The University of Chicago has a tradition dubbed the “Aims of Education Address”. As put by the university:
Every year since 1961, a University of Chicago faculty member has been invited to address students in the College regarding their view on the aims of a liberal education. In 1962 the Aims of Education Address was added to Orientation Week and officially became a tradition for incoming students. The address encourages students to reflect on the purpose and definition of education as they embark upon their collegiate years.
In 2022, the speaker at the Aims of Education was Agnes Callard. She’s a relatively prominent figure in philosophical academia, so I recently decided to watch her address. Interestingly, around 11 minutes into her address, she starts talking about longtermism, which is one of the key beliefs in effective altruist and rationalist circles. I’ve transcribed the most relevant part of the speech below. (The following paragraphs are all taken from Agnes Callard’s address, linked above.)
(Part of) The Address#
“So recently I read a book called What We Owe the Future, which tries to argue the reader into longtermism, which is the view that we ought to care about the future. I was surprised that the author William McKascal, who is a philosopher, at no point in the book whipped out the philosophy thought experiment designed to show that we already do. Why go to all the trouble trying to browbeat someone into caring about something when instead you can show them they already do care about it? Myself, I like to take the easy path. So, I’m going to tell you about that thought experiment.
Suppose we find out tomorrow that over the past few months, another virus alongside COVID has been creeping silently around the globe. The disease caused by this highly infectious virus is largely asymptomatic, which is why it took us a few months to notice that just about everyone has been infected by it. In fact, assume that by the time we figure out exactly what the virus does, everyone on the planet has been infected. […] I’m also going to posit what the virus does. It makes you infertile.
The virus gets called Sterilla virus because its only medical effect on those human it infects—whether they’re male or female—is sterility, the inability to have children. What I want you to think about is what would be your reaction to learning that an epidemic of Sterilla virus has swept the globe? While you’re thinking about that, I’ll tell you about my reaction. […] My reaction is that I feel sick.
I’m borrowing the outlines of this thought experiment, including the label, the “infertility scenario”, from philosopher Samuel Scheffler’s book, Death and the Afterlife, though I’ve modified it a little. Scheffler is himself drawing on the P.D. James novel, Children of Men, which Alfonso Quiron made into a movie with Clive Owen in 2006. The movie differs from the novel in a lot of details. Both are good, but something they share is a focus on just how dystopian our world would get in the decades before our time ran out. Everyone, but especially the last people to be born who are called omegas in the book seems to have lost the ability to care. Scheffler points out this is surprising. Each of us knows we’re going to die, yet we take this in stride and live productive lives. Somehow, when we’re confronted not even with the deaths, but just the nonbirths of future people (which is to say people who could have existed but didn’t), it’s in the face of this weird metaphysical lacuna that our that our ability to cope somehow fails us.
It wouldn’t be surprising if we were upset by the prospect of a meteor coming and killing all of us, because that would cut our lives short and some of us would die in great suffering. In the infertility scenario, no one you know or love is dying prematurely. And yet, P.D. James and Alfonso Quaron seem to think that in the period after humanity learns that they’re in the infertility scenario, but before they actually go extinct, human life on Earth would become a living hell. Scheffler conjectures that such a world would feature “widespread apathy, enemy and despair, the erosion of social institutions and social solidarity, the deterioration of the physical environment, a pervasive loss of conviction about the value or point of many activities.” My gut tells me he’s right.
But why? Why do future generations matter so much?
Scheffler’s explanation, which I find plausible, is that absent the prospect of future generations, human life seems to lose its meaning. That is, the meaning of our lives now relies in ways we don’t always notice or take into account on the existence of future lives. Scheffler says, “The coming into existence of people we do not know and love matters more to us than our own survival and the survival of the people we do know and love.” He thinks in the infertility scenario, the time after death becomes “a blank eternity of non-existence.” But what is it now? Well, he compares it to a party we have to leave early. His thought is that a lot of the most meaningful activities that we engage in are parts of ongoing traditions. It matters to us that the party—be it about scientific achievement, political struggles, religious observance, literary appreciation—not come to an end with our contribution to it.
Here’s another quote from Scheffler: “Our conception of a human life as a whole relies on an implicit understanding of such a life as itself occupying a place in an ongoing history uh in a temporally extended chain of lives and generations.” If this is so, then perhaps we cannot simply take it for granted that the activity of say reading The Cather in the Rye or trying to understand quantum mechanics or even eating an excellent meal would have the same significance for people or offer them the same rewards in a world that was known to be deprived of a human future.
What I notice is that my response to the infertility scenario is very different from one in which from a scenario in which I simply don’t have biological descendants. If I were to learn that none of my children were going to have children, I might be a bit saddened. (Please have kids, guys!) But I don’t feel that vertigenous1 loss of meaning. I wouldn’t even feel it if I learned that no one I currently knew would have any descendants alive in a 100 years as long as other humans did have descendants. It looks like I don’t especially care that I survive or that I or my associates leave a chain of descendants behind us. What I seem to care about is a set of people who haven’t been born yet, who I have no personal connection to: the humans of 2200 to 5000.”
My Reaction#
I find this argument (which I was unaware of before watching this address) very compelling. To be honest, I’m not sure why it isn’t brought up more in longtermist circles2. The rest of the talk is fairly good as well (although I disagree that the fact that Scheffler’s “pyramid scheme” proposal for how humans define meaning is invalid because it is illogical; I believe that the validity of an argument has little to do with the extent to which that argument influences our lives).