Editor’s note, May 31, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below originally published on October 6, 2024. This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Stay tuned for more original Your Mileage May Vary columns coming in June.

My grandmother had a teenage pregnancy she hid from her family before giving birth in secret and immediately giving the child up for adoption after birth. I accidentally discovered this after I received a message on an ancestry DNA website from someone closely related genetically to me. She told me she knew barely anything about her birth parents and was desperate to just have an answer. I accidentally exposed this secret to my mother and grandmother by asking if anyone knew who this person who messaged me was.

My grandmother was horrified, and wants nothing to do with her. How do I respect the choice my grandmother felt she had to make at that time in her life and protect her peace, while also acknowledging that this person should be able to at least know who the people who created her are and prominent family medical history? I feel guilty for exposing this secret accidentally but now I feel like I have an obligation to protect my grandmother and offer this person some peace of mind.

Dear Caught-in-the-Middle,

Your question reminded me of an idea from Bernard Williams, one of my favorite modern philosophers. He said that someone facing a moral trade-off can make what is, all things considered, the best decision, and — even though it was the right call — find that it still results in some cost that deserves acknowledgment or feels regrettable. Williams called that cost “the moral remainder.”

Regret is a trickster of an emotion. We’re used to viewing it as an indication that we’ve done something wrong. But as Williams explains, sometimes all it means is that reality has forced upon us an incredibly hard choice between two options, with no cost-free option available. 

Your grandmother is not in the wrong for giving up her child all those years ago — or for wanting to keep her distance now. As you said, it’s the choice she “felt she had to make at that time in her life.” Pregnancy outside of marriage, especially in her generation, often came with a massive serving of shame, and the fact that she felt the need to hide it from her family and give birth in secret suggests this was a pretty traumatic experience. 

It’s understandable if she’s scared to reopen that trauma now. She has a right to decide if and how to process it — a right to self-determination.

At the same time, her grown child is not wrong for wanting answers today. The desperation felt by this newfound relative of yours is the “moral remainder” of your grandmother’s decision. 

As technology shifts over the generations, moral norms shift along with it. When your grandmother gave up the baby for adoption, she had no idea DNA testing would become commonplace — but it has. And as cheap testing kits like 23andMe have exposed all kinds of family secrets, more and more kids who’d been kept in the dark are making their experiences known. 

Some were never bothered by their obscured origins, but discover an extra measure of joy and connection once they meet long-lost relatives. Others say they always suffered from an uneasy sense that they’re different from their siblings. Still others say it’s important to know your biological family’s medical history, especially with the advent of precision medicine.    

All this has led to an increasing belief that children have a right to know where they came from — a right to self-knowledge.  

Take it from Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance, who found out as an adult that her beloved father was not her biological father. She writes: 

The secret that was kept from me for 54 years had practical effects that were both staggering and dangerous: I gave incorrect medical history to doctors all my life. It’s one matter to have an awareness of a lack of knowledge — as many adoptees do — but another altogether not to know that you don’t know. When my son was an infant, he was stricken with a rare and often fatal seizure disorder. There was a possibility it was genetic. I confidently told his pediatric neurologist that there was no family history of seizures. 

Some bioethicists, like Duke University’s Nita Farahany, are also building this case. Following the famous proclamation from Ancient Greece — “Know thyself!” — Farahany argues that people have a right to self-knowledge, including when it comes to medical information. She writes that “access to that essential information about ourselves is central to the self-reflection and self-knowledge we need to develop our own personalities.” It helps us shape our own lives and empowers us to make choices about our future.

That means that self-knowledge is actually a subset of self-determination — the exact same value that your grandmother is asserting. And it seems only fair for us to acknowledge that if your grandmother is entitled to that, then so is her child. 

If both people have a right to self-determination, and their rights are in conflict with each other, then … well … what do you do?

