Philosophy for an Ending World

Samuel Scheffler’s well-known Death and Afterlife (2013)invites us to consider whether, knowing that human extinction is immanent due to wide-spread infertility, we can continue to find many of the projects and activities that animate our lives to still be meaningful. His answer is that we cannot: too many of our projects and activities make sense to us as worth pursuing because they aim at things that matter. But much of what we take to matter tacitly assumes that humanity will continue into the indefinite future. Scheffler’s conjecture is that knowledge of humanity’s immanent extinction would undermine our confidence that there are things that matter and we would collectively lapse into a state of anomie and despair.

The insight that animates Tim Mulgan’s exciting and carefully argued new book, Philosophy for an Ending World, is that a small change to Scheffler’s thought experiment brings into view a new series of challenging questions that reward philosophical exploration. What he proposes is that we consider the implications of knowing that, due to a cataclysmic event many light years from earth, human extinction (and the extinction of all life on earth) is certain but not immanent. Humanity can count on another two centuries before its story comes to an end. Despair and anomie might still be apt responses to the reality of this post-cataclysm world. But there are other plausible ways of responding to it that are live possibilities because there is time to adapt to the loss of future-dependent meaning.

Mulgan introduces the range of plausible ways of thinking about the significance of the cataclysm through a debate between the various positions. In these early chapters we meet, amongst others, the character of the Perennial Pessimist, who holds that life has always been meaningless and is inclined to embrace anti-natalism; the Presentist, who accepts that the cataclysm robs humanity of some ways of living that can give life meaning, but believes that there remain a sufficient number of goods available to be pursued in life that do not presuppose humanity’s continuing into the indefinite future to make life meaningful; the Post-Cataclysmic Pessimist, who holds that knowing that extinction is on the horizon, even if it is still a way off, undermines the possibility of leading a meaningful life, given our current conceptual repertoire for how one might lead a meaningful life; and finally, the multigenerationalist.

The core of the book is an extended argument for multigenerationalism. The view agrees with the Post-Cataclysmic Pessimist in holding, against the Presentist, that meaningful lives are not possible if the kinds of goals, projects, and activities that constitute leading a meaningful life are completely severed from any connection to future people. Not all goals and projects are, of course, multi-generational in character in the way that, say, curing cancer is a multi-generational project. But even present-focused activities get their point from intergenerational traditions in which they are embedded. Multigenerationalism insists, however, that we need not wallow is pessimism because the possibility of meaningful lives need not come to an end because we know extinction is on the horizon. For though leading meaningful lives requires intergenerational sources of meaning, it is both possible and feasible to reorient these sources in a way that frees them from the assumption that humanity will continue indefinitely. That is, meaningful lives are possible post-cataclysm if we develop intergenerational, time-limited projects of the kind that living meaningful lives requires.

Crucially, these new intergenerational projects must be able to sustain meaningful lives for even the last generation of humans. The multigenerationalist claim is that living meaningful lives requires participating, either directly or indirectly, in intergenerational projects and traditions. For this reason, one might think that, in fact, procreation is not permissible after the cataclysm. If procreation is allowed to continue, there will be a last generation that do not have the possibility of leading meaningful lives. Arguably, producing that generation is impermissible. But once this is granted, we quickly reach the conclusion that procreation is impermissible after the cataclysm, on pain of participating in an intergenerational Ponzi scheme. But if procreation is impermissible after the cataclysm, it follows that it also marks the end of people being able to lead meaningful lives.

Three of the book’s central chapters, on procreative ethics, argue that both consequentialist and non-consequentialist approaches to theorizing permissible procreation concur that we need not accept this conclusion. Procreation is permissible if multi-generational projects that support intergenerational meaning are feasible. To respect the constraints that Mulgan uncovers through his nuanced discussion of procreative ethics, suitable projects must involve intergenerational co-operation, allow future people the hope of a flourishing life that are hopefully better, and at the very least, not worse than that enjoyed by past generations, and allow the last generation to find meaning in the fact that they are contributing to a co-operative project of bringing the history of humanity to a fitting end.

