When discussing the extinction of humanity, there does not seem to be any clear agreement about what ‘humanity’ really means. One aim of this paper is to show that it is a more slippery concept than it might at first seem. A second aim is to show the relationship between what constitutes or defines humanity and what gives it value. Often, whether and how we ought to prevent human extinction depends on what we take humanity to mean, which in turn (...) depends on what we value about humans. Finally, I will offer a definition of humanity that I argue offers a plausible account of when we might say humanity has gone extinct, and reflects what we value about humans, and relatedly, what many actually care about in terms of why we should be preserved. (shrink)

According to an intriguing though somewhat enigmatic line of thought first proposed by Jonathan Bennett, if humanity went extinct any time soon this would be unfortunate because important business would be left unfinished. This line of thought remains largely unexplored. I offer an interpretation of the idea that captures its intuitive appeal, is consistent with plausible constraints, and makes it non-redundant to other views in the literature. The resulting view contrasts with a welfare-promotion perspective, according to which extinction would be (...) bad because it would come at a massive opportunity cost in terms of feasibly achievable welfare over the lifetime of our species. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. Our earth is approaching its end. Through Project Arcadia our species has a chance at escape. In this paper, I want to argue that Arcadia is all things considered unjustifiable and unadvisable. It is unjustifiable because human beings have proven themselves incapable of stewarding sentient life on planet earth; for example, our collective response to climate change has been dire, handled almost exclusively through adaptation, committing vast areas of the world to desolation, desertification, or disappearance. Basic respect for life, and what we likely will make of some other instances of it, should counsel humility as we contemplate relocating ourselves to other life-supporting domains. It is inadvisable because our species, like the world, is impermanent. We will, at some point, have to contemplate the ceasing of our existence, and it is my argument that we contemplate this ceasing on the terra firm of our own planet. In conclusion, and drawing on the work of Samuel Scheffler and the Japanese concept of mono no aware, I will argue that there is considerable value, admittedly tainted with considerable melancholy, to be had in grasping the opportunity provided by planetary devastation to achieve some semblance of narrative completion. (shrink)

In this article I make two main critiques of Kaczmarek and Beard's article ‘Human Extinction and Our Obligations to the Past’. First, I argue that there is an ambiguity in what it means to realise the benefits of a sacrifice and that this ambiguity affects the persuasiveness of the authors’ arguments and responses to various objections to their view. Second, I argue that their core argument against human extinction depends on an unsupported assumption about the existence and importance of existential (...) benefits. (shrink)