Do We Have a Moral Obligation to Continue the Human Race?
In philosophy, the ‘non-identity problem’ refers to what our moral obligations to future individuals should be, that is, to those who do not yet exist. It is a problem in moral philosophy because, typically, the ethical rightness or wrongness of an action is evaluated in terms of how it affects someone (who exists). To summarise the non-identity problem in the form of a question: How can we wrong those who do not exist? Where does wrongness lie if there is not an identifiable recipient of harm? The philosopher Derek Parfit summed up this intuition — known as the person-affecting intuition — in his influential work Reasons and Persons (1987): “what is bad must be bad for someone.” However, we live in a world that we know, with more or less certainty, will contain future generations (how many generations that will be is uncertain, especially in light of the climate crisis).
Because we expect future individuals to exist, actions today will, therefore, have a bearing on actual lives. One solution to the non-identity problem, then, is essentially a utilitarian one: our moral obligation to prevent/minimise suffering and create/maximise well-being means that expected future harms and goods should factor into our present-day actions (or inactions).
This non-identity problem also ties into antinatalism. This is because antinatalists argue we commit wrongdoing by bringing new people (or sentient beings more generally) into existence, owing to the harms they will experience, which is not seen as compensated — thereby making procreation permissible — just because they will experience goods as well. Thus, antinatalism is committed to the view that wrongness can relate to beings who do not yet exist but whose existence depends on our decisions. (I don’t want to detail the arguments for and against antinatalism; I have covered many of them in previous articles.)
A logical outcome of universal antinatalism would be human extinction. Universal antinatalism is extremely unlikely to ever arise, but for argument’s sake, if it should — and did — arise, antinatalists concede that this voluntary extinction would not be a completely pain-free process. The last generation, given that they would not have a younger generation to support them, would face a difficult existence. Nonetheless, so argue many antinatalists, these expected harms do not justify the continuation of the human race and the harms done to (potentially) many more numbers of generations preceding the final one. As the philosopher — and well-known populariser of antinatalism — David Benatar argues in Is It Wrong to Reproduce? (2015):
Continued procreation in order to save existing people from harm is a giant procreative Ponzi scheme. Each generation has to procreate to save itself from the fate of the final generation, thereby creating a new generation that must procreate in order to spare itself the same fate. Like all Ponzi schemes, it cannot end well….As a species, we can tread the perilous waters of purposelessness by procreating only so long. The final people’s problems of purpose will be no different whether the final people are the current generation or some distant future one.
One of the common counterarguments to antinatalism is that we shouldn’t all stop procreating because of its logical outcome: the end of the human species, which is viewed as bad. Indeed, the idea of human extinction, intuitively and often quite viscerally, feels like a catastrophic scenario. It would spell the loss not just of billions of future lives — and the joys of existence — but also the loss of human ingenuity, scientific discovery, art, music, writing, and so on and so forth. However, as we’ve seen, for the antinatalist, these goods do not justify the wrongdoing of procreation, owing to the harms involved — the kinds and degrees of harm that are non-consensually imposed on others.
Furthermore, a key aspect of Benatar’s argument for antinatalism — his belief that it is always bad for a being to come into existence — is the axiological asymmetry. This argument is as follows: it is good to prevent harm by abstaining from procreation, even if no one exists to benefit from that prevention; but it is not bad if that also means preventing well-being, as the absence of well-being is only bad if someone exists to experience that deprivation. In other words, there is an asymmetry in how we evaluate the good and bad things in life.
The axiological asymmetry, at least partly, rests on the moral intuition that we do not regard it as immoral if someone could have a child but doesn’t (religious conservatives may see this as immoral on religious grounds, but it is not typically framed as wrong — entirely or partially — due to the prevention of well-being). He also exemplifies this intuition with the thought experiment of imagining all the lives that don’t exist on other planets: we don’t give this much thought, nor consider it a tragedy if we do.
