Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Breitbart – Professor Todd May thinks that when you consider the pain we inflict on animals through climate change, any reasonable assessment suggests humans should not be allowed to continue.
Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?
Our species possesses inherent value, but we are devastating the earth and causing unimaginable animal suffering.
By Todd May
Mr. May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University.Dec. 17, 2018
…
There are stirrings of discussion these days in philosophical circles about the prospect of human extinction. This should not be surprising, given the increasingly threatening predations of climate change. In reflecting on this question, I want to suggest an answer to a single question, one that hardly covers the whole philosophical territory but is an important aspect of it. Would human extinction be a tragedy?
…
So, then, how much suffering and death of nonhuman life would we be willing to countenance to save Shakespeare, our sciences and so forth? Unless we believe there is such a profound moral gap between the status of human and nonhuman animals, whatever reasonable answer we come up with will be well surpassed by the harm and suffering we inflict upon animals. There is just too much torment wreaked upon too many animals and too certain a prospect that this is going to continue and probably increase; it would overwhelm anything we might place on the other side of the ledger. Moreover, those among us who believe that there is such a gap should perhaps become more familiar with the richness of lives of many of our conscious fellow creatures. Our own science is revealing that richness to us, ironically giving us a reason to eliminate it along with our own continued existence.
One might ask here whether, given this view, it would also be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering. Although I do not have a final answer to this question, we should recognize that the case of future humans is very different from the case of currently existing humans. To demand of currently existing humans that they should end their lives would introduce significant suffering among those who have much to lose by dying. In contrast, preventing future humans from existing does not introduce such suffering, since those human beings will not exist and therefore not have lives to sacrifice. The two situations, then, are not analogous.
…
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/opinion/human-extinction-climate-change.html
Send your kids to Clemson University, assuming they don’t commit suicide on the spot after being exposed to Professor Todd May’s viciously anti-humanist green philosophy, they could well be talked out of ever having their own children.
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I would encourage Dr May to set the example for humanity. Go first.
Like every doomsday cult. Just Do It.
He is a doozy, isn’t he? From his CV page
“He specializes in Continental philosophy, especially recent French philosophy. He has authored thirteen philosophical books, focusing on the philosophical work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. His book The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism has been influential in recent progressive political thought, and his work on Rancière is among the first in English………
…His teaching interests are varied; he has found himself teaching classes as diverse as Anarchism, The Thought of Merleau-Ponty, Resistance and Alterity in Contemporary Culture, Secular Ethics in a Materialist Age, and Postmodernism and Art. ”
Post modern shamanism is what I would call it.
Profound BS production a speciality, the type that if you ask them if they want to coffee it is point of pride to them that their answer would take at least 5 minutes of your time to listen too and a lot longer to understand.
He is symptomatic of the whole movement. His name appears frequently in scientific forecasts: The Arctic May become ice free… Animal species May go extinct…
The really scary part is, he is allowed to be around children..! No wonder suicide rates are skyrocketing..
You can bet he consider his own existence to be a very important thing indeed rather than a ‘burden on the planet ‘ For it usual for those that care little for others to care a great deal about themselves.
This is the problem with almost all movements, the become a breeding ground for extremists. The environmental movement has had its share of misanthropists for a long time, but now it appears that hatred of humankind has become sufficiently mainstream in that movement that it has become acceptable as an educational philosophy. Shame on ANY educational institution that would provide a platform for such hate.
This is the latest sign of suicidal extreme liberalism. Yes, it is necessary to protect civilization and, above all, western civilization. Otherwise suicide tendency is part of human nature and its manifestations are encountered every day.
China had one-child, we have selective-child (and recycled-child).
it would also be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering.
Whenever anyone expresses such a sentiment I immediate wonder why they don’t lead by example.
Indeed – and it need not entail “suffering,” either. Plenty of ways for them to do what, in their twisted world view, is the “right thing” without any suffering. Plus, it would have the added benefit of ending the suffering of anyone within earshot of this idiot, or who has the misfortune of reading anything he has written.
That kind of a rant is a product of a sick mind. He might be a potential killer.
He was asking the question whether “it would also be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering.” He concluded that would cause undue suffering of humans.
His conclusion was that humans should stop procreating.
Since a major tenet of modern philosophy is that altruism has selfishness underneath, he logically merely wants to justify his own selfishness. Perhaps he wants to be able to spend all his future earnings on himself, only.
SR
John Endicott
“……….it would also be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering.”
Sounds more like a dictatorial instruction than a philosophical question.
However, I do agree with him, we should all end our lives to alleviate the suffering of other species.
