They’re not even trying to hide it anymore. They want us dead.
Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?
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?
I’m not asking whether the experience of humans coming to an end would be a bad thing. […] 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.
Let’s begin with the extinction of the New York Times and then pause to assess if the world is a better place for it. It’s behind a paywall, so you can begin the process by hitting the ‘esc’ key as it loads and read the vile, silly thing and not pay them for it.
