In what follows, I refer to this view as Opportunity Cost. 3 As long as conditions are hospitable to human flourishing and the ratio of happy to unhappy lives remains favorable, it will be good for humanity to continue surviving and bad for humanity to go extinct. According to this paradigm, extinction any time soon would come at a massive opportunity cost in terms of achievable welfare over the lifetime of our species or our species’ descendants ( Bostrom 2003 MacAskill 2022, 9–28, 167–1, 43–46, 235–238, 259 Parfit 1984, 453–454). One reason Unfinished Business is interesting is that it offers an alternative to one of the dominant paradigms for explaining extinction’s badness. Since the view has so far not been developed in detail, I will be content if my discussion helps to clarify what this option might plausibly look like and what it may contribute to our ethical thinking about humanity’s future. Rather, my primary aim is to begin to articulate, in a frankly exploratory spirit, what a plausible interpretation of the view might amount to. I will not be primarily concerned to defend the view against objections or to compare it to other proposals for explaining extinction’s badness. Yet what could it possibly mean to say that the human project is objectionably incomplete? What is the business that humanity needs to finish? And what exactly is the value at stake in finishing that business? Is it really plausible that not finishing that business is one of extinction’s bad-making features, giving us reason to hope that history will continue? My aim in this paper is to offer an interpretation of Unfinished Business that begins to answer these questions. Given humanity’s peculiar historical trajectory and potential, some things remain unfinished, and because of this, immanent extinction would represent an unwelcome rupture in the history of our species. (1978, 67)īennett’s thought seems to be that extinction would somehow leave the human project objectionably incomplete.

My attitude to mankind’s future is conditioned by my attitude to its past: my sense that it would be a shame if the story stopped soon is nourished by my sense that it has been an exciting story that involves some long-term endeavours that aren’t yet complete. Instead, one’s reaction might be something like “Oh no! Surely it isn’t over yet! That can’t be the end of the story! We’re not done yet!” Jonathan Bennett articulates his reaction to the thought of human extinction along these lines: Bostrom 2003 Kavka 19 Parfit 1984) or “Oh no! Everything I love and non-instrumentally value will be snuffed out!” (cf. When contemplating such facts, one’s reaction to the thought of immanent human extinction might not be “Oh no! All that loss of future well-being!” (cf. The beginning of the abolition of legally entrenched social and political hierarchies is barely 200 years old the great discoveries of relativity and quantum mechanics are around 100 years old the internet is a couple of decades old the decoding of the human genome is roughly 20 years old. 2 As a consequence, the question of what chimpanzees and bonobos will be like in 200 years is far less interesting (and frankly less scary) than the question of what humans will be like in 200 years.Ĭonsider, next, that compared to the roughly 300,000-year history of our species and the roughly 12,000-year history since the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, in which our ancestors traded hunting and foraging for sedentary agricultural life, many of the most exciting breakthroughs in science, culture, technology, politics, and morality have occurred only recently. For reasons not yet fully understood, changes in the human lineage have put us on a radically novel and unpredictable developmental trajectory. Our closest living primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, live much like they have for millions of years.

In the span of an evolutionary blink of an eye, our species has gone from foraging for food and fending off predators to splitting atoms and cracking its own genetic code. To briefly motivate Unfinished Business, consider that something remarkable has occurred in our species’ history. Since there is work left for humanity to do, it would be regrettable, all else equal, if history ended before the relevant tasks could be completed. According to an intriguing though somewhat enigmatic line of thought, if humanity went extinct any time soon this would be unfortunate because important business would be left unfinished.

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