The Benatarian axiological asymmetry has received various critiques, leading to counter-responses from Benatar. Some of these critiques, Benatar contends, rest on a misunderstanding of his argument, for example, seeing it as a logical argument instead of an axiological one: we can logically state that absent pleasures are bad, but Benatar stresses we should not. This is an argument based on value judgements of different scenarios. In any case, this axiological asymmetry presents a solution to the non-identity problem: we are morally obligated to prevent harm to potential future individuals but not to create well-being for them, and this means we should abstain from procreation, even if this means preventing lives that contain more benefits than harms. Benatar believes that the asymmetry preserves our common moral intuitions regarding the presence or absence of goods and harms.
If one accepts Benatar’s argument — or any other argument for strong antinatalism, rather than a weaker or conditional form of antinatalism — the logical extension is human extinction. Yet whether or not one accepts an anti-procreation argument, the thought of human extinction can still seem problematic. This might be due to the suffering that would be faced by the last few remaining generations. But it can also follow from the intuition mentioned earlier: a kind of pre-emptive grief about the loss of lives and valuable human creations. Still, the intuitions encapsulated in Benatar’s axiological asymmetry imply that it would not be bad for there to be no future human generations on Earth, even if that means the prevention of many good lives. This would be no more bad than the current non-existence of sentient life on Mars.
The wish to preserve the human species on Earth may just be a strongly felt sentimentalism. Nonetheless, if this is mere sentimentalism, it is understandable: we are aware of all the goods in human history and the present, and the possible (and unimaginably exciting) goods to come in the future. We perceive a trajectory of human progress, and the acceleration of scientific discovery and technological development can — for those who are more optimistic — make one excited for what future humans will discover and create. (Of course, it is not just pessimists and antinatalists who are less optimistic about the future that humans are creating, in light of issues like the climate crisis and developments in AI.)
Konrad Szocik has argued in a 2024 paper published in Topoi that sentimentalism (i.e. feeling empathetic) towards future people can lead to either pronatalism or antinatalism/ pro-extinctionism. But pronatalist/anti-extinctionist sentiment doesn’t always stem from empathy towards future individuals but rather from thoughts about the human race continuing, more generally. It is the loss of the species, as a whole, which is seen as disheartening — as if it is a great loss from the point of view of the universe. This would be a loss of civilisation — a rare outcome of cosmic evolution — and the loss of the continued progress of civilisation. The visceral negative reaction to the idea of human extinction may conjure up images of a flourishing futuristic society, never to be realised. Human extinction may entail the loss of an increasingly moral and happy world, progressing towards a state of utopia, or near-utopia.
This sentimentalism often draws on fantasy and science fiction, and its utopian imaginings are unlikely to materialise (creating utopias also tends to lead to dystopian outcomes). Yet to reiterate, even if future societies on Earth are an improvement — even a significant improvement — to current ones, Benatar insists this would not justify the harms suffered by successive generations. Even if a future utopia were guaranteed, or even just likely, to materialise in the future, this would involve ‘sacrificing’ interceding generations to get us there.
For the antinatalist, there are many reasons not to continue the human race. There is no moral obligation to continue it; antinatalists argue that moral reasoning should, instead, lead us to prefer its (voluntary) disappearance. The wish for humans to never go extinct amounts to sentimentalism, albeit an understandable kind of sentimentalism. The perceived wrongness of letting humanity go extinct is based on existing people’s negative feelings about this scenario, not any violation of moral duties. In line with Benatar’s thinking on the non-identity problem, a future Earth without humans is not a bad state of affairs; in fact, he views it as a good state of affairs. This aligns with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic worldview. As the latter writes in his essay ‘On the Sufferings of the World’ (1850):
If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.
This vision of reality, and its lifelessness, will to many certainly sound more bleak than it does ‘good’. But this is where Benatar’s reasoning leads him (and others). In a future without humans, there will simply be no humans around to be saddened about their non-existence. Existing humans today can, of course, be saddened by this thought, but it regards a scenario in which people don’t exist. There is simply no one around who can be wronged.
