the reasons that ordinarily actuate real chess players.

Turning to the specific biological version of the claim, even if it is plaus- ible, it is unclear how it would speak against our own extinction precisely

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because, as I just now observed, our own extinction would very likely do more good than harm to natural biodiversity and consequently to the range of genetic possibilities likely to turn up in the future course of evolution- ary history. Even were we not so remarkably destructive a species, our extinction coming not as part of a mass extinction but as an isolated event would make a large difference to which genetic possibilities the future saw realized but plausibly very little or none to how many were realized. Indeed it is strictly false that any as yet unrealized possibilities in Mendel’s library would be foreclosed by our extinction. There is no point in the logical space of possible genotypes accessible some day to our descendants that is not likewise accessible in principle to, say, the descendants of other animals. Of course for very many such points it is astronomically improb- able that the descendants of other animals will ever attain it but the same can be said of most such points with respect to our own descendants.

These general considerations of biodiversity, plenitude or raw intrinsic value that might be brought to bear to urge regret at the extinction of any biological species do not then get us very far in considering the fate of our own. We might reasonably then turn to the things that are special about our species, things that distinguish us from white rhinos, cacti or plankton. There are plenty of candidates, to be sure: that we are rational, that we have language, that we are self-conscious, that we are capable of moral agency, that we are made in God’s image or simply that we are human. With all but the last of these it is of course questionable whether we are unique satisfiers of these descriptions and with all of them it is questionable how much is supposed to follow morally if we are.

So it is hard to know where to start. Here it will help to recall again the distinction between A and B above. We want to distinguish the question Does it matter how long humanity lasts? – from the question Does it matter, in absolute terms, how many human beings there are? Considered synchron- ically, the overwhelmingly plausible answer to the latter question is: No. Within the utilitarian tradition this answer is controversial, but it is plaus- ible enough for it to be widely taken as a reductio of total utilitarianism that it appears to imply otherwise.13 In any case, I will here assume a negative answer as it is not my present aim to add to the considerable literature on the issue.14 But if B is not compelling, why should A be? Focusing on this helps us to see what not to focus on in terms of what is special to human beings. If beings with reversible thumbs are intrinsically valuable in ways that make it better the more of them there are, that would support both A and B. And that is not the result we want. So we want to look for something that makes sense of our regarding A and B differently.

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There is one aspect in particular of human beings that looks rather more promising here, an aspect in which human beings differ markedly from other species. Not only do individual human lives have a certain narrative structure but so too, given our unique endowment with lan- guage, writing and culture does human history. And when we think of the prospect of human extinction, perhaps we think of it as an evil in the same way as we think of the premature death of an individual as an evil. If we have read our Wells or Stapledon or Asimov we may be caught up in some capitalized vision of The Future and think of extinction as tragic- ally robbing us of that future much as the death of a child might tragically rob her of her future. Certainly, if we have such a future, our descendants will then look back on our own times as, in a sense, the childhood of our race much as we, from our perspective, might so view the time of the early hominids.

The thought is not novel. Jonathan Bennett has classed the career of Homo Sapiens among those “great long adventures which it would be a shame to have broken off short.”15 And Gregory Kavka has highlighted the analogy between the narrative structure of our species’ history and that of an individual life.16 But it is vital to appreciate how fragile the analogy is in one crucial respect. If someone dies aged twenty-five, that is tragic because it cheats them of the normal and natural span of a human life. If someone dies aged ninety-five, though we mourn their passing, their death is not tragic in the same way or for the same reason. But it is implausible to suppose that human history – or that of any species – has a natural narrative structure in the same way as a human life.

We might have taken it to have such a structure if we had some large philosophical vision of human history as making sense in terms of some readily discernible goal which it might be tragic not to attain. I take it very few of us today are gripped by such a vision. If human beings go on for countless millennia, today will seem to have been the childhood of our species. If we disappear tomorrow today will seem (to some imagin- ary observing aliens) to have been its old age. If we reject grand philo- sophical pictures that endow human history with some essential pattern, all that can be meant by metaphorical talk of our species’ childhood is those times that are relatively early in its career whenever they may turn out to be. The individual human tragedy of dying young has no obvious analogue in the career of our species as a whole.17

Perhaps we still want to insist on the big narrative – perhaps we might be attracted by a large conception of human historical purpose without understanding this in terms of some final end point furnishing a goal we should seek to attain; but rather in terms of some overarching ideal of progress, some ladder we see ourselves ascending on which we should aim to maximize the height we will attain. This would break any close analogy with the good of individual human longevity but might allow us

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to make sense of the thought that our extinction is something better postponed.

