Humanity as an object of attachment

ABSTRACT

In Why Worry about Future Generations?, Samuel Scheffler argues that we typically love humanity, and that this attachment gives us reasons to care about future generations. The paper explores this idea with an eye to understanding better the sense in which humanity is an object of attachment. The paper argues that the humanity we love should be understood in an enriched rather than a reductively biological sense, as a species that has historically sustained a complex set of cultural and personal meanings. Caring about this object will lead us to be concerned about future generations. But these reasons of love should not be understood as reasons to be concerned directly about the fate of individual future people. The paper concludes with some reflections about the attachment-independent value of humanity in the enriched sense, distinguishing between relational and non-relational interpretations of this independent value.

KEYWORDS:

• Humanity
• love
• beneficence
• attachment
• future generations
• human flourishing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Scheffler has an interesting discussion of the issues raised in this paper in (Scheffler 2018), 45–52.

2 Compare (Scheffler 2018), 93: ‘a concern for the future of humanity flows naturally from, and is given rational and motivational support by, a conservative concern for the things that we value now’.

3 A similar conception of the flourishing of a biological species is implicit in (Pollan 2001).

4 Compare (Frick 2017), 344–367. Frick argues that humanity possesses ‘final value’, and he suggests that the bearer of this value should not be interpreted solely in biological terms, but includes ‘our sense of history, cultural traditions, relationships between parents and children, etc.’ (363; cf. 359).

5 In (Wallace, unpublished), sec. 3, I suggest that we might care not just about the specific values that we have engaged with ourselves, but also with the generic phenomenon of agential engagement with value. My present point is that this is not something that is independent of our attachment to humanity, but forms a part of it, on a suitably enriched conception.

6 There is a foothold here for concern about ‘transhumanist’ aspirations to improve human nature through techniques of genetic enhancement. Nearly all meaningful human activities are conditioned in some way by limitations that are endemic to our biological nature – think of achievements in the arts and sciences and in athletic competition. Modify those limitations too dramatically, and the resulting activities might seem drained of the value they have when engaged in by people more like ourselves.

7 One way these things could conceivably come apart is if social conditions that meet the basic human needs of the masses turned out to be inimical to genuine cultural accomplishments, of the kind that could inspire confidence in anyone about the fate of what I have been calling enriched humanity. There is a strand of perfectionistic concern about this possibility, for instance, in some of Nietzsche’s writings.