Tim Mulgan’s fascinating and carefully argued book is structured around a thought experiment: scientists discover that a deadly cosmic ray, triggered by a cataclysmic event deep in the galaxy, will destroy the earth and eradicate all life on the planet within two hundred years (“the Cataclysm”). The extinction of the human race is thus imminent and inevitable, though not immediate. One of the book’s surprising insights is that this scenario has much to teach us. Mulgan explores its implications for our understanding of the meaning in (and of) life, the existence of God, procreative ethics, and the desirability of virtual futures.
That contemporary philosophical debates can benefit from thinking about the Cataclysm rests on the assumption that the fate of future generations is of much greater importance than we typically acknowledge. In this respect, Mulgan draws extensively on Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife (2013). However, whereas Scheffler’s scenario allows no time to prepare future human beings to live well in the face of extinction, in Mulgan’s thought experiment there is still time to create future generations – raising the question of whether, and under what conditions, doing so would be permissible. The two works also differ in terms of their style: Mulgan’s work stands out for its meticulous argumentation and the intricate structure of its various conceptual threads. Rather than arguing for a single position, Mulgan leaves room for several alternatives, presenting a landscape of philosophical paths one might take in the face of a slowly ending world.
To do justice to the diverse positions at play, Mulgan relies on a distinctive philosophical format. Three chapters, called “Debates” (Chapters 1, 2, and 9), consist of dialogues between the Perennial Pessimist (who holds that human life has always been meaningless), the Post-Cataclysm Pessimist (who claims that human life will become meaningless after the Cataclysm because meaning is future-dependent), the Last Generation Pessimist (who argues that life is only meaningless for the last generation), the Presentist (who argues that present-focused activities are sufficient to render life meaningful), the Multigenerationalist (who holds that we should engage in intergenerational projects), the Theist (who argues that meaning flows from a connection to divine reality), and the Escapist (who argues that we should try to escape extinction by uploading our minds into digital realms).
This taxonomy of options is illuminating. Even so, Mulgan ultimately takes a stand: while the “Debates” are an open exploration of different views, he defends multigenerationalism, which holds that the best way to find meaning in an ending world is to embark on and take part in projects that span several generations and ultimately aim at the possibility of a meaningful life for the last generation. Mulgan envisions transforming our future-directed outlook (the dependence of meaning on the future) into one in which meaning is not future-dependent. The Multigenerationalist delivers six “Lectures”: three of which (Chapters 3, 7, and 8) present key features of multigenerationalism. In between these chapters, the Multigenerationalist inserts three lectures on procreative ethics. The link between the two themes is Mulgan’s thesis that in an ending world, we are permitted to create future people if and only if we embark on multigenerationalist projects. This position is agnostic between consequentialist and non-consequentialist traditions in procreative ethics – both of which, Mulgan contends, support multigenerationalism.
Mulgan masterfully weaves together various strands of his prior work, including his research on collective consequentialism, future ethics, and purpose in the universe. I am particularly impressed by the depth of his inquiry and the breadth of topics opened up for discussion. With that said, I would like to suggest further questions on two themes.
The first issue concerns the future dependency of meaning. Both the Multigenerationalist and the Post-Cataclysm Pessimist assume that finding meaning in life requires having an open-ended future. Consequently, both believe that, under our current conception of meaning, the last generation is doomed to lead a meaningless life. Where the Multigenerationalist and the Post-Cataclysm Pessimist disagree is on what this means for earlier generations, and ultimately for us. The Post-Cataclysm Pessimist argues, via a Ponzi argument (p. 27), that the burden of the last generation is “passed on” to earlier generations: if the penultimate generation creates a generation whose life is meaningless, their own lives will be rendered meaningless as well – and so on. The Multigenerationalist, by contrast, argues that this burden can be alleviated. If we embark on intergenerational projects that enable the last generation to find meaning independent of the future, they can still lead meaningful lives. The challenge, then, is to transform our conception of meaning from a future-dependent to a future-independent yet intergenerational one, such that the last generation sees its life as fulfilling and completing the projects of previous generations.
