Peter Singer is one of the best known moral philosophers alive today. He is probably best known for his book Animal Liberation where he introduced the term speciesism to describe our exploitation of animals and subsequently turned a lot of people vegetarian. More recently he published The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty a treatise on how those of us in the rich west can best live ethically with respect to those living in the developing world. I like Singer best because he follow all his thoughts out to their logical conclusions even if they lead to unpopular or, sometimes, uncomfortable ends.

Last Sunday he published an interesting, philosophically mind-bending article in the New York Times–Should This be the Last Generation–on the rights of non-existent people: the unborn.

Here is a thought experiment to test our attitudes to this view. Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. Some stop eating meat, or flying abroad on vacation, in order to reduce their carbon footprint. But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about.

So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!

Party our way to extinction. Sounds fun–and terrible. I’m sure some might be tempted to accuse Singer of being–well I’m not sure exactly what you’d accuse someone of who wants to end the human race–but something bad nonetheless. Singer doesn’t put out these ideas because he thinks they’re good ideas. More often, he likes to make people reflect on these weird and impossible futures because they can help us, in some way, think better about the future we will have. Do you ever think about the rights of the unborn? I’d be pretty pissed if I was born into a desert wasteland because of the jet-setting lifestyle of people who lived a hundred years before me. That’s a little crudely put but you get the idea.