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. 2019 Oct 21;9(1):15100.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-50145-9.

The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments about Human Extinction

Stefan Schubert  1 , Lucius Caviola  2 , Nadira S Faber  2   3   4
Affiliations

The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments about Human Extinction

Stefan Schubert et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

The 21st century will likely see growing risks of human extinction, but currently, relatively small resources are invested in reducing such existential risks. Using three samples (UK general public, US general public, and UK students; total N = 2,507), we study how laypeople reason about human extinction. We find that people think that human extinction needs to be prevented. Strikingly, however, they do not think that an extinction catastrophe would be uniquely bad relative to near-extinction catastrophes, which allow for recovery. More people find extinction uniquely bad when (a) asked to consider the extinction of an animal species rather than humans, (b) asked to consider a case where human extinction is associated with less direct harm, and (c) they are explicitly prompted to consider long-term consequences of the catastrophes. We conclude that an important reason why people do not find extinction uniquely bad is that they focus on the immediate death and suffering that the catastrophes cause for fellow humans, rather than on the long-term consequences. Finally, we find that (d) laypeople-in line with prominent philosophical arguments-think that the quality of the future is relevant: they do find extinction uniquely bad when this means forgoing a utopian future.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Proportions of participants who found extinction uniquely bad. (This means that they found the difference, in terms of badness, between a catastrophe killing 80% and a catastrophe killing 100% to be greater than the difference between no catastrophe and a catastrophe killing 80%.) Laypeople consistently did not find extinction uniquely bad in the control condition (Control), but did so in a scenario where the future would be very long and good conditional on survival (Utopia). The animals condition (Animals), sterilization condition (Sterilization) and salience condition (Salience) yielded in-between results. People explicitly devoted to existential risk reduction (Existential risk mitigators) consistently found extinction uniquely bad.
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