It is not clear however that there is any convincing way for this ideal of progress to be filled out. Those that look most tempting are liable to grow less so on close inspection. Thus some have been gripped by a view of biological evolution – whether by natural or artificial selection – as a meliorative progress whose advancement gives meaning and value to our history, but there seem to be abundant grounds for scepticism about both the moral and the scientific credibility of any such picture. Or, on a cultural level, we might cite the advancement of knowledge and science as giving our species a purpose that warrants belief in the impersonal value of its maximally long continuance. Undoubtedly we often do invest value in just this large and abstract project though plausibly the real lifeblood of scientific motivation lies in more local manifestations of curiosity, in more particular intellectual projects, in the desire to know this or that rather than the bare desire to know – the desire (de dicto!) to know lots of stuff. Nor can any such grand scientific project plausibly be anything like the whole story – for science is only one of many human projects and commitments, and one at whose cutting edge the vast major- ity of those whose lives we value are not significantly engaged. And other human projects and commitments tend to subsume still less readily in any analogously conceived overarching master project.

It might still be insisted here that we want human beings to be all they can be, fully to develop and explore their capacities. But let us note the ambiguity in this thought: who is understood here by ‘human beings’? To view the matter in microcosm, suppose I want my children to be all they can be. How can I better promote this end? Well, I can do more to create educational and other opportunities for them and encourage them to take them. Or I can simply seek to have more and more children. We naturally want to have children and when we have them, we naturally want the children we have to excel. But we do not naturally want – and it would be odd to say we should – the excellence of our children in any way that might sensibly motivate me to keep on procreating until an Olympic athlete turns up. Similarly with human beings it is one – very natural – thing to want all the human beings there will in fact be to make the most of themselves, another – far less natural – to want there to be more and more human beings so that, collectively, we can the more maximally exhaust the possibilities before us.18

Recall that our question was not Is it a bad thing that we will one day become extinct? but Given that we will become extinct, is it a bad thing if

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this happens sooner rather than later? Given that this is what we are asking it is not clear that considerations of how awful extinction will be for those to whom it actually happens are any help at all. For this is going to happen anyway. All we can say is that we do not want these bad things to happen sooner rather than later. But, from an impersonal standpoint, it makes no very obvious difference, given that they will happen some- time, when they happen.

A natural rejoinder is that this consideration does not move us much because we do not occupy so impersonal a standpoint.19 There will be some generation, sometime, that will be overtaken by these terrible events. I know this but I do not want it to be my generation; to be the generation of those I most care for. Nor do I want it to be the generation of my children – if I have any – or grandchildren or the children and grandchildren of people who matter to me. When I con- template the possibility that humans might soon die out, all kinds of de re sentimental attachments may inform the alarm I might feel at this. The thought of the streets I walk to work along emptied of human life and the people who live there killed is one I naturally find peculiarly distressing – or would if circumstances arose that made such a danger feel imminent. The thought of a like fate overtaking the unimaginable science fiction landscape that might be those same streets in the ninth millennium might inspire in me a certain distant sadness. But it is a very distant sadness at the prospect of a distant tragedy, very like the distant sadness one might feel on reading about some cataclysm in the ancient world.

Plausibly, I wish to propose, wanting there to be a next generation and wanting it to thrive is a sentiment akin to and continuous with wanting to have children and wanting them to thrive. The desire to have children is a selfish sort of sentiment, to be sure, but in a peculiar and complicated way. Partly it is a matter of wanting there to be a constituency for that range of our moral and altruistic instincts that we bring to bear on our immediate successors. If there is no such constituency, our lives are impoverished in central and vital ways. The desire for – as the song has it – somebody to love is that peculiarly sociable form of selfishness that is fundamental to human moral community.20 Given that there will inevit- ably be some generation for which there is no successor generation, I nonetheless do not want it to be mine – ascending to something closer to a moral point of view, I do not want it to be ours.