According to one view on the non-identity problem, we only have moral obligations to future individuals we can expect to exist. What we do (or don’t do) today matters if it will affect future people. But if what we do (or don’t do — i.e. we don’t procreate) means no one will exist in the future, then we have done nothing wrong. On an emotional level, this might feel regrettable, but this sentimental reaction does not demonstrate a moral obligation to continue the human race. In fact, this sentimentalism, when examined, often boils down to anthropocentrism: the idea that humans are the crown of nature — the most important species — and so preserving humans should always be the number one moral priority.
This human-focused sentimentalism is also often bolstered by optimism about humans, neglecting or downplaying the harmful effects of humans on other humans, other species, and the environment. (Techno-optimism — the belief that technology will solve all our problems — is an aspect of this optimism.) This is not to say we should swing to the other extreme and engage in unjustified misanthropy, viewing the human race solely in negative terms. The philosopher Ian James Kidd notes that misanthropic attitudes, and being a misanthrope, can be justified, in light of human moral failings. He argues, moreover, that such misanthropy should not be dismissed as hatred: “when you look at the attitudes of particular philosophical misanthropes, it is clear that there is a complex and dynamic interplay of different emotions, moods and feelings.”
Justified misanthropy can regard the species in a general sense because of the overall effects that humans have. Misanthropy need not (and should not) be a hatred towards all people, but it can (and perhaps should), instead, involve a moral condemnation of humankind. Anthony Morgan, who interviewed Kidd, said:
In Straw Dogs John Gray, a pessimist and misanthrope in a Schopenhauerian mould, refers to humanity as Homo rapiens — rapacious, greedy, destructive. More recently Rutger Bregman has referred to humanity as Homo puppy (cuddly, lovable, domesticated, etc.). To riff on Iris Murdoch’s idea that “man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble that picture”, won’t narratives like Bregman’s encourage us to foreground our more puppy-like characteristics?
Kidd responds:
Bregman wants the idea that human beings are fundamentally Homo puppies to motivate an optimistic vision of our current moral performance and our moral possibilities going into the future. If human beings are by nature disposed to cooperativeness, playfulness, and other puppyish virtues, we can trust in our future moral progress.… [D]eep down we might be puppies, but in our overt behaviour in our social communities we become wolves. Homo homini lupus, as the old Latin motto has it…. But I consider these facts [about our underlying nature] to be irrelevant. The focus should be on how human beings live and behave within the actual arrangements of the contemporary world. The optimism of Bregman’s narrative is achieved by playing down facts about the world or by encouraging us to think that change is just around the corner.
A pessimistic or misanthropic picture of humans (perhaps as Homo rapiens), if justified, could be used as an additional reason to support a moral obligation to voluntarily bring an end to humankind. Indeed, Benatar makes a misanthropic argument for antinatalism: the harm that humans cause to humans, non-human animals, and the environment are additional reasons to desist from procreation.
However, there may be an indirect moral duty to continue the human race if, as some antinatalists argue, we need to make sure some humans are around to help end the continuation of other sentient species. Indeed, since much of antinatalism rests on the interests and preferences entailed by sentience generally — not just human sentience — then the well-being of livestock and wild animals matters too. The philosopher Kyle Johannsen, for example, argues in his book Wild Animal Ethics (2020) that we have a moral duty to reduce wild animal suffering, and this means intervening in nature. Some antinatalists have considered the practical outcomes of such a duty, including the mass sterilisation of wild animals. But this would require the existence of future humans to enact such a solution. On utilitarian and/or deontological grounds, continuing the human race (up to a certain point) may be justified if it ensures that the much greater suffering — endured by a greater number of beings — in animal agriculture and the wild is prevented and reduced.
It is also possible to defend the position that we have no moral obligation to continue the human race even if we reject pessimism and antinatalism, and embrace optimism and pronatalism. For example, if one supposes that the goods in human lives justify the continuation of the human race — because one judges most lives to be good overall — then we can say that, in most instances, it is a good thing to procreate. By procreating, we gift the joys of existence to someone else — and this someone else will likely be glad that they exist, despite the fact that they will inevitably experience suffering and death. Nonetheless, this does not necessarily entail a duty to create a life.
