Seminar: Dr Chris Belshaw, 7 October 2015

Dr Chris Belshaw (Open University)
‘Death and extinction’

How should we feel about extinction in general, and human extinction in particular? There are important connections with death. The death of animals and plants can be bad for survivors, but only the death of persons is bad (often) for those who die. Species extinction, as such, is not bad for the members of that species, but if it brings about the disappearance of culture then our extinction is (very likely) bad for us. But isn’t death sometimes good? Indeed it is, and so (in a roughly parallel fashion) extinction

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