I suggested above that it did not matter, in absolute terms, how many human beings there are. I can now explain the qualification. It may mat- ter greatly to Bill and Mary that they have children. And if this matters, it matters that the number of human beings there have been to date gets larger than it presently is. For it must do if Bill and Mary are to have the children they want. But while such concerns are important, no value

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attaches to the absolute numbers involved. The value in Bill and Mary having children is not a matter of its taking the species as a whole beyond, say, that crucial 20 billion watershed. Likewise it may matter to every- body – or almost everybody – in the present – or in any – generation that there be a next generation.

Consider that old favourite of the literature on average utilitarianism – the reasons Adam and Eve might have to have children.21 I would doubt that they have reasons of a quite general and impersonal kind. I would doubt too that they have reasons stemming from the narrative shape of human history as a whole. But they do have the familiar reasons we all – or most of us – have to have children. They may aim to enrich their own lives by having something beyond their own happiness to shape and give direction to their concerns, capacities and energies.22 It would surely be a bizarre misunderstanding to call such reasons selfish in any sense which contrasts them starkly with more ethical forms of motivation. None- theless we are not here in the domain of narrowly moral reasons, where these are understood as bound up with obligation.23

Let us note here too that, while the overall narrative structure of human history has little work to do here, much greater relevance may attach to all manner of more intermediate narratives.24 For Adam and Eve may have all manner of projects and commitments that cannot be contained in a single life and that call for the cooperation of successor generations. Adam, Eve or both may be deeply concerned with the com- pletion of the projects of turning that bit of space behind the house into a garden, of getting the details right on that fancy new ploughing device they were working on, of figuring out just how plants breed or of solving Fermat’s last theorem. Such projects widen our interests beyond our own lifetimes. It was good for Darwin that his ideas on evolution were vindic- ated by modern genetics; good for Mallory that Everest was eventually climbed and good for those who died fighting the Nazis that the Nazis were finally defeated.25

Such intermediate narrative structures, like the structures of family life, lift the moral horizons of the agent beyond her own life in ways that may give that life greater depth.26 They differ from the total narrative of human history in having a natural terminus and hence a natural shape. They give no special reason, impersonally speaking, to favour human life ending at any one time rather than another, for the members of any generation will find themselves bound up in some such set of narratives. But Adam and Eve’s implication in such narratives gives them a reason to think the end of their species an inevitability that is better postponed. And it gives that same reason to each and every generation. If this – generation-centred – reason is invisible from a timeless and impersonal moral perspective, so much the worse, it may plausibly be urged, for a timeless and impersonal moral perspective.27

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I have suggested a certain continuity between our – generation-centred – reasons for wanting there to be a next generation (and a next again after that) and our – agent-centred – reasons for wanting to have children (and grandchildren). The latter reasons are not, I suggested, moral reasons in a narrow sense. But they do not, for all that, lack ethical depth. They involve a desire that there be objects for certain central other-regarding emotions to engage with and a desire both to have certain projects and commitments that transcend the limits of one’s own lifetime’s efforts and to have those projects and commitments flourish. Plausibly these are good and virtuous dispositions to have and to cultivate and their actual- ization can be a central constituent of a good and happy life.

None of this is to deny that the desire to have children can take all manner of pathological forms. Let me roughly sketch a case in point. Suppose Agnes knows she carries a gene such that any child of hers is almost certain to suffer from a disorder that is certain to make his life extremely painful and unpleasant. Suppose nonetheless that she has intense maternal instincts and she decides to have a child anyway so that these feeling should not lack an object. Adoption will not do – the child has got to be (biologically) hers.

Plausibly we might not think highly of Agnes. We might think her decision thoughtless and self-indulgent. Of course someone who has a child she expects to have every chance of a happy, flourishing life may also be indulging her maternal instincts but it would be grotesque in that far healthier case, as I urged above, to see such motivation as straightfor- wardly and reprehensibly selfish or self-indulgent. In the healthier case, the mother aims to bring someone into the world and make that person’s happiness a ground project of hers, and there is every hope that this aim will cohere pervasively with the aims and projects of the child himself. Agnes, on the other hand, can aim to have such a project only knowing that the project has little chance of success. If Agnes can be made happy by having a child with this sort of fate, we may then think, there is something the matter with her.

