âDisingenuousâ? I really donât think itâs 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 âmisleadingâ.
But fwiw, I strongly disagree that itâs misleading. Human extinction is obviously a âtrajectory changeâ. Quite apart from what anyone wantsâmaybe the party is sufficient incentive to change their preferences, for exampleâI think itâs perfectly reasonable to expect the continuation of the species by default. But Iâm 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. Iâm not appealing to âexisting people not wanting to dieâ, but rather existing people being glad that they got to come into existence, which is rather more obviously relevant. (But I wonât accuse you of dishonesty over this. I just think youâre confused.)
Sorry, I didnât mean to accuse you of dishonesty (Iâm adding an edit to the OP to make that completely clear). I still think the framing isnât defensible (but philosophy is contested and people can disagree over whatâs defensible).
Even if you come to expect extinction, it remains accurate to view extinction as extinguishing the potential for future life.
Yes, but thatâs different from extinguishing future people. If the last remaining members of a family name tradition voluntarily decide against having children, are they âextinguishing their lineageâ? To me, âextinguishing a lineageâ evokes central examples like killing the last person in the lineage or carrying out an evil plot to make the remaining members infertile. It doesnât evoke examples like âa couple decides not to have children.â
To be clear, I didnât mean to say that Iexpect extinction. I agree that what we expect in reality doesnât 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 ânon-moral reasons,â Iâm 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 âthere should be no future peopleâ in that sort of world.
Your response to the Cleopatra example is similarly misguided. Iâm not appealing to âexisting people not wanting to dieâ, 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 thereâs clearly an element of deprivation when we as existing people imagine Cleopatra doing something that prevents us from coming to exist. Itâs kind of hard â arguably even impossible â 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 arenât looking back to us from the vantage point of existence).
To be clear, itâs 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 âgotchaâ quality that made it seem like people donât have coherent beliefs if they (1) really enjoy their lives but (2) wouldnât 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 âgratefulâ in a sense thatâs more limited than the axiologically relevant sense â âgratefulâ in a personal sense but not in the sense of âthis means itâs important to create other people like me.â (Iâm 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 doesnât necessarily mean Iâm 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 havenât put a lot of thought into this specific account. Another reply could be that itâs simply unclear how to go about comparing oneâs existence to never having been born.])
âDisingenuousâ? I really donât think itâs 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 âmisleadingâ.
But fwiw, I strongly disagree that itâs misleading. Human extinction is obviously a âtrajectory changeâ. Quite apart from what anyone wantsâmaybe the party is sufficient incentive to change their preferences, for exampleâI think itâs perfectly reasonable to expect the continuation of the species by default. But Iâm 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. Iâm not appealing to âexisting people not wanting to dieâ, but rather existing people being glad that they got to come into existence, which is rather more obviously relevant. (But I wonât accuse you of dishonesty over this. I just think youâre confused.)
Sorry, I didnât mean to accuse you of dishonesty (Iâm adding an edit to the OP to make that completely clear). I still think the framing isnât defensible (but philosophy is contested and people can disagree over whatâs defensible).
Yes, but thatâs different from extinguishing future people. If the last remaining members of a family name tradition voluntarily decide against having children, are they âextinguishing their lineageâ? To me, âextinguishing a lineageâ evokes central examples like killing the last person in the lineage or carrying out an evil plot to make the remaining members infertile. It doesnât evoke examples like âa couple decides not to have children.â
To be clear, I didnât mean to say that I expect extinction. I agree that what we expect in reality doesnât 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 ânon-moral reasons,â Iâm 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 âthere should be no future peopleâ 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 thereâs clearly an element of deprivation when we as existing people imagine Cleopatra doing something that prevents us from coming to exist. Itâs kind of hard â arguably even impossible â 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 arenât looking back to us from the vantage point of existence).
To be clear, itâs 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 âgotchaâ quality that made it seem like people donât have coherent beliefs if they (1) really enjoy their lives but (2) wouldnât 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 âgratefulâ in a sense thatâs more limited than the axiologically relevant sense â âgratefulâ in a personal sense but not in the sense of âthis means itâs important to create other people like me.â (Iâm 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 doesnât necessarily mean Iâm 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 havenât put a lot of thought into this specific account. Another reply could be that itâs simply unclear how to go about comparing oneâs existence to never having been born.])