But how radical must this transformation be? Mulgan presents both a weaker and a stronger claim regarding the future orientation of meaning. The strong view is articulated by the Multigenerationalist, who claims that “we don’t currently have available any sufficient source of present meaning—we need to construct something new” (p. 13). But this seems too strong, as presentist accounts of meaning do exist and could be strengthened – incorporating not only activities that lead to pleasure but especially those that are centered around personal relationships, such as loving, practicing compassion, and relieving present suffering. It seems to me that the Presentist is not taken seriously enough in Mulgan’s dialectic and is sometimes caricatured as a hedonist. At one point, the Presentist is quoted as saying that “concern for other people” inevitably “brings concern for the future of humanity” (p. 280), and since this future is unavailable at the end of the world, the Presentist cannot recommend concern for others as a source of meaning. Yet the claim that meaningful care for others presupposes concern for the future of humanity seems implausible and unjustified. Indeed, I would argue that relationships with others provide a source of meaning that is more presentist than Mulgan suggests. Additionally, other presentist alternatives to meaning, such as Susan Wolf’s suggestion that meaning arises when we are subjectively attracted to an activity that is objectively attractive, merit further consideration.
A weaker thesis (suggested by the Theist, p. 60) is that while different kinds of meaning are currently available, future-directed conceptions are especially important. However, Mulgan does not seem to present an argument for the normative claim that generation-transcendent meaning should be regarded as especially important.
The second issue concerns the feasibility of the multigenerationalist project, which Mulgan defends in Lecture 5. Multigenerationalism presupposes a particular kind of moral progress, namely “moral transformation” (p. 200), in which future people adopt better moral standards. As I understand it, these standards are better not in some absolute sense but in the sense of being better suited to the needs of future people than our own standards. This moral transformation requires moral imaginativeness: future people must transform future-dependent traditions and values in ways we cannot yet imagine. (Interestingly, Mulgan classifies the transformation of meaning as a moral transformation, whereas other accounts, such as Susan Wolf’s, treat meaning and morality as independent dimensions of the good life.) Mulgan’s main defense of feasibility is that it has happened before: his central example is that of the Crow chief Plenty Coups, who, following the forced removal of his people to a reservation, reinterpreted the traditional virtue of courage in ways that made it intelligible under radically changed circumstances. According to Jonathan Lear in his book Radical Hope (2006), Plenty Coups needed “radical hope” that the Crow could forge a new form of the good life, even if its precise contours were unimaginable at the time. Mulgan extends this idea to the Cataclysm, arguing that radical hope must be multigenerational (p. 36). Even if the last generation’s conception of meaning is unimaginable to us, we must hope that they will reimagine it on their own terms.
The example of the Crow shows that it is possible for human beings to hollow out values and fill them with new content. But precedent alone does not establish the feasibility of multigenerationalism. Moreover, since it is a collective and political enterprise, one might ask: How can we ensure that “[e]veryone in our Post-Cataclysm world” agrees that they “must pursue active, cooperative, intergenerational projects” (p. 204)? How can we mitigate the risk of coercion and manipulation? Ultimately, what Mulgan establishes in this lecture is not that the multigenerationalist project is feasible (in the sense that there are realistic ways of pursuing it, or that it has a reasonable chance of success) but that we have no reason to believe that it is impossible. Given the stakes, this may suffice for his purposes: he believes that multigenerationalist projects are the only alternative to anti-natalism. Nevertheless, those who wish to follow his approach will need to consider concrete ways of grounding faith in future imaginativeness and translating radical hope into more concrete hopes, step by step.
This review offers only a glimpse into the richness of this book, which has plenty to offer those who are intrigued by its central thought experiment and interested in questions about meaning in life and the future of humanity – a future that will differ from the past in ways we cannot predict.
