DISCUSSION
Meaningful Lives and Meaningful Futures
Volume 30, Number 1, March 2025, Pages 137–145
PDFAbstract
What moral reasons, if any, do we have to prevent the extinction of humanity? In “Unfinished Business,” Jonathan Knutzen argues that certain further developments in culture would make our history more “collectively meaningful” and that premature extinction would be bad because it would close off that possibility. Here, I critically examine this proposal. I argue that if collective meaningfulness is analogous to individual meaningfulness, then our meaning-based reasons to prevent the extinction of humanity are substantially different from the reasons discussed by Knutzen.
Copyright © 2025 Michal Masny
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