‘Last Generation?’: A Response
By PETER SINGER
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
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The role of philosophers — and I take it, of The Stone — is to stimulate people to think about questions that they might not think about otherwise. That so many people were roused to comment on my piece, “Should This Be the Last Generation?” — despite comments being closed at one point — suggests that it achieved this aim. That said, it would have been good if some of those commenting had read the piece with a little more care, and all the way through.
The comments show two common misunderstandings of what I was trying to do. As an example of the first, Rob Cook of New York writes that “this piece frames overpopulation and environmental destruction in the wrong terms. It assumes that developed countries cannot cut down on consumption.” But “Last Generation?” isn’t a piece about overpopulation or environmental destruction, and it makes no assumptions about whether developed countries can cut down on consumption. It just isn’t about that question at all. It asks a deeper question, one not dependent on the environmental constraints on our planet, nor on the number of people now on Earth. Even if there were only 1 million humans on this planet, all living at the level of an average citizen of, say, Switzerland, we could still ask whether it would be a good thing to have children in order to continue the species.
Philosophers frequently set out views that are opposed to their own and seek to present them in their strongest possible form.
This was not, of course, intended to be a realistic solution to the problem of climate change. It was, as I said, a thought experiment to test our attitudes to one of the views I had been discussing. I expected that most people would reject this as an appallingly selfish way of allowing us to emit all the greenhouse gases without constraint, and that this would show that most of us dothink that it is a good thing to bring more human beings into the world. That, in turn, would suggest that most of us do think life is worth living, and it leads us back to the problem of the asymmetry with which I began — why many people think it is wrong to bring a child who will live a miserable life into the world, but do not think that the fact that a child will live a good life is reason enough for bringing a child into the world. (For the world as it is today, any suggestion that it is desirable to bring a child into the world is likely to be met by a reference to the environmental problems that the existing population is causing; but in order to focus on the philosophical issue rather than the practical one, the question can also be considered in the hypothetical situation, in which our planet has only 1 million people on it.)
This brings me to the second common misunderstanding found in the comments. I was surprised by how many readers assumed that my answer to the title question of my essay was “Yes.” Perhaps they stopped reading before they got to the last paragraph, in which I say that I think that life is, for most people, worth living, and that a world with people in it is better than one without any sentient beings in it.
The claims made by some readers that my essay reveals philosophers to be gloomy, depressed people are wide of the mark.
By the end of my essay, it should have been clear that although I think Benatar puts up a better case for his conclusions than many people would imagine could be made, I do not think that he is right. Nevertheless, I hope those with a serious interest in these issues will read Benatar’s book. They may end up disagreeing with him, but I doubt that they will think his position absurd.
The claims made by some readers that my essay reveals philosophers to be gloomy, depressed people are therefore wide of the mark. Even further astray, however, are the suggestions that those who believe that life is not worth living are somehow committed by this position to end their own lives. Mmrader of Maryland, for instance, asks: “If you think life is so pointless and painful, with most pleasure a fleeting illusion, why are you still here?” I don’t, of course, think life is so pointless and painful, but someone who did might still decide to stick around — might indeed think that it would be wrong not to stick around — because he had the ability to reduce the amount of pain that others experience.
I also want to assure the many readers who pointed out that humans are not the only sentient beings, that the author of “Animal Liberation” has not suddenly forgotten this important fact. He just wanted to focus on the issue under discussion, and to avoid mixing it with the separate issues of whether nonhuman animals would be better off in a world without human beings in it, and if so, whether the gains for nonhuman animals would be sufficient to outweigh the losses to human beings. Hence the suggestion that we compare a world with humans in it to one that has no sentient beings at all.
The sheer number of comments received is one sign that the essay raised an issue that people find perplexing. Another sign of this is that a number of readers thought that Benatar’s position is absurd, whereas others thought it self-evident. Since we do not often discuss such fundamental questions — D. Lee of New York City is right to suggest that there is something of a taboo on questioning whether life is worth living — I thought it would be interesting to take an online poll of readers’ opinions on some of the key questions. But for technical reasons that proved impossible, and hence the questions appeared at the end of the essay, with an invitation to readers to answer them. Only a few did, but many more expressed a general attitude, for or against the idea that existence is generally bad and we should not bring more children into the world.
On the negative side, I thought MClass (location: “gallivanting around Europe”) expressed it well when he or she wrote:
My life’s low points are nowhere near as severe many other people’s; but that’s actually not the point. My own conclusion was “Why take the risk?” especially with my own kids — if the natural instinct of parents is to prevent the harm and promote the good of their offspring, why would I even contemplate bringing my kids into a rickety planet to be raised by imperfect parents.On the positive side, many readers expressed satisfaction with the lives that their children are leading, and saw this as an indication that their decision to have children was justified. Suzanne from Wisconsin offered the distinct idea that there is objective value in some human activities, when she writes that “it would be tragic if no one was left to love/make art, music literature, philosophy, etc.”
I love my kids so much that I didn’t have them.
I have argued for a broader view that takes into account the preferences of all sentient beings, and seeks to satisfy them to the greatest extent possible.
Since readers have the opportunity to recommend comments by other readers, I also asked Ms. Kheyfets to count the recommendations. This yielded a higher score for those with negative views of existence, in part because fewer readers recommended comments that were neutral or undecided. Excluding once again those comments that did not address the issue, 1870 readers recommended comments expressing negative views of our existence or opposing bringing children into the world, which was 29 percent of all recommendations, while 3109 or 48 percent took a positive view of our existence or favored bringing children into the world, with 23 percent of comments neutral or undecided.
None of this allows us to draw any conclusions about the attitudes of people other than those who chose to comment, or recommend comments, but at least among that group, there is more support for a negative view of human existence and against having children than one might have expected. (I put this forward purely as an interesting fact about this group of people; I am not suggesting that it has any bearing on whether that view is sound.)
Alas, to respond adequately to the many readers who understood exactly what I was attempting to do, and had serious points to make about it, would take more time than I have available. Several readers suggested that my essay somehow ignored evolution, but my topic was what we ought to do, and as all the best writers on evolution — from Charles Darwin to Richard Dawkins — make clear, our knowledge of evolution does not tell us what we ought to do.
Among the many significant philosophical challenges in these comments I will only mention the one that came from those who, like Abe of Boston, asked whether happiness is the only metric by which to measure life. That’s the view of the classic utilitarian tradition that traces its roots to the work of Jeremy Bentham, but many contemporary utilitarians, including myself, do not accept that view. I have argued for a broader view that takes into account the preferences of all sentient beings, and seeks to satisfy them to the greatest extent possible. But other utilitarians — or more broadly, consequentialists — take a more pluralistic view, including other values like justice, love, knowledge and creativity in their account of what is intrinsically good. And of course many philosophers are not consequentialists at all. If I spoke mostly of happiness and suffering in the essay, that is because most people do take these as important, and in a short essay it is impossible to discuss every aspect of these large questions.
If you find these questions interesting, there is a lot more to read. The current philosophical debate owes most to Derek Parfit. Part IV of his “Reasons and Persons” presents the issues about bringing people into existence in all their baffling complexity. And for those who asked “What is a good life, anyway?” don’t miss the brief Appendix I (that’s the letter “I”, not a roman numeral).
There are also two relevant articles in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I suggest you go first to Lukas Meyer’s article on “Intergenerational Justice,” at and then for a discussion of a more specific problem related to this issue, go to the article on “The Repugnant Conclusion” by Jesper Ryberg, Torbjörn Tännsjö, and Gustaf Arrhenius.
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is “The Life You Can Save.”
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