Todd May

Some books are readable because they are infuriating. This is the case with Todd May’s latest, Should We Go Extinct? He’s a philosopher, with a long list of titles to his credit, so his approach was going to be well thought out, careful, nuanced, and thought-provoking. Or so I thought.

May starts out on the wrong foot with me by trying to evaluate Man’s value in the cosmos by the degree of happiness (he claims) they experience. Of all the possible measures in the universe, his top choice is degree of happiness to decide on extinction. That’s the most important measure, it seems, at least in philosophy. Using an entirely mythical and undefined “unit of happiness”, and that most people seem on balance to be happier than they are miserable, May reaches out to the animal world to compare happiness levels. According to those entirely fictitious levels, species should or should not go extinct in this argument.

Determining the happiness units collected by animals (never mind plants) quickly proves unmanageable, if not completely impossible. He dives further into the murk by discussing factory farmed animals. They live short, miserable lives at the hands of humans, and are then killed, often horribly. From this vantage point, animals might deserve to live more than people deserve to.

But because Man is (allegedly) on balance happier, the more people brought into existence, the happier the planet would be (“Humans make the world better by adding happiness to it”). That’s how philosophy works, and why every little thing is the subject of huge arguments, he acknowledges.

Another argument for Man to stick around is that he cannot continue if he knows there’s no future in it. To make life meaningful, Man needs to know his work is not for nothing, that his children will inherit his accomplishments and basically, that humanity will continue. It is too depressing to live in End Times. Therefore Man must persist, says philosophy. Self-serving, circular logic if ever there was.

May spends a lot of time on uncaring men torturing animals, making them suffer needlessly. He’s even got numbers for it. The “average U.S. life – a single one – costs the suffering of roughly 22 pigs, 1560 chickens, and 65 cows.” From that perspective Man is deficient in awarding Kantian dignity and respect to animals. No marks.

But all of this must be tempered by two imperatives: Other animals matter. And Nature matters. At last a whiff of sanity.

Yet the entire context of the planet is absent from this analysis. Man, like every other species, from amoeba to grass to whale, has just one function in life: multiply. That’s the reason they are there. That’s their sole mission and all-consuming priority. Doesn’t matter how many Taylor Swift concerts they’ve been to, or how many beers they can chug before throwing up and/or passing out. The great leveler is the single duty to multiply. Every species of everything has that singular duty. On that basis, humans have far exceeded their mandate. Thanks to doctors, medicines and cleanliness, far more humans now survive than used to or even should, upsetting the balance of everything else. Man has taken himself out of ecology to stand on his own selfish terms. Should Man be allowed to continue is a better question.

There is also the inconvenient truth that all species go extinct. The world is always changing. It doesn’t matter how happy they might be; species come and they go, continuously. Mankind therefore is not so much a should as a when, obviating this entire argument.

The book is well written: an easy read. May is a friendly writer, even endearing with his asides and humorous, self-deprecating comments. He demonstrates his philosophy chops on almost every page. But his argument will seem bizarre to most readers. And the argument, by extension, invalid.

Here’s the thing. Man is the most invasive species on Earth. He does not belong in most of the places he has taken over. The key is that unlike most animals, Man creates his ideal environment everywhere he chooses to live. He has mastered heating, air conditioning, refrigeration and massive buildings. He pipes in water, and pipes out waste. He takes up a huge amount of space where nothing else is allowed to live. This has proven to be a disaster for everything else, as Man elbows out every other living thing.

Man is the only animal whose waste is toxic to the planet. Everywhere he goes he destroys. His first act is to kill off the wild animals, followed by pollution of the earth, water and sky. Yet Man is an animal. He is supposed to be part of the ecology. Part of the food chain. He is supposed to be both predator and prey. His numbers are supposed to be in some sort of balance with fellow animals. But Man has taken himself out of the ecology everywhere he has established himself, upsetting the balance and ruining it for all other species. Not just cows.

For one thing, his mastery of medicine has led to massive population explosions all over the world, and only in the last hundred years. Before that, infant mortality, death in childbirth and the sweep of childhood diseases kept the population in some sort of check. No more. Now Man must depend on female education levels to at least somewhat limit the number of new humans coming onstream. It’s not working.

Meanwhile, flying insects are down a shocking 75%. Wildlife now amounts to squirrels and deer, which have exploded in number because Man has killed off all their predators. The oceans are polluted with continent-sized floating islands of garbage. The water is filled with plastics and forever chemicals. Obnoxious sonar is leading to the fatal deafening of sea mammals, who beach themselves in a desperate attempt to escape the pain. Farm goods from near the coasts are heavily polluted with forever chemicals, because the mist from breaking ocean waves contain 1000 times the forever chemicals that still water does. The oceans are now hotter than bathwater in places: unbearable even to Man. Everything Man touches he ruins. It’s not just the climate.