The aims and desires that drive us to have children are not ordinarily furthered by our having miserable children. Insofar as they involve the desire for there to be a constituency for other-regarding sentiments such as love they cannot naturally be peeled apart from such sentiments in ways that would leave us indifferent to the happiness of those children. And insofar as they involve a concern that certain projects of ours be brought to fruition after our deaths, we are naturally concerned with the capacities and resources of those children.28 Only in pathological cases can it be otherwise: in someone like Agnes these aims and desires have been distorted from their natural and healthy shape. By analogous reasoning,

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the aims and desires in virtue of which we wish to have successor genera- tions to our own could not be furthered, except in self-indulgent and self- defeating ways, by bringing about miserable successor generations whose lives are not worth living. To say this is to make tractable within the present perspective the Asymmetry identified by Jefferson McMahan between the plausible innocence of not bringing into being additional happy people and the plausible wrongness of bringing into being addi- tional unhappy people.29

I think this worth doing. It is immensely striking that the impersonally conceived moral reasons proposed and discussed by many writers on the ethics of population30 have literally nothing to do with the actual reasons most human beings in fact have for having and not having children or for caring whether others do so. This might of course be because our ordinary motivation is not sufficiently moral – or it might be because so much of contemporary ethical theory is simply disconnected from the realities of human moral experience. Even when we think globally about issues of human population, we are not remotely interested in bringing the size of the human population to its intrinsic moral optimum. For it has no intrinsic moral optimum: at most, in reality, we fear there may be too many of us given the de facto limits on the Earth’s resources, a wholly extrinsic – albeit urgent – consideration.

To have children – or, collectively, to have a whole new generation of children – when we know they will lead miserable lives – might be futile and foolish. For it would either defeat the purposes for which we have children or mean those purposes had become so perversely self-indulgent they were not worth furthering and could be furthered only in brutally instrumental ways. But of course we know the normal risks attached to human life. We might well believe that in every generation very many people will lead lives of at best highly compromised happiness and some people will lead quite terrible lives.31 Nonetheless our interest in having children is such that we may find the risk acceptable. As individuals we live with the typically small risk that our children will have appalling lives; and as members of societies we live with the correlative certainty that a small but significant proportion of our posterity will do so.

Readers of Parfit may note that I am thus not committed to any such view as leads to his “Ridiculous Conclusion”.32 In chapter 18 of Reasons and Persons, Parfit considers ways of handling the Asymmetry that place an upper limit on the value of additional happiness or additional happy people but no upper limit on the disvalue of additional unhappiness or additional unhappy people. The problem he identifies with such views is that there might be very large populations in which a great deal of happi- ness coexists with a small amount of unhappiness. A “small amount” here is understood as proportionally very much less than we find among actual people as they now are. If these populations are large enough such

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a view threatens to yield the “Ridiculous Conclusion” that this state of affairs is worse than one in which there were no people at all.

On the account I propose, for any case of bringing a new person into the world we may suppose there is a level of risk of wretchedness in that person’s life (imprecise of course and a matter for nice judgement in borderline cases) above which it would be unacceptable and pointless not to quieten and suppress one’s parental impulses in the face of it. At the collective level, this will translate into a statistical incidence of wretched- ness beyond which the good we seek in having a posterity would not be adequately realized. In this context I see no reason to doubt that the absolute numerical size of that posterity is neither here nor there. On my account then, it matters that we have a posterity, that our species become extinct later rather than sooner. This matters for the sort of generation- centred reasons I have sketched. But these reasons are defeasible. They are defeasible, in particular by the expectation that our posterity – or too large a proportion of them – will not have lives worth living.

It is hard to be precise about where the relevant thresholds are here. And we are in an area where an Aristotelian caution about demanding too much precision is plausibly in order.33 To pursue such an inquiry would take us into the difficult and little-charted waters of the ethics of hope and despair. Much of what is best in us is often rightly disposed to shy away from despair, both in continuing our own lives in the most difficult of circumstances and in continuing our lineage in similar circum- stances. If Agnes knows her children will be very poor, she may choose to have some anyway from an optimistic determination to help them overcome this handicap and it might be a rash ethical theorist who would fault her choice. On the other hand, if Agnes knows her children will have a crippling and painful genetic disorder, we might more confidently assert that, if she has any children, she has crossed the line that divides optimism from illusion and folly.