In ethics, some actions are considered supererogatory — that is, they go beyond what we are morally obligated to do. Supererogatory actions are good actions that involve doing more than is morally required or necessary. Some examples of supererogatory actions include enduring injury or sacrificing one’s life or organs for the sake of someone else’s life or well-being. Other examples include granting forgiveness, doing favours, dedicating a significant portion of one’s free time to charitable causes, and living an ascetic life if this means one can provide additional resources to others or prevent harmful effects on the environment.
Supererogatory acts are morally praiseworthy, but they are not seen as a fulfilment of a moral duty. Nevertheless, it can be tricky to always distinguish between a supererogatory act and a moral duty: we need to decide what factors determine whether we are ‘going above and beyond’ what is required of us. After all, moral duties often involve an element of self-sacrifice (sacrificing our time, effort, or resources), so perhaps it is the degree of self-sacrifice that determines the difference. Indeed, moral duties should not demand that we disregard our own interests and well-being.
Superergotary actions factor into the demandingness objection to utilitarianism: if we should seek to minimise suffering and maximise happiness, this may lead to the demanding conclusion that we should all act like saints. Some utilitarians accept that their position places great moral demands on all of us — to give up more than we currently do — which may lead them to reject the notion of ‘supererogatory’ entirely. If some actions further maximise well-being, then these actions are duties, not supererogatory acts. Other utilitarians, however, accept that supererogatory acts exist — the sorts of examples given above — based on the moral intuition that we are not obligated to make great sacrifices to our well-being for the sake of others. Yet some may see this moral intuition as in conflict with, and therefore an argument against, the position of utilitarianism.
If one accepts the reality of supererogatory acts, as most people do, procreation (and, in turn, continuing the human species) may be one such act. This would preserve the intuition that we are not obligated to create happy lives. From a certain optimistic and pronatalist perspective, it can be viewed as a good outcome if the human race continues, because of the human well-being and flourishing that will result, but it would be mistaken to view non-procreation — even if universally practised — as morally wrong. One argument for pronatalism, especially an optimistic version, may be based on the many goods that parents enjoy as a result of having children. But one version of pronatalism may give more attention to the negatives of parenting: the financial, lifestyle, and mental health costs that parents accept.
In light of the personal sacrifices made by parents for their children, perhaps procreation — in addition to adopting children — could be considered another supererogatory act. While it may be questioned whether procreating is truly a supererogatory act, given how normal it is and the benefits entailed by being a parent, many supererogatory acts bring joy to the people doing them. However, perhaps it is not procreation itself that is the supererogatory act but preserving the human species; procreation thus becomes a contribution towards that goal (no individual can, by themselves, ensure the continuation of the species). Continuing humankind can be considered supererogatory because we do no wrong by not continuing it, but we achieve a lot of good if we do.
By way of analogy, if we ‘go beyond the call of duty’ and donate an organ to save a stranger’s life, this inevitably means they will live longer and experience more suffering, but this additional suffering does not discount that saving the person’s life is morally praiseworthy. An anti-extinctionist may, similarly, view continued procreation, by most people, as morally praiseworthy if it ensures the human race continues, despite this leading to inevitable suffering.
Whether one adopts a pessimistic/antinatalist or optimistic/pronatalist perspective, a plausible case can be made for there being no moral obligation to continue the human race. Nonetheless, as we have seen, there are variations of both perspectives that make a future with (at least some) human generations preferable. Intuitively, it may seem obvious that we are obligated to ensure the human race continues, as the thought of us going extinct can seem like a great moral travesty. But whether such a moral obligation exists needs to be justified — going beyond sentimentalism. It needs to be shown that the future of the human race entails goods that justify the resulting harms or that voluntary human extinction is a form of wrongdoing.
Originally published at https://www.samwoolfe.com on February 17, 2025.