Personally, I elect atmospheric CO2 poisoning over anything else. I think that’s reasonable, don’t you? I’ll be gone in, say, 10,000 years which should give me lots of time to reflect on my philosophical misgivings.
Completely lost his compass.
Not lost, de-magnetized
You never know where a de-magnetized compass will point.
In academia, towards grants, a comfy chair, then a long post-career career as an “emeritus”…
As he is a philosophy professor, having an inefficient moral compass would actually be part of the job description.
I’ve said for a long time, at it’s base AGW philosophy is much worse than what led to the Holocaust.
THEY were just targeting ‘mongrel races’ – THESE guys are pushing out and out extinction.
And note the stuck-up, self-assured, superior-elitist position by which he judges the rest of us.
Public (shudder) Intellectuals.
There is an old but good saying:
“Nonsense so blatant that only an intellectual would fall for it.”
That they are far from reality has been long known. I really liked the ancient description about an intellectual.
Someone who upon hearing the opening bars to the “William Tell Overture”, did NOT think of the “Lone Ranger”.
But a line I’ve been working on lately in response to Dr. May’s concerns as well as to others compelled to mess up the lives of as many people as possible.
Nihilism will be imposed until it is seen not to work.
Dr. May’s inanities could represent “ending action” for the long experiment in authoritarian government.
I would presume that this diatribe was found on his bureau as he wrote his last words before exiting to
that “big sabbatical in the sky.”
When one means to say “you are devastating”, one should not say “we are devastating”.
Anyway, I’m not devastating. He might be. He should draw the conclusions and not invoke “us”.
In the 1970s, Jacob Bronowski brought us a British Documentary Series entitled ‘The Ascent of Man”. The most remarkable feature of this series, for me, was the idea that science did not evolve in a vacuum, but hand in hand with art, culture, philosophy and religion, each influencing the other over time. It brought home the idea that the history of humanity cannot be understood by studying any individual field of human endeavour, but must be understood as the melding of all human endeavours into a whole, intricate story.
Without that big-picture idea, we might look at the writings of Todd May as an enigma; an isolated manifestation of ill-thought. But if we think of it as an aberration, we are missing the importance of it. The ideas that May is expressing are natural, ‘rational’ outcomes of the acceptance of assumptions and understandings, which are becoming foundational across the cultures of the modern world.
The Renaissance was driven largely by the resurgence of Christianity, which has a foundational philosophy of human growth and expansion. Christianity is a philosophy of change, dynamics and miracles. It places the dominion of the universe in the hands of man, and provides divine permission for man to shape this world. The science and art of the Renaissance where nurtured in this cultural philosophy. New thoughts were rewarded and excitedly shared. Change was embarrassed and fervently sought.
The renaissance emerged from the stagnation of the Islamic Empire, which was philosophically wedded to the intrangient world of mathematics and irrefutable proofs. For centuries, Islam was the face of culture, science and art, but its strict adherence to math and form made the culture rather stagnant and unchanging, as it largely remains to this day. (Watch Episode 4 of the Ascent of Man for more on this.)
Oddly, the world is becoming full circle. Post modernism, with its ‘science based’ rejection of God, has thrown the baby out with the bath water. In the absence of a guiding light, we are turning back the idea of an immutable universe. As a species, we are rejecting the philosophy of a dynamic, optimistic world view in favor of a static world view. Our resources are constantly defined as finite and diminishing. The environment is viewed as pristine as the pythagorean theorem, immutable and unchanging. Numerical calculation is the language of this new philosophy. Computer models are replacing dynamic thought with calculated ‘truths’, and infidels are defined as those who do not accept these calculated truths as the best expression of reality. The computer is the new Mohammad, and we are in the midst of jihad of sorts.
Todd May is a signpost, revealing the direction humanity is now gowing. He is equivalent to a sign that says “Bridge Out Ahead”. We can call the sign stupid if we want to. We can insist that the sign is wrong. But we ignore it at our own peril. We do not need to deal with the sign. We need to get off this road.
We need to restore dynamic thinking to desirability. We need to make the word ‘growth’ a positive word again. We need to reattach a fundamental philosophy of optimism to the human condition. We need to celebrate the ever-growing, ever-changing dynamo of life, and retire, once again, the notion that the divine is only found in immutable truths, which always become the property of those with the ability to kill the most people.
Fine post. Thank you.
Pseudo-Intellectual Catastrophe Kitsch (PsICK)
That’s what he is.
“Hell is other people. Make other people get rid of themselves.”
I read the article yesterday in the Times, and at the time there were over300 comments. Interesting reading, of those I read, which were many, well over half agreed with the author. Many appeared to be young folks. Scary.
Scary indeed. it shows the indoctrination programs (IE public schools) have been effective.
Largest national population is in China, 2nd is in India.