Even John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century English philosopher who literally wrote the book on liberty, didn’t think that anyone’s right to liberty or self-determination is an absolute right. Instead, it’s a qualified right — the kind that we generally honor but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others. 

So it feels appropriate here to strike a balance between your grandmother’s wishes and her child’s. There are a few different ways to do that, but here’s one: You could assure your grandmother that you won’t pressure her to talk to the child or hear any more about her, but you will give the child family medical information and a general understanding of her birth story, including the aspect that might feel most important to her: why she was given up for adoption. 

Without mentioning your grandmother’s name or any details that would make it easy for the grown child to track her down, you could say something like, “Your birth mom is one of my relatives. She got pregnant as a teenager and didn’t have the means or support to take care of you. She made the hard choice to give you up for adoption in hopes that you’d have a better life than she could provide. She doesn’t feel comfortable being in contact now, and I feel that I need to respect her wishes and her privacy, but I hope this message brings you at least a little bit of peace.” 

Ultimately, you won’t have total control over what your relative does with this information, because internet sleuthing is a force to be reckoned with. And you won’t be able to control whether she feels fully satisfied with what you tell her. That’s a feature of this kind of moral dilemma: You can’t please everyone 100 percent, but you’re doing what you can to honor the values at stake.

If you want, you might choose to meet with the grown child without involving your grandmother. Or you might decide that your notion of kinship isn’t rooted in biology and you don’t feel any particular need to bond with someone new to you. 

Either way, what I love about Williams’s idea of the “moral remainder” is that it encourages you to view everyone in this tricky situation (including yourself!) compassionately. Regardless of which specific step you take next, you can move forward from that place of compassion.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• 23andMe is floundering, to the point that the company’s CEO is now considering selling it. As Kristen V. Brown notes in The Atlantic, that would mean “the DNA of 23andMe’s 15 million customers would be up for sale, too.” It’s one of the many reasons why I’ll never spit into one of those test tubes.

• I recently reread the philosopher Susan Wolf’s 1982 essay “Moral Saints,” and it feels more on point than ever. Wolf argues that you shouldn’t actually strive to be “a person whose every action is as morally good as possible” — and not just because those people are incredibly boring! 

• David Brooks is not my usual cup of tea, but I appreciated him writing in the New York Times about how, contrary to popular opinion, “emotion is central to being an effective rational person in the world.” 

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. 

The questions I tackle in this column usually come from strangers. But this time, the call is coming from inside the house. 

My partner is due to give birth to our first baby any day now. And as parenthood approaches, she’s started grappling with a nagging question. I decided to tackle her dilemma in my last column before beginning my parental leave because, as you’ll see, it’s not only relevant to parents. It’s relevant to anyone who worries about failing someone or making lasting mistakes, and who wonders how they’d deal with the guilt they might feel afterward. 

We’re about to have our first baby. I’m so excited! But I’m also a bit overwhelmed by all the actions and choices that go into trying to raise a kid who’s happy and healthy. I feel like the modern world’s never-ending desire to optimize everything has crept into parenting. Yet the world is so unpredictable. And there are so many opportunities to mess up and harm a kid in ways both big and small.

The questions swirling through my mind range from “How soon after birth should we take the baby into crowded indoor places, knowing their immune system isn’t fully formed?” to “When should we introduce our kid to sugar?” to “How much unsupervised play time should we let them have as they get older?”

There’s not a lot of definitive data about certain things. And a lot of kid stuff involves situations where the risk of something bad happening is very low, but if it does happen, then it’s really terrible. For example, I’ve heard some parents aren’t letting their kids go to sleepovers anymore because they’re worried someone will touch them inappropriately. The likelihood is that sleepovers are going to be positive experiences for most kids, but there’s always a small chance of something negative happening. Trying to think through these situations feels like a little bit of torture. If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?

Dear Parent-to-Be,

Can I confess something? When you voiced this question, I actually felt relieved, because the same question has been secretly hammering at me for months. 

