An Argument for the Global Suicide of Humanity

The animal rights movement, both as an activist social movement and as a philosophical-moral movement, has introduced a Copernican revolution into Western moral discourse. More specifically, it has removed humanity from the centre of moral discourse and has placed alongside humans other, non-human, sentient beings. The environmental movement has further widened this moral discourse by emphasising a moral responsibility of care for the natural environment as a whole. Each of these movements has developed in response to humanity’s violent treatment of other sentient beings and humanity’s pollution and destruction of the earth’s ecology and stratosphere. Whether the environmental destruction set in place by humans can be halted or reversed remains a pressing and open question. This paper argues that the efforts of governments and environmental bodies to prevent environmental catastrophe will not succeed if such actors continue to be guided by a general modern idea of technological and social progress and an attitude of ‘speciesism’. From the standpoint of a dialectical, utopian anti-humanism, this paper sets out, as a thought experiment, the possibility of humanity’s willing extinction as a solution to a growing ecological problem.