āDisingenuousā? I really donāt think itās OK for you to accuse me of dishonesty just because you disagree with my framing of the issue. Perhaps you meant to write something like āmisleadingā.
But fwiw, I strongly disagree that itās misleading. Human extinction is obviously a ātrajectory changeā. Quite apart from what anyone wantsāmaybe the party is sufficient incentive to change their preferences, for exampleāI think itās perfectly reasonable to expect the continuation of the species by default. But Iām also not sure that default expectations are what matters here. Even if you come to expect extinction, it remains accurate to view extinction as extinguishing the potential for future life.
Your response to the Cleopatra example is similarly misguided. Iām not appealing to āexisting people not wanting to dieā, but rather existing people being glad that they got to come into existence, which is rather more obviously relevant. (But I wonāt accuse you of dishonesty over this. I just think youāre confused.)
Sorry, I didnāt mean to accuse you of dishonesty (Iām adding an edit to the OP to make that completely clear). I still think the framing isnāt defensible (but philosophy is contested and people can disagree over whatās defensible).
Even if you come to expect extinction, it remains accurate to view extinction as extinguishing the potential for future life.
Yes, but thatās different from extinguishing future people. If the last remaining members of a family name tradition voluntarily decide against having children, are they āextinguishing their lineageā? To me, āextinguishing a lineageā evokes central examples like killing the last person in the lineage or carrying out an evil plot to make the remaining members infertile. It doesnāt evoke examples like āa couple decides not to have children.ā
To be clear, I didnāt mean to say that Iexpect extinction. I agree that what we expect in reality doesnāt 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 ānon-moral reasons,ā Iām 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 āthere should be no future peopleā in that sort of world.
Your response to the Cleopatra example is similarly misguided. Iām not appealing to āexisting people not wanting to dieā, 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 thereās clearly an element of deprivation when we as existing people imagine Cleopatra doing something that prevents us from coming to exist. Itās kind of hard ā arguably even impossible ā 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 arenāt looking back to us from the vantage point of existence).
To be clear, itās 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 āgotchaā quality that made it seem like people donāt have coherent beliefs if they (1) really enjoy their lives but (2) wouldnāt 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 āgratefulā in a sense thatās more limited than the axiologically relevant sense ā āgratefulā in a personal sense but not in the sense of āthis means itās important to create other people like me.ā (Iām 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 doesnāt necessarily mean Iām 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 havenāt put a lot of thought into this specific account. Another reply could be that itās simply unclear how to go about comparing oneās existence to never having been born.])
āDisingenuousā? I really donāt think itās OK for you to accuse me of dishonesty just because you disagree with my framing of the issue. Perhaps you meant to write something like āmisleadingā.
But fwiw, I strongly disagree that itās misleading. Human extinction is obviously a ātrajectory changeā. Quite apart from what anyone wantsāmaybe the party is sufficient incentive to change their preferences, for exampleāI think itās perfectly reasonable to expect the continuation of the species by default. But Iām also not sure that default expectations are what matters here. Even if you come to expect extinction, it remains accurate to view extinction as extinguishing the potential for future life.
Your response to the Cleopatra example is similarly misguided. Iām not appealing to āexisting people not wanting to dieā, but rather existing people being glad that they got to come into existence, which is rather more obviously relevant. (But I wonāt accuse you of dishonesty over this. I just think youāre confused.)
Sorry, I didnāt mean to accuse you of dishonesty (Iām adding an edit to the OP to make that completely clear). I still think the framing isnāt defensible (but philosophy is contested and people can disagree over whatās defensible).
Yes, but thatās different from extinguishing future people. If the last remaining members of a family name tradition voluntarily decide against having children, are they āextinguishing their lineageā? To me, āextinguishing a lineageā evokes central examples like killing the last person in the lineage or carrying out an evil plot to make the remaining members infertile. It doesnāt evoke examples like āa couple decides not to have children.ā
To be clear, I didnāt mean to say that I expect extinction. I agree that what we expect in reality doesnāt 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 ānon-moral reasons,ā Iām 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 āthere should be no future peopleā 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 thereās clearly an element of deprivation when we as existing people imagine Cleopatra doing something that prevents us from coming to exist. Itās kind of hard ā arguably even impossible ā 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 arenāt looking back to us from the vantage point of existence).
To be clear, itās 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 āgotchaā quality that made it seem like people donāt have coherent beliefs if they (1) really enjoy their lives but (2) wouldnāt 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 āgratefulā in a sense thatās more limited than the axiologically relevant sense ā āgratefulā in a personal sense but not in the sense of āthis means itās important to create other people like me.ā (Iām 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 doesnāt necessarily mean Iām 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 havenāt put a lot of thought into this specific account. Another reply could be that itās simply unclear how to go about comparing oneās existence to never having been born.])