I ought to stress that the question I am addressing is the importance we should attach to whether there are future generations. This is a separate question from what, if there are to be such future generations, our obliga- tions to them are. I will happily allow that it would be wrong to set up a doomsday machine set to take effect 1 million years hence. Insofar as there may be people still living at these distant dates it would be wrong to aim at their harm. My claim is only that if we were to learn that there would not be people at such distant dates, we should not, just on that account, be greatly troubled. When we contemplate the possible extinc- tion of human beings at relatively close-at-hand dates, there is a reason

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for concern at our imminent extinction but it is a generation-centred reason that would not be visible from a timeless and impersonal perspect- ive. When we contemplate our possible extinction at relatively distant dates this sort of reason will be absent or very weak. There may remain all manner of moral reasons why the harms that we might inflict on members of some temporally very distant human generation might pro- perly exercise us but these reasons stem from our obligation not to aim at their harm. We are under no obligation to bring them into being.34

Department Of Philosophy University Of Glasgow

NOTES

1 See Williams, “The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” in his 1973; Nussbaum, 1994, chapter 6; and my 1995.

2 I have focused, given the analogy I will go on to explore, on why premature death is an evil for the person who dies. Naturally if that person is loved by others, this is far from the whole story.

3 A possibility I’ve ignored – for simplicity – is that human beings might disappear from the scene by evolution into some very different creature. Whether that would involve any kind of loss is a subtle – and to my knowledge little addressed – question I won’t be concerned with here. The fact remains that some more destructive form of extinction is an inevitable fate for our descendants of whatever species.

4 See e.g. Leslie, 1983. For further sceptical reflections see Heyd, 1992, pp. 115–126. 5 At least in so far as it can be said that there might have been more such individuals.

Matters get more metaphysically vexed of course if we try to say, of individuals that might have existed, that they will fail to exist.

6 On this point cf. Narveson, 1967 and 1973; Adams, 1972; Bennett, 1978; Warren, 1978; Bigelow and Pargetter, 1988; Tooley, 1983, chapter 6 and 1998; Heyd, 1992, chapter 4. The point is disputed by e.g. Hare, 1975; Sikora, 1978.

7 This point echoes Parfit’s discussion of the Absurd Conclusion in chapter 18 of his 1984. As is clear from Parfit’s comments on p. 411, it is in virtue of making too much of such A/B type distinctions in the timing of when people live that the Absurd Conclusion is deemed absurd.

8 As it was by a referee for Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. 9 That said, many would find ground for regret in the absence from northern Scotland

of, say, wolves, which, unlike white rhinos, have a history of living there. And many would find it regrettable if white rhinos were present in the world in various zoos but there were none in their natural African habitat. Such thoughts complicate the picture here but do so in ways that support the claim that our concerns here are far too particular to be captured in such hugely abstract formulations as A and B.

10 See e.g. Wilson, 1992. 11 It is crucial here that the central value plausibly implicated in our concern about the

ongoing extinction of innumerable nonhuman species is natural biodiversity. Such concerns are thus barely alleviated by the possibility held out by modern biotechnology that artificial surrogates for natural biodiversity can readily enough be cooked up in laboratories.

12 See Dennett, 1995, chapters 5 and 6.

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13 The classic discussion is Parfit’s of his Repugnant Conclusion in his 1984, chapter 17. 14 See e.g. Narveson, 1967 and 1973; Adams, 1972 and 1997; Bennett, 1978; Kavka, 1978;

Tooley, 1983 chapter 6 and 1998; Heyd, 1992, chapter 6. Dissenting views are found in e.g., Ng, 1989 and Rachels, 1998. The recent literature is dominated by the complex and densely argued discussion of Parfit, 1984, Part 4.

