Should Humanity Pay the Ultimate Price For Its Crimes Against Nature?

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Hangings will do that sort of thing: concentrate the mind. But how about a moral hanging? Does it concentrate the mind? And what is a moral hanging anyway?

First things first. A moral hanging, which is a technical term that I just made up, is when you know you’ve done something really bad that you can’t undo, and the more you live, the more you’ll keep doing it. It’s a hanging because getting rid of your future is the morally right thing to do. (Whether you deserve it is another question.) It’s also a hanging because you’re just hanging there. You can’t get out of it.

In a book that is about to be published, Should We Go Extinct: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times, I raise the possibility that humanity itself might be subject to a moral hanging. The rough idea is that the factory farming, deforestation, climate destruction, scientific testing of animals, and so forth that we engage in creates so much misery for our fellow creatures that it might be better if we no longer procreated—if we just let our species die out.

The operative word here is might. There are lots of good things we bring to the planet, and also much we can do to justify our continuing to inhabit the place. We are beings that create and appreciate art and science and construct meaningful lives in ways that other animals can’t. And, if we tried, we could limit or eliminate factory farming and deforestation and mitigate climate destruction and the cruelties scientific testing visits upon other animals.

But as it stands, it’s an open question. That is to say, maybe, for the sake of the future of our fellow creatures, we should, as a species, bow out.

I’ve been asked what writing a book like this has done to change the way I live. This short essay means to answer that question. After all, writing a book arguing that perhaps our entire species shouldn’t remain here will likely, to borrow a phrase, concentrate the mind. Indeed it has.

Writing philosophy of any kind, especially moral or ethical philosophy, should probably have the effect of altering—or at least prompting consideration of—how the writer lives. Discussing the morality of extinction is just an extreme case of that. On the other hand, I’ve heard that there are studies showing that philosophers of ethics don’t behave any better than other folks. I’m not surprised at this. (The academic world is a cauldron of resentment, is it not?) Loitering in the realms of human extinction, though, has had an effect or two on me. Let me explain.

It’s difficult to contemplate an absence. Maybe a Zen practitioner could do it, but not this Western philosophy guy. I wasn’t trying to picture the existence of a world without people. What happened to me was closer to home.

I live in a mountainous area of Western North Carolina. It’s stunning here. It isn’t just the rolling hills and mountains of foliage—billowing green in the spring and summer, luminous yellow, orange, and brown during the fall—although it is that too. It’s also the life in the mountains. The life you can hear and the life you know is there. Especially it’s the birds. Birds are easy to ignore, but if you stop a minute you can recognize that there are lots of different calls coming from a variety of bird species, and from there it’s only a short step to picture the trees harboring a multitude of birds.

Here’s what I said in my book about my experience of this area:

“Several months ago I was driving on a highway that led through the mountains. I was particularly struck by the fall colors, and I felt a strong sense of peace at the possibility that, after I die, these mountains would continue their annual ritual of leaves turning, then falling, then reappearing in the spring. The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson uses the term “wonder” in relation to ecosystems, which seems to capture something important. Wonder is a difficult emotion to describe. We might say that it’s what we feel when we come across something that seems greater and more beautiful than what we’re capable of creating.

What I was feeling was similar to wonder, but a bit beyond it. It was a sense of tranquility stemming from the possibility that even when I was gone, that ecosystem or its evolutionary equivalent would likely still be there. And because I was also considering the themes of this book, it occurred to me that there might be something to be said for the turning of the leaves—and the whole ecosystem of which this turning is a moment—even in the absence of anybody to appreciate it. That is, the existence of this ecosystem, apart from any of its effects viewers or on the creatures it sustains, struck me as being important, as being good-in-itself.”

That sense hasn’t left me. If anything, it’s gotten deeper. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve recently read David George Haskell’s Sounds Wild and Broken, which has attuned me more to the sounds of nature than this New York City boy has a right to be.

So picture this with me. On the one hand, the mountains of Western North Carolina with their teeming life, existing—albeit with the changes that all dynamic natural systems undergo—for millennia after I die. On the other hand—the natural progression of human sprawl—an area cleared of nature, paved over with roads and parking lots and a bunch of houses that look like other houses everywhere. (Am I contributing to this other hand? Yes, I am. Should we go extinct, then? Or maybe just me?)

What goes for the Western North Carolina mountains goes for the animals I come across in my daily routine. I can put it this way: I notice them. My mind is concentrated on them, drawn to them. Dogs and cats, forests and birds, are there. As we navigate through our world, some things are in the foreground of our perception and attention while others remain in the background. In the past, people were always foreground for me, and other living things mostly background. No longer. Living beings have come into the foreground, their lives as well as their precarity and vulnerability. They are salient for me in a way they never were before.

Thinking about our extinction, and more pointedly thinking about what might argue for it, will do this to a person. Or at least it has done it to this person. There is a lot of life out there that is easy to miss. And maybe because it’s so easy to miss it’s easier to mistreat it either directly and cruelly or just neglectfully. Maybe if we saw it and heard it and wondered about it all a bit more we might be better suited morally to pass along our genes to further generations.

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Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times by Todd May is available from Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.