I haven’t talked about it much because I thought maybe it was just a function of my own anxiety. But I’m starting to think it’s more common than I realized. So I’m going to share the idea that has helped me the most with it. It doesn’t come from a parenting book or even the mental health field, but from that philosopher I’m always yammering on about, Bernard Williams. 

In 1976, Williams coined the term “moral luck.” It’s a surprising term, because what does morality have to do with luck, right? Surely what matters for my moral status is “what I did” and not “what the world did”! But Williams’s point is that life does seem to present us with situations where our goodness or badness depends a lot on factors that are out of our control — on whether we get lucky or unlucky. 

How can that be?

To illustrate, Williams invites us to imagine a truck driver who accidentally runs over a kid. The driver isn’t drunk or careless or negligent. He’s just driving along when suddenly a child darts out into the road. The kid gets hit and dies.

Clearly, a terrible harm has occurred. But has the driver done anything wrong?

Now let’s imagine another truck driver. He sets out that same day on that same road. But this guy is drunk. He careens down the road carelessly. He could easily hit somebody. But guess what? It just so happens that no kid darts into the road. The driver makes it home without incident.

In this scenario, no one’s been harmed. Yet the driver has obviously done something wrong. But for fortune, he would forever be branded a killer. He just got morally lucky.

What’s useful about this thought experiment is the way it clarifies that harm and wrongdoing are two separate things. We usually clump them together in our minds, because it’s often the case that a harm results from someone doing something wrong. But they can occur separately.

And when they do, how guilty should a person feel? Take the first driver, who wasn’t drunk or careless and yet ended up killing a child. It wouldn’t make rational sense to feel remorse, per se, because it’s not like he voluntarily did a bad thing. It’s more like the bad thing happened to him. At the same time, he certainly won’t feel nothing. He’ll probably feel pained in some nebulous, hard-to-name way. 

Well, Williams came up with a name for that: “agent-regret.” It’s the feeling you might experience if you inadvertently do a bad thing through bad luck.  

What’s the upshot for you, me, and everyone who fears failing or accidentally harming someone they love? 

Your goal is not to control every possible outcome. The reality of luck makes that impossible: You could do everything right and something terrible could still happen. Plus, trying to prevent every possible harm often leads to exhaustion and paralysis — you’ll feel like you can’t make any decision or take any action, because, as you said, everything has some small chance of a bad outcome.

Instead, your goal is to live in line with your values as best you can. The trick here is recognizing that you have values, plural. Sometimes, two values will be in tension with each other — keeping a kid safe from possible harm, say, and allowing a kid unsupervised time to play, grow, and form social bonds with other kids. In those cases, you have to weigh all the different factors and make a decision that seems best on balance.

Could something bad still happen? Yes, and that’s gutting. But remember that even if harm occurs, that doesn’t mean you were guilty of any wrongdoing. It doesn’t mean you deserve blame. It means you deliberated as well as anyone could have expected of you and something terrible happened anyway. That’s not your fault. 

Risk of tragedy is just the cost of living in our world. 

And I do think you should live in it. Fully. Bravely. Without endlessly second-guessing every move you make.

That brings me to the contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf, one of Williams’s best interpreters. In her essay “The Moral of Moral Luck,” she questions what we should take away from his concept.

“Morality is deeply and disquietingly subject to luck,” Williams wrote. But, Wolf asks, is that just the result of our own irrational judgments?

Wolf considers a slightly different truck driver thought experiment. In her version, two equally negligent truck drivers set out on the road. One has good luck: No child darts into the road, so no one gets hurt. But the other has bad luck: A child darts in front of the truck and is instantly killed. 

If humans were purely rational beings, surely we’d judge both drivers just as harshly, even though one killed a kid and the other didn’t. That’s because they’re both equally guilty of wrongdoing. But Wolf observes that, in reality, the driver who strikes the child is probably going to feel a lot more guilt. And members of society are likely to direct a lot more blame at him — after all, he actually killed someone, and they’re going to feel angry about that (while they won’t even know the other guy was ever driving negligently).