15 Bennett, 1978, p. 66. 16 Kavka, 1978, esp. pp. 197–198. 17 I think Kavka’s failure to see this point makes his dismissal (1978, p. 197) of the point

emphasized in the following paragraph unconvincingly swift. 18 Such roughly perfectionist lines of resistance to my central claims were forcefully

conveyed to me by Nick Unwin, Dean Rickles and an anonymous referee. The scepticism I here express about both evolutionary and scientific ideals receives spirited support in Midgley, 1985 and 1992.

19 Cf. Foot, 1985; Williams, 1985, especially chapter 6; Adams, 1997. 20 Cf. my 1994, pp. 227–228. 21 See e.g. Parfit, 1984, p. 420. The classic worry is, in effect, that if Adam and Eve are

immensely happy, they would have good average utilitarian reasons not to have merely very happy descendants. The worry is generally – and plausibly – taken as a reductio of average utilitarianism.

Hurka (1983) and Ng (1989) have both aired views on population ethics whereby the marginal value added by extra people is considerable when there are very few people but declines asymptotically as the population grows. (On this view Adam and Eve have a strong moral obligation to have children albeit we may not.) I’m not really convinced by this supposition. Certainly, as Hurka observes, we value extra members of a species more when the species is very scarce. But plausibly this is not because scarcity need be a bad thing in itself but because it involves a risk of extinction and we think that a bad thing. Of course when species have value as resources to us we may want them to be abundant and there may be economic reasons why we would be in trouble if human numbers fell very low but (as Hurka acknowledges) these considerations are of entirely instrumental significance.

22 Cf. Partridge, 1981b; Heyd, 1992, chapter 8; de Shalit, 1995, pp. 34– 40. 23 This way of distinguishing the moral from the ethical by reference to obligation owes

something to Williams, 1985, chapter 10. 24 John O’Neill helped me to see this point. 25 See especially O’Neill, 1993. Cf. also Delattre, 1972, p. 256; Hurka, 1993, pp. 110 –111. 26 Cf. Rawls, 1972, pp. 523–529. 27 On generation-centeredness cf. Heyd, 1992, Part Two and Dasgupta, 1993, chapter

13.4. 28 I suspect considerations like these are highly relevant to thinking about Parfit style

non-identity puzzles like why it is better not to have our children in our teens (Parfit, 1984, pp. 358–361) and why we should not choose policies that deplete resources (ibid., pp. 361 – 364). Cf. Bigelow and Pargetter, 1988, p. 180. Which is not to say that such considerations, albeit relevant, are the whole story here.

29 The label is due to McMahan, 1981, p. 100. Notable landmarks in a large literature include Narveson, 1973; Parfit, 1984, chapter 18; Rachels, 1998; Tooley, 1998.

30 Notable exceptions to this complaint include Adams, Dasgupta, Heyd, O’Neill and de Shalit. Those familiar with these writers will appreciate the debts the present essay owes to them. Indeed for the complaint itself cf. Dasgupta, 1993, pp. 385ff.

31 It is a vexed question whether we should believe this. We certainly know that large numbers of people live in appalling circumstances, circumstances of poverty, disease, mal- nutrition and so forth. But there is some empirical evidence that people may be remarkably

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able to sustain high levels of utility – on various subjective measures of “utility” – in strikingly adverse circumstances. That said, we might be sceptical about what comfort we should draw from such findings which may very plausibly be understood as only reinforcing any doubts we may have as to whether human well-being is best understood in terms of subjective utility at all. Cf. e.g. Sen’s remarks in his 1987, pp. 45 – 47. A rich and suggestive discussion with extensive references to the empirical literature is Millgram, 2000.

32 The material on which the following paragraph is focused is found in his 1984, chapter 18, especially pp. 406ff.

33 Nicomachean Ethics I, iii. 34 I am grateful to the U.K.’s Arts and Humanities Research Board and the University of

Glasgow for financing a year’s study leave in the session 1999–2000 during which this paper was completed. Thanks are also due to Paul Brownsey, Jim Edwards, Bob Hale, George Harris, Brad Hooker, Gary Kemp, Dudley Knowles, David McNaughton, John O’Neill, Pat Shaw and Elizabeth Telfer for reading and commenting on earlier drafts, to an audience at the Bolton Institute (especially Dean Rickles and Nick Unwin), to my fellow-participants at the bioethics conference held in December 1999 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong where an earlier version of this paper was read and to an anonymous referee for Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

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