Posted on 12/17/2018 5:55:34 AM PST by C19fan
There are stirrings of discussion these days in philosophical circles about the prospect of human extinction. This should not be surprising, given the increasingly threatening predations of climate change. In reflecting on this question, I want to suggest an answer to a single question, one that hardly covers the whole philosophical territory but is an important aspect of it. Would human extinction be a tragedy?
To get a bead on this question, let me distinguish it from a couple of other related questions. I’m not asking whether the experience of humans coming to an end would be a bad thing. (In these pages, Samuel Scheffler has given us an important reason to think that it would be.) I am also not asking whether human beings as a species deserve to die out. That is an important question, but would involve different considerations. Those questions, and others like them, need to be addressed if we are to come to a full moral assessment of the prospect of our demise. Yet what I am asking here is simply whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might seem puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
And I feel fine.
What makes you think intelligence is a requirement?
Right now, insects on earth outweigh humans. How do you define "dominant?" ;)
The world would be a better place if we could arrange for leftist extinction.
Not really ... considering
I always remember back when the South End of Boston went through gentrification. Prior to gentrification the South End looked like a film set for a WWII movie. Burnt out building shells and boarded up buildings on every block. Then the yuppies moved in and fixed up the entire neighborhood. The population of the South End is now 1/2 of what it was before gentrification.
To who? Muvver erf will shake us off like a wet dog shakes off water and continue circling the sun. (Unless it’s really the sun circling us!) Kind of like the tv series about life after humans. Who’ll care? If animals survive, they will balance themselves out eventually.
And they've been doing 'the sky is falling' thing for decades. Remember 'peak oil, nuclear winter, global cooling, global warming, mass starvation, bird extinction by DDT, dead polar bears, Arctic ice melted, natural resources depleted by 1998 etc etc etc.
It's possible liberals are afraid of their own deaths and use these 'sky is falling' BS stories as a way to deal with their own fears.
And they've been doing 'the sky is falling' thing for decades. Remember 'peak oil, nuclear winter, global cooling, global warming, mass starvation, bird extinction by DDT, dead polar bears, Arctic ice melted, natural resources depleted by 1998 etc etc etc.
It's possible liberals are afraid of their own deaths and use these 'sky is falling' BS stories as a way to deal with their own fears. Todd May falls right in with the rest of 'em...
depends on what the standard of value is. Leftard environmentalists believe in the intrinsic value of nature as the standard of value, rather than life proper to a rational being.
With everyone dead who be around to call it anything?
With no human consciousness to feel the “pathos” it would be an “event” like to asteroids colliding. A completely unknown anonymous event since there is no one to record it.
Basically its a ridiculous question!
The same could happen here if people like Todd May put more thought into casual incentives and less thought into being totalitarian control freaks.
NO! Only a Blessing!
Well....if you’re a human it might be a big deal.
NYT’s last report will be that HELL is ‘proof of man-made global warming’......
I predict that the New York Times will become extinct long before the human race does.
It would be a tragedy. Humans are an integral part of the natural world, but they haven’t learned not to trash their surroundings.
But it would be a cause for celebration if the nyt went extinct.
I think it is more fundamental than that. Fear of something like nuclear winter may be extreme, but it is still fear. You still want to live. In contrast, the extinction fantasy crowd think the world would be better off without people. Not sure they want to live. For them, it’s about self loathing.
What is wrong with these people?
For humans.
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