There are no humans left to give it meaning

The argument

Tragedy is a human concept. It is not a feature of events in themselves but a way of regarding them — an appraisal that requires someone to be there, to care what happens, and to register a loss as a loss. Nothing is tragic without a perspective from which it is tragic, and the perspectives that supply such judgements are ours. This is why the argument holds that human extinction could not be tragic. Other creatures do not care whether we are here, and to whatever extent any of them might, they have no way of forming or expressing the kind of appraisal that tragedy requires. If humans were gone, no one would be left to view the event as a catastrophe. The loss would have no one to whom it was a loss. The point is easily confused with a different claim, and the difference matters. Human extinction can seem tragic when we imagine it now, because we are here to do the imagining and we mind. But that feeling belongs to the present, populated world; it is not a property the event carries forward into the aftermath. Once there are no humans, the vantage point from which extinction looked terrible has gone too, and with it the only thing that made the description apt. What remains, on this account, is not a great sorrow but nothing at all — not even indifference, since indifference still requires someone to be indifferent. The question of whether extinction would be a tragedy turns out to be irrelevant rather than merely difficult to answer. Human extinction would mean nothing, because meaning is something humans supply, and there would be no humans left to supply it.

Context

If humans went extinct there would be nobody left alive for it to mean anything to. The universe does not have a point of view. It was neither better nor worse off during the ice age as it is now.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Even though the world can’t express an opinion, there are practices and activities we do that are inherently “good” or “beneficial” to the world. It would be a loss to the universe if these practices were to disappear. Other animals also have interests. Whether or not we would call that a view is debatable, but our extinction would impact and have meaning to other animals. Therefore, it is possible to weight up if this impact would be a “good” thing or whether it would be a “bad” thing and our extinction could even be considered a tragedy.

Rejecting the premises

P1: Tragedy is a human construct but positive and negative impacts are not. If the loss of humankind would have an objectively “negative” impact on the world, we should consider this a tragedy. Therefore, it would not be meaningless.