Outstaying our welcome

In his new book, Should We Go Extinct?, Todd May poses the question: “Would it be better to take our leave within a generation or two rather than put it off for centuries or eons from now?” This is a largely utilitarian inquiry. With moral abacus in hand, the author seeks to stack up arguments both for and against the proposition that “human-on-human suffering cause[s] more overall misery to humans than happiness”.

May, a philosophy professor at Warren Wilson College who has worked as a consultant for the television show The Good Place, dismisses a few ideas from the jump: mass human suicide is a non-starter; he rightfully considers it “too profound a sacrifice.” Similarly, he finds the anti-natalist positions espoused by the likes of David Benatar unappealing, by virtue of the fact that they fail to take into account what he calls the “meaningfulness” of certain experiences.

Central to the author’s con­tention, advanced in the first half of the book, that humans should not undergo decreation – to borrow a term from Simone Weil – is that our lives are imbued with a “non-quantifiable moral value”. Humans have the unique ability both to create and to appreciate art, music, literature and other things that some philo­sophers view as “good in themselves”. At least to a greater degree than other animals, we are endowed with the capacity “to have certain valuable relationships, relationships to beauty, truth, and a good life”. By May’s lights, this could serve as one avenue for justifying not just our present existence, but “future human existence” as well.

Another argument in favour of anti-extinction (not to be confused with de-extinction, which is concerned largely with resurrecting extinct species) is the possibility of introducing more happiness into the world. Ranged on the pro-extinction side of the ledger are familiar arguments: the pre­valence of factory farming (and its attendant cruelty to animals), the risk of overpopulation and overconsumption, and anthropogenic climate change.

Where does this all leave us? It’s no spoiler to say that the book ends at an impasse. Part of this has to do with May’s tendency to qualify his claims or renounce them altogether. In the most charitable reading he is a Socratic gadfly who doesn’t presume to dispense wisdom from on high, but pricks people to think for themselves. Yet May’s provocations (if they deserve the name) lack the galvanizing sting of more radical thought experiments. He favours a discursive, demotic tone – no bad thing when trying to convey philosophical ideas to the widest possible audience – but his frequently glib pronouncements (“Kant = reason”), self-deprecating anecdotes and crunchy granola platitudes (“It is central to human life that we live toward the future and in an awareness of the past”) are more irksome than enlightening.

In the end the book is insufficiently rigorous to stand up to scholarly scrutiny, too measured to convert partisans of any cause and too bland to rouse the masses towards radical change. Like Chidi in The Good Place, May seems to be trapped in a vicious cycle of indecision and overthinking, unable to break free.

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