A consequence of the constraints on permissible post-cataclysm procreation is the need for moral progress and transformation. The values and moral outlook we now have are poorly suited to enable humanity to cope with extinction because they presuppose humanity continuing into the indefinite future. Simply bequeathing them to the next generations is not, therefore, compatible with the constraint that we do our best to ensure their lives are at least as good, if not better, than the ones past generations have enjoyed. If the history of humanity is to be continued for the next two centuries before it comes to an end, different values will need to be taken up, values that are better adapted to navigating the changed circumstances of knowing that humanity will come to an end in the next two centuries. We cannot know what these values will look like from our current vantage point.

Uncovering these new or adapted values is an exercise in intergenerational moral creativity and imaginativeness. That a successful reimagining or moral transformation of this kind is in fact possible is illustrated, as Mulgan sees it, by the example of the Crow Indian Chief Plenty Coups, as portrayed by Jonathan Lear in his Radical Hope (2006). As Lear describes him, Plenty Coups was confronted with the task of leading the Crow through a period of cultural devastation in which the way of life presupposed by their values disappeared. Exercising a kind of imaginative courage, Plenty Coups drew on Crow teachings and traditions to transform Crow morality, reimagining what, for example, a good Crow life that exemplified the virtue of courage could be like under a radically changed circumstances in which the Crow no longer engaged in war. The permissible continuation of humanity after the cataclysm requires an intergenerational commitment to a similar imaginative moral transformation. Given the scale of what is involved, it cannot be successfully realized within a single generation.

What I have covered here are just some of the main ideas of Philosophy for an Ending World. There is a lot more in it. I have, for example, skipped over the very interesting discussions of religion, of whether the best way to ensure the flourishing of the last generations is for them to upload their consciousness into a virtual world, and of the kind of utopia towards whose realization by the last generation some multigenerational projects might aim. That Mulgan covers so much ground is both a strength and weakness of the book. It is a strength in that it exhibits the fecundity of the slowly ending world thought experiment.

But it is also a weakness, in two respects. First, because it covers so much ground and at times engages with recent work on, for, example, procreative ethics in great detail, it is likely to be off-putting for non-academic readers. Given the importance of its subject, that is to be regretted. As Mulgan points out at the end of the book, even if one doubts that humanity is on the precipice of extinction, it is easy to believe that the possible futures for our descendants will be radically different than anything humanity has experienced and that is all one need accept to find the questions Mulgan pursues in this book to be important. A much shorter version of it that just presented a broad overview of these questions and the complexity involved in thinking through them would certainly find a wider audience.

Second, the scope of coverage comes at the cost of certain key premises of the book’s overall argument being insufficiently defended. For example, the case for the importance of intergenerational meaning seemed to me to call for a more extended defense than it receives. Some of what I take to be meaningful in life, such as the exploration of philosophical ideas, is in part meaningful because I am participating in a venerable tradition that will continue after I am gone. But I don’t see why I should find it less meaningful if I knew the tradition would soon come to an end. Why isn’t it enough for me to feel that I am participating in a meaningful activity whose meaning transcends me that there are at least still some others who value philosophical inquiry as I do?

I would have also welcomed some discussion of the idea of ‘bringing the story of humanity to a fitting end.’ The idea that the cataclysm makes salient humanity and its history as something that enters our consciousness as an object of evaluative concern has a great deal of intuitive plausibility. But what it is that is of concern is ill-defined, in a way that invites skepticism that the appearance of plausibility can survive scrutiny. Some discussion of whether humanity and its history is in fact a defensible object of concern would have been welcome and is something hopefully we will hear more about from Mulgan and others working in this area.

REFERENCES

Lear, Jonathan (2006). Radical hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Scheffler, Samuel (2013). Death and the Afterlife. Edited by Niko Kolodny. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.