Sorry, I didn’t mean to accuse you of dishonesty (I’m adding an edit to the OP to make that completely clear). I still think the framing isn’t defensible (but philosophy is contested and people can disagree over what’s defensible).
Even if you come to expect extinction, it remains accurate to view extinction as extinguishing the potential for future life.
Yes, but that’s different from extinguishing future people. If the last remaining members of a family name tradition voluntarily decide against having children, are they “extinguishing their lineage”? To me, “extinguishing a lineage” evokes central examples like killing the last person in the lineage or carrying out an evil plot to make the remaining members infertile. It doesn’t evoke examples like “a couple decides not to have children.”
To be clear, I didn’t mean to say that Iexpect extinction. I agree that what we expect in reality doesn’t matter for figuring out philosophical views (caveat). I mentioned the point about trajectories to highlight that we can conceive of worlds where no one wants humanity to stick around for non-moral reasons (see this example by Singer). (By “non-moral reasons,” I’m not just thinking of some people wanting to have children. When people plant trees in their neighbourhoods or contribute to science, art, business or institutions, political philosophy, perhaps even youtube and tik tok, they often do so because it provides personal meaning in a context where we expect civilization to stay around. A lot of these activities would lose their meaning if civilization was coming to an end in the foreseeable future.) To evaluate whether neutrality about new lives is repugnant, we should note that it only straightforwardly implies “there should be no future people” in that sort of world.
Your response to the Cleopatra example is similarly misguided. I’m not appealing to “existing people not wanting to die”, but rather existing people being glad that they got to come into existence, which is rather more obviously relevant.
I think I was aware that this is what you meant. I should have explained my objection more clearly. My point is that there’s clearly an element of deprivation when we as existing people imagine Cleopatra doing something that prevents us from coming to exist. It’s kind of hard – arguably even impossible – for existing people to imagine non-existence as something different from no-longer-existence. By contrast, the deprivation element is absent when we imagine not creating future people (assuming they never come to exist and therefore aren’t looking back to us from the vantage point of existence).
To be clear, it’s perfectly legitimate to paint a picture of a rich future where many people exist and flourish to get present people to care about creating such a future. However, I felt that your point about Cleopatra had a kind of “gotcha” quality that made it seem like people don’t have coherent beliefs if they (1) really enjoy their lives but (2) wouldn’t mind if people at some point in history decide to be the last generation. I wanted to point out that (1) and (2) can go together.
For instance, I could be “grateful” in a sense that’s more limited than the axiologically relevant sense – “grateful” in a personal sense but not in the sense of “this means it’s important to create other people like me.” (I’m thinking out loud here, but perhaps this personal sense could be similar to how one can be grateful for person-specific attributes like introversion or a strong sense of justice. If I was grateful about these attributes in myself, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m committed to it being morally important to create people with those same attributes. In this way, people with the neutrality intuition may see existence as a person-specific attribute that only people who have that attribute can meaningfully feel grateful about. [I haven’t put a lot of thought into this specific account. Another reply could be that it’s simply unclear how to go about comparing one’s existence to never having been born.])
Sorry, I didn’t mean to accuse you of dishonesty (I’m adding an edit to the OP to make that completely clear). I still think the framing isn’t defensible (but philosophy is contested and people can disagree over what’s defensible).
Yes, but that’s different from extinguishing future people. If the last remaining members of a family name tradition voluntarily decide against having children, are they “extinguishing their lineage”? To me, “extinguishing a lineage” evokes central examples like killing the last person in the lineage or carrying out an evil plot to make the remaining members infertile. It doesn’t evoke examples like “a couple decides not to have children.”
To be clear, I didn’t mean to say that I expect extinction. I agree that what we expect in reality doesn’t matter for figuring out philosophical views (caveat). I mentioned the point about trajectories to highlight that we can conceive of worlds where no one wants humanity to stick around for non-moral reasons (see this example by Singer). (By “non-moral reasons,” I’m not just thinking of some people wanting to have children. When people plant trees in their neighbourhoods or contribute to science, art, business or institutions, political philosophy, perhaps even youtube and tik tok, they often do so because it provides personal meaning in a context where we expect civilization to stay around. A lot of these activities would lose their meaning if civilization was coming to an end in the foreseeable future.) To evaluate whether neutrality about new lives is repugnant, we should note that it only straightforwardly implies “there should be no future people” in that sort of world.
I think I was aware that this is what you meant. I should have explained my objection more clearly. My point is that there’s clearly an element of deprivation when we as existing people imagine Cleopatra doing something that prevents us from coming to exist. It’s kind of hard – arguably even impossible – for existing people to imagine non-existence as something different from no-longer-existence. By contrast, the deprivation element is absent when we imagine not creating future people (assuming they never come to exist and therefore aren’t looking back to us from the vantage point of existence).
To be clear, it’s perfectly legitimate to paint a picture of a rich future where many people exist and flourish to get present people to care about creating such a future. However, I felt that your point about Cleopatra had a kind of “gotcha” quality that made it seem like people don’t have coherent beliefs if they (1) really enjoy their lives but (2) wouldn’t mind if people at some point in history decide to be the last generation. I wanted to point out that (1) and (2) can go together.
For instance, I could be “grateful” in a sense that’s more limited than the axiologically relevant sense – “grateful” in a personal sense but not in the sense of “this means it’s important to create other people like me.” (I’m thinking out loud here, but perhaps this personal sense could be similar to how one can be grateful for person-specific attributes like introversion or a strong sense of justice. If I was grateful about these attributes in myself, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m committed to it being morally important to create people with those same attributes. In this way, people with the neutrality intuition may see existence as a person-specific attribute that only people who have that attribute can meaningfully feel grateful about. [I haven’t put a lot of thought into this specific account. Another reply could be that it’s simply unclear how to go about comparing one’s existence to never having been born.])