What objective reasons, if any, do we have to care about the survival of humanity? I will critically explore some previously proposed answers—the Arguments from Additional Lives, from Final Value and from Value Dependence—before suggesting an alternative account. According to it, a concern with the existence of human beings in the future is intrinsically implied by the engagement in a particular kind of activities, namely, ones with infinite ends of unconditional worth. The account thereby ties our capacity to appreciate the goodness of a human future to the actuality of our recognition of goodness in human existence in the present.
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Speaker
Anastasia Berg is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. She is also a senior editor The Point magazine, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others.