Join us for a lecture from Jeff McMahan, the emeritus Sekyra and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy from the University of Oxford.
This event will also be available on zoom. Please email Philosophy@Illinois.edu for a link.
Human Extinction and the Morality of Procreation
Many of us believe that human extinction would be catastrophically bad. Some of us believe that, among the events that are realistically possible, it would be the worst. But why? Part of the explanation is that it would frustrate many or most of the interests of the people who would be alive while it was occurring and perhaps, retroactively, the interests of people in the past. But if human extinction would really be as bad as many of us think it would be, the main part of the explanation must be that there would be no more lives with high levels of well-being when there could have been a vast number of such lives. This, however, suggests that there must be a moral reason to cause people to exist just because their lives would be worth living, and this is in tension not only with common-sense morality but also with widely accepted views in “population ethics.” The main aim of my talk is to present a variety of arguments against the common view that there is no moral reason to cause well-off people to exist just because they would have lives that would be good for them. If these arguments are sound, they should provide firm grounding for common beliefs about the badness of extinction.
