Living up to our Humanity: The Elevated Extinction Rate Event and What it Says About Us

摘要

Either we are in an elevated extinction rate event or in a mass extinction. Scientists disagree, and the matter cannot be resolved empirically until it is too late. We are the cause of the elevated extinction rate. What does this say about us, we who are Homo sapiens-the wise hominid? Beginning with the Renaissance and spreading during the 18th century, the normative notion of humanity has arisen to stand for what expresses our dignity as humans-specifically our thoughtfulness, in the double sense of our capacity for reasoned choice and our capacity to enter sympathetically into the lives of others considering their good outside of the egotistical orbit of our own. Concurrent with this tradition has been a counter-current of critical thought viewing humans as self-defeating or self-destructive beings. This view reached great heights in the 20th century. Our causing an elevated extinction rate is largely unintentional and goes against our humanity in form as well as in content. Accordingly, it shows us to be self-defeating, and some scientists think that if Earth cascades into mass extinction, Homo sapiens will have doomed itself. That would be self-destructive. In other words, calling ourselves Homo sapiens would then be a delusion, and we would be deceiving ourselves about our sense of humanity. I argue that such judgments are currently true regarding the elevated extinction rate event, and that their being so underlines one thing that is in the offing with our collective ability to respond to the elevated extinction of our times: our own humanity. This conclusion, in turn, presents us with a somewhat novel and widely acceptable justification for addressing extinction, one that runs counter to deep ecological trends in environmental ethics and the anti-humanism of contemporary post-humanism. Homo sapiens-Latin, originally 'wise man' (Oxford American Dictionary).