Posted by david f-

Do you think it would be a better world if humans would disappear? I'm in favour of it but others first.

Answer-

Good question

I would like to see humans reduce world population to levels at least under a billion- then do a review. This would take some of the pressure off the natural world and between cultural segments of humanity. And we would still be much better off than we were going the other way through the one billion milestone. This is a 90% reduction in the world population especially given the world population is likely (median estimate) to be over 11 Billion by the end of the century. There will be a lot of problems achieving this goal.

This question touches on the concept as to whether humans are naturally virtuous or not- is man naturally good or bad- from memory this argument also appears between Hobbes/ Locke (ironically both influential in Liberal thought- so perhaps Platonic philosophers should be included here) and Xunzi and Mencius (of Confucian thought).

If humans are naturally "bad"- then perhaps one could naively assert that it would be best that humans disappear. However Hobbes and Xunzi on the "bad side" believed that man could become virtuous through the influence of a virtuous society

Would the world be better off without humans?

To the degree that no other animal would be as dominant, probably.

At least until another major calamity occurs and wipes many animals out, like the past

Dear Canem Malum.

I was trying to get beyond whether humans are good or bad. I was trying to consider humans in regard to our effects on other life forms and the planet. Good and bad are human concepts.

Whether humans are good or bad by some criteria is not relevant. I was wrong in asking if it would be a better world since ‘better’ is a human judgment. If humans disappeared there would be no better or worse.

We can set aside land for habitat of non-human species. Such habitat should be protected from incursions of cats and dogs, predators associated with humans.

Any ideas we have such as valuing biodiversity, democracy or other concepts are all human abstractions. If the planet were a spinning lifeless orb it would still exist.

Hi Saltpetre,

I have to respond to your comment that " ..... it is general human nature to be caring, empathic and fundamentally good ...."

That's the rationale for socialist societies, all of whom rapidly have had to respond to that 'minor' problem of the tiny handful of people who are acquisitive and not as interested in contributing to the common good, who therefore need to be ... umm ... subtracted - of course, for the common good.

So entire classes, rich and middling farmers and peasants (the Soviet Union and China) - capitalists, of course - but also intellectuals (Kampuchea) and various assorted dissidents and malcontents - whose numbers never seem to diminish, have to be safely removed.

So another class of comrades has always had to be created, 'removers', who are skilled with firearms or axes or hammers. So vast pits and trenches have to be dug in out-of-the-way places as accommodation. However, even some of those necessary comrades prove to be unreliable and have to be 'removed'. I'm thinking of the rapid succession of secret police bosses in the USSR between Dzerzhinsky and Vishinsky. Not to mention, of course, a degree of 'unreliability' amongst the leadership which has to be sanitised, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Radek and of course Trotsky; Peng Teh-huai, Liao Shu-chi and Lin Piao.

But on the bright side, of course some of these malcontents may be able to contribute and partly repay for their crimes by ceaseless work in remote prisons - the Zeks in Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Archipelago' are a good example, a tribe of people who could dig up the remains of frozen prehistoric creatures, tear chunks off the remains and eat them raw.

The perfect is the mortal enemy of the good. Utopias and 'Perfect Societies' seem to inevitably degenerate - and sometimes very quickly - into fascist regimes. Have there ever been any exceptions to this rule ?

Joe

Canem Malum,

To early to say because it might just be a physical defect of the individual they found. Need to find some more hobbits. The world needs more hobbits.

david f,

I would like a few humans to disappear. Guess who they are.