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Why Not Let Life Become Extinct?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
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Would Earth be sadly underpopulated if all life on it had died? I shall argue for a Yes, against two main groups. In the first are those who say that life's absence could not be sad, a pity, something less than ideal, because there would be nobody to be sad about it. The second group maintains that life's absence would be preferable to its presence since living can be nasty.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1983
References
1 ‘The Theory that the World Exists Because it Should’, American Philosophical Quarterly 7, No. 4 (October 1970), 286–298; ‘Morality in a World Guaranteed Best Possible’, Studia Leibnitiana HI, No. Ill (1971), 199–205; ‘Ethically Required Existence’, American Philosophical Quarterly 9, No. 3, (July 1972), 215–224; ‘Does Causal Regularity Defy Chance?’, Idealistic Studies m, No. 3, (September 1973), 277–284; ‘The Value of Time’, American Philosophical Quarterly 13, No. 2 (April 1976), 109–119; ‘The Best World Possible’, in The Challenge of Religion Today, J. King-Farlow (ed.) (New York: Neale Watson, 1976), 43–72; ‘God and Scientific Verifiability’, Philosophy 53 (January 1978), 71–79; ‘Efforts to Explain All Existence’, Mind 87, No. 346 (April 1978), 181–194; Value and Existence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979); ‘The World's Necessary Existence’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion XI, No. 4 (1980), 207–224.
2 In his ‘Objectivity in Morals’, Philosophy 25 (1950), 149–166 (esp. 153).
3 ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy 33 (1958), 1–19 (esp. 17).
4 For example, in his ‘Justice as Fairness’, Philosophical Review 67 (April 1958) 164–194. See also sections 27ff. of his A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971) for a discussion in which the competing attractions of Average Utilitarianism are taken very seriously. Rawls notices that contract theorists like himself could have no grounds for doubling population size if the distribution of degrees of happiness (and, therefore, the Average Happiness) remained precisely as before. So, seeking to fault Average Utilitarianism, he disregards this (as it seems to me) fatal defect in it, concentrating instead on an allegedly uniquely rational way in which selfish contracting persons would avoid choices which involved the risk of finding themselves in unpleasantly worse-than-Average positions when a veil of ignorance—ignorance extending even to their own attitudes towards risk-taking—had been drawn aside. See Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice, Ch. 9 (Oxford University Press, 1973), for expertly reasoned characterization of this as ‘attempting to square the circle’.Google Scholar
5 In note 6 to Ch. 5 and note 2 to Ch. 9 of The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, 4th edn (Princeton University Press, 1963).Google Scholar
6 6 In Ch. 3 of Christian Theology and Natural Science (London: Longmans, 1956). In ‘Must God Create the Best?’, Philosophical Review 81 (1972), 317–332, R. M. Adams argues that God would not do wrong either to us or to the beings in any best of all possible worlds by failing to create their world instead of ours, and on pp. 114–115 of The Existence of God (Oxford University Press, 1979), R. Swinburne approves both this and the idea that a deity who chooses to create beings is blameless so long as he gives them lives whose values exceed zero.Google Scholar
7 Vol 16, No. 2 (1979), 105–113 (esp. 111); Govier, T., ‘What Should We Do About Future People?’ For similar moral indifference towards happy people who are merely possible (rather than likely to exist), see J., Narveson, ‘Utilitarianism and New Generations’, Mind 76 (1967), 62–72.Google Scholar