Fastest growing regional population is in Africa.
Fastest growing religion is Islam.
So to achieve any significant reduction in animal suffering, you’d have to convince China, India, Africa and Islam to drastically curb their birth rates.
That would make for an interesting TED talk; go for it Todd!
This is why “contemporary philosophy” is an oxymoron. I read a while back a supposedly serious philosophical discussion on the morality of infanticide. Good thing Socrates got out while he could.
Stupid op-eds like this is the reason serious people have stopped reading the NYHTimes. Please, read the comments section. If you think the professor is daft, take a gander at people who read the Times.
Why stop at animal suffering? Plants surely feel pain too. /sarc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zfzT7QfLZc
(Or search Vegetarian Nightmare )
Indeed.
As I told someone way back in the 80s who pulled the old “what if an alien came to earth and enslaved, tortured and ate humans as we have have done to animals” canard: “what if the alien is a giant carrot?”.
“what if the alien is a giant carrot?”.
Then it would star in the worst episode of Lost In Space ever.
Word press won’t let me post. Interesting.
Including that one?
Everyone who doesn’t see this post, please deposit $5 in my bitcoin account.
It appears I was misinformed.
There is no difference between Mr Todd May (he doesn’t deserve to be called “Prof.”) and Khmer Rouge. And, yes, he’s far worse than the Nazis and the Communists. Why? Because the Nazis cared, at least, about their own people, Germans, even if it all collapsed for them in the end, and the Communists cared about workers, at least in principle. People like Todd May care about no one. They are the whole humanity’s haters. If they ever get their way, why, they’ll send *everybody* to gas chambers. It is important that they are named for what they really are: aspiring mass-murderers. Even today, note, people are dying already because of Green’s murderous energy starvation policies.
Don’t worry everyone**
The Girls have it all worked out.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-46118103
add on these 2 little beauts….
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46389147
also
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-40608256
Its been said around here quite a number of times, under the mistaken notion that being rich and clever is the root cause. How wrong is it possi…….
** Well OK, maybe DO worry – about an upcoming lack of Ad-Hominem targets such as this guy.
As per the introduction to this story:
It could only go downhill from there – please try to grasp the idea of Unreasonable Behaviour before the lawyer’s letters start arriving.
And anyway – they’re topping themselves at whichever university they go to:
Even in Australia:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6408533/The-shocking-use-drugs-Schoolies-laid-bare-leavers-ditch-booze-pills.html
Obtained ‘On Prescription’ I don’t wonder from well qualified and scientifically trained doctors…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6477773/Hundreds-teachers-struggle-spelling-maths-knowledge-curriculum.html
He does deserve a bit of a poke though, Shakespeare is not any sort of Triumph of Humanity.
His plays were the Trash TV of his time – dysfunctional characters in dysfunctional storylines.
Where Shakespeare’s work has become A Triumph is in the creation of Pretension and Snobbery, yet another way for one group of rats-in-the-cage to claim superiority over another.
And thus be justified in eating them.
Wonder why that is, we’re not short of anything are we?
We can’t be – we keep tellin ourselves how wonderful everything is like Willis’ story just recently…….
Shakespeare he quotes
Todd May belongs to the poststructuralist (or deconstructionist) school of philosophy.
When Clive James described ‘deconstructionism’ as nonsense without advancing any supporting arguments proponents retorted that he couldn’t.
James replied that, yes, he could.
“Unless we believe there is such a profound moral gap between the status of human and nonhuman animals…”
There is not a profound moral gap between humans and animals – there is an infinite moral gap. Animals are not moral creatures. They cannot sin or commit crimes. The fact that this professor can ponder morality (even in the ridiculous way he does so) illustrates that his premise, the equity of humans and animals, is a lie. No shark is wringing its fins about whether shark extinction might be a net good for all the other animals.
The professor refuted himself when he sat down to write about morality.
Animals are not moral creatures. They cannot … commit crimes
I don’t know about that, I recall seeing a video of a bra stealing cat. The cat would literally take underwear and run off with it in the dead of night. Theft is a crime. What cats (and other animals) can’t do is understand why their actions are wrong, but they are certainly capable of committing actions that the law classify as a crime.
BTW, in medieval times, there are cases of animals that where put on trial for crimes:
https://www.globalanimal.org/2011/02/14/medieval-court-cases-animals-on-trial/
“In Medieval times, Europeans put animals that had committed crimes on trial, often providing them with all the same rights as people, including the right to a lawyer and a fair trial. While the punishments seem harsh to us today, keep in mind that humans were given the exact same treatment”
so, yes, animals can commit crimes.
So this guy is actually in favor of an “extinction event” because of “Climate Change”?