Voluntary human extinction
When I was teaching out east some years ago, I noted a Philadelphia Inquirer piece on the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. This organization, firmly in the grip of zero-sum anti-humanist environmentalism, was calling for the elimination of human beings by unspecified means.
I expect that VHEMT’s members are no longer with us, but somehow the desire to end the human species has survived and pops up in a Peter Singer piece at the New York Times site: “Should This Be the Last Generation?”
In the article, Princeton philosopher Singer asks us to consider sterilizing ourselves. Bringing no additional children into the world would improve things since (a) we are hurting the environment, and (b) life sucks anyways.
During his career, Peter Singer has always exhibited a great ability to take zero-sum thinking to its reductio ad absurdum limits. But since he accepts the premise firmly, he doesn’t see the absurdity as such (despite his tacked-on compromise conclusion in the NYT piece.)
Singer’s “life sucks” attitude is, as he points out, a re-statement of Arthur Schopenhauer’s strong pessimism. Reality, Schopenhauer wrote in The World as Will and Representation, is a “world of constantly needy creatures who continue for a time merely by devouring one another, pass their existence in anxiety and want, and often endure terrible affliction, until they fall at last into the arms of death” (p. 349). And more: “we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world, that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence” (p. 576). As for mankind: “nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist” (p. 605).
In his piece, Singer also mentions David Benatar, whom I discussed briefly two years ago in my “Worth Reading” for January 18, 2008:
‘A recent extreme anti-humanist manifesto published by Oxford University Press—David Benatar’s Better Never To Have Been: The Harm Of Coming Into Existence: “David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one’s life make one’s life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. … The author then argues for the ‘anti-natal’ view—that it is always wrong to have children—and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a ‘pro-death’ view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct.”’
Philosophically, Singer’s thinking rests on three beliefs:
1. Human beings are net destroyers (rather than net creators).
2. Human beings experience life in net-negative terms (rather than net-positive).
3. Humans should be selfless and sacrifice the lesser value of their own lives for the greater value of other beings (rather than pursue happiness).
Premise one is the standard Malthusian premise that many environmentalists and other doomsters find so seductive; the antidote is Julian Simon’s great work. Premise three is a strong form of altruistic collectivism; the antidotes are the life-affirming philosophies, especially, in my judgment, those of Aristotle and Rand. And premise two is will-to-nothingness pessimism; but there is no known antidote once that poison has taken hold.
In his Lysis, Plato has Socrates say: “I think you’re right, Lysis, to say that if we were looking at things the right way, we wouldn’t be so far off course. Let’s not go in that direction any longer” (Lysis 213e).