It does not matter a damn how happy he is compared to cows. It would not be “better” if factory farming of animals had better rules. The burning of fossil fuels to maintain Man’s artificial environment does not need to be adjusted downwards; it needs to cease entirely. The plague of private airplanes has to be shut down. Flying cars must never come to be. The oceans are not giant toilets, constantly flushing. Forests are more important than parking lots and cattle ranges. Two-thirds of the biomass of animals is not meant to consist of just Man’s domesticated animals.

There were never supposed to be eight billion people on Earth. No one in 1900 (when world population crossed one billion) would believe you if you told them that. We’re down to 3000 tigers in the world, but have over one billion housecats, busy eating all the fish in the world to extinction, because humans want them for pets. Man unbalances everything.

With all the extinctions going on, substantially all of the problems of the world could still be solved with just one more extinction…

Should We Go Extinct, as I said, makes you think, but not necessarily the way Todd May intended.

David Wineberg… (more)

Although I felt this work suffered from some of the same problems as May's *Death* - in that it can read a bit belabored at parts - I did enjoy this book more for the topic/s covered. I have to say that I'm not completely convinced May argued away Camus' main point as much as he set out to do, because he never convinces that the world is not ultimately and inherently meaningless and absurd, he does show how meaning can be created from more than just arbitrary values by basing it on values seemingly true among humans. Maybe the better way to think about this topic is combining it with the poetic naturalism found in Sean Carroll's book The Big Picture. The ultimate description of life and the universe may be random and "meaningless" but that is not a useful way to talk about meaning in human lives. For that, another level of language needs to be used which would be the language and thoughts described by May.… (more)

I'll be honest, I picked up and started reading Todd May's "Death" because it was mentioned on "The Good Place." And when in the first few pages May states that "Death is the most important fact about us" I was intrigued and excited. Thinking about death, and how it affects our lives, has been an ongoing preoccupation of mine. I wanted so much from this short book yet ultimately found myself disappointed by it. And that disappointment occurred even though I agree with most of May's main points.

Maybe it's because May was writing for young readers or readers only just coming to this subject matter for the first time. Regardless, it was hard to escape the feeling that May was avoiding the meat and depth of his subject in much the same way he suggests most people avoid facing the fact of their own future death. I could quibble and say that May sometimes jumps to conclusions not yet fully supported by his arguments, but really my disappointment lies with the way May takes what seems like a very long road to get to his main points without treading deeply enough to truly highlight the importance of those points or examine them in enough detail once there.

I have no doubt that these hesitations on my part would be put aside if I was ever lucky enough to have a conversation with May in which we could pause and dig more fully at the various junctions of his argument. Unfortunately a book does not allow that level of mutual investigation so that all I am left with is the argument as presented.

I am already well into May's book "A Significant Life" and am already finding it more engaging, so again I have to assume it was the format of this book and not May's thoughts which led to my general appraisal.… (more)

A Decent Life by Todd May puts into words a way of living a decent life, which in his terms is one that is moral without being either unattainable or too difficult (as in requiring so much selfless action as to be counter to one's own happiness).

Like one of my early professors of ethics and moral philosophy used to say, the theories that we study are just that, theories. Each has strengths and weaknesses. More practically, they each seem particularly useful in some situations while being almost absurd in others. He referred to these as the elements in a moral or ethical toolbox. In other words, we take life as it happens and do what we feel is the most ethical thing for each situation. Not quite the same as what has been called situational ethics, which still has some strict aspects to it. Some situations call for a utilitarian approach while others call for a Kantian approach. Some, well, a bit of a mix and match. What May has done is try to give a little more form to this toolbox, without making it either unrealistic or too far toward the kind of moral relativism that basically results in a free-for-all where rationalizations substitute for moral contemplation.

His system, if it can be called one, has an extremely workable framework. If one is not too familiar with the various schools of thought beyond the very simple, almost overly simplified to serve as an easy foil, explanations May offers, this "decent life" would make the world a better place if followed by all or even most people. For those who have studied the topic a little bit and incorporated some elements into teaching of their own, you will likely find a few places where you would make a small adjustment to what you would include. That said, just coming up with something this well-considered and wide-ranging is quite an accomplishment.

If you don't care to spend a lot of time reading and studying different theories in moral philosophy, which is very understandable, this work will serve as a wonderful toolbox for you. May acknowledges in several places that many specific choices will be individual in nature while remaining within his system, while other such systems would, for the most part, have outcomes that everyone should come to if the theory is applied accurately. That "customization" makes this a valuable book for anyone who wonders how one can be a better member of society while also taking care of oneself.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (more)