The last man
Richard Routley (Sylvan) · Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic? · 1973
Imagine you are the very last human being. A catastrophe has carried off all the others, and you yourself will die in a few moments, with no descendants and no witness to come. Before you, a device could wipe out at a stroke, and without the slightest pain, everything still alive on the planet: the forests, the oceans, the animals. No human being will ever again exist to rejoice in it or to suffer from it. Nothing you do can therefore harm anyone. Would laying your hand on that device be a wrong, or a matter of indifference?
As the last human being, you could painlessly wipe out all remaining life. Is it wrong?
What it does in the debate
Objects to Anthropocentrismattacks the position
The last man could painlessly wipe out all remaining life: if only humans count, the act would be indifferent; yet it seems a grave wrong, a sign that value did not rest on us alone.
- Be the last human, dying, with no descendants: you can destroy at a stroke and without pain all remaining life, forests, oceans, animals.
- No human will exist any longer to suffer from it or rejoice in it: according to anthropocentrism, for which all value is value for humans, the act wrongs no one and remains indifferent.
- Yet it strikes us as a devastation, a wrong: this living world had worth, it seems, independently of any human gaze.
Therefore So value is not only value-for-us: if destroying life without harming any human remains a wrong, then the moral circle overflows humanity.