It’s tempting to say that this condemnation doesn’t tell us anything real about the unlucky driver’s moral status — it’s just an artifact of human irrationality, and we should toss it out. But Wolf doesn’t want to go that far. She thinks it’d be “positively eerie” if the driver who struck a child saw himself as being in the exact same moral position as the driver who didn’t. He’d be revealing a sense of himself “as one who is, at least in principle, distinct from his effects on the world.” 

Wolf suggests that there’s a better way to see ourselves: 

We are beings who are thoroughly in-the-world, in interaction with others whose movements and thoughts we cannot fully control, and whom we affect and are affected by accidentally as well as intentionally, involuntarily, unwittingly, inescapably, as well as voluntarily and deliberately. 

To form one’s attitudes and judgments of oneself and others solely on the basis of their wills and intentions, to draw sharp lines between what one is responsible for and what is up to the rest of the world, to try in this way, to extricate oneself and others from the messiness, and the irrational contingencies of the world, would be to remove oneself from the only ground on which it is possible for beings like ourselves to meet. 

This is a beautiful passage that describes a beautiful virtue: the ability to recognize that none of us is a separate and independent self. Wolf says this virtue has lived without a name, so she calls it “the nameless virtue.”

But I think it’s only nameless in Western philosophy. In Buddhism, it’s a foundational principle known as “dependent co-arising” or “interbeing.” The idea is that nothing has its own fixed, boundaried essence. Everything is always changing, because everything is subject to different causes and conditions, which act upon it all the time. That includes us human beings. We are constantly remaking each other — through the kind or unkind things we say to each other, through the ideas we expose each other to, through the actions we do or don’t perform. 

We are all each other’s causes and conditions. 

This undercuts the traditional Western understanding of agency. According to that view, I’m a discrete agent and when I decide to take a certain action, that decision starts in my own mind. My intent is what sets a causal chain in motion. Therefore, if I decide to do a bad action and harm results, I’m blameworthy.

But from the Buddhist perspective, we can’t say that my decision “started” with me. The “I” that decides isn’t a self-contained originator of action — it’s a node in a web that runs in every direction. That means the clean line between “what I did” and “what the world did” was always a kind of fiction. All my decisions have been conditioned by everything and everyone that ever influenced me in life. Which means blame, in the clean Western sense, doesn’t really hold up.

Williams found moral luck disquieting because it seemed to undermine the self-originating agent at the heart of Western ethics. But in the Buddhist view, there was never such an agent. That means that when something bad happens, it’s appropriate to recognize that you’re part of the causal web that yielded harm — but not to blame yourself as an individual.

You asked me: “If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?”

No, I don’t think you always will. Although you’ll probably feel pained if some decision of yours leads to harm, eventually, your pain will not take the form of “I’m a terrible person.” It’ll take the form of “I was doing the best I could with the information and awareness I had at the time — with the conditions I was given. I wish that the conditions could have been different.” 

We’re all so used to the Western understanding of agency that our brains default to it in situations of crisis or panic, making us prone to self-blame. But I’ll be there to remind you of this other understanding. And I feel lucky knowing you’ll do the same for me.  

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Speaking of the world being so unpredictable…I’m excitedly digging into Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI, by the philosopher Carissa Véliz. She argues that predictions are often power plays in disguise.
  
• On a new episode of the podcast Philosophy Bites, a professor of Buddhist philosophy tackles the question: Without an enduring self, can there be moral responsibility?
  
• I’m loving the illustrated book Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts. It shows just how normal it is for new parents to have an inner monologue that runs something like: “What if I drop him? What if I snap and hurt my baby? Mothering is so hard. I don’t know if I really want to do this anymore. Gosh, I’m so terrible for thinking that!”

Editor’s note, June 7, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below originally published on November 3, 2024.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Stay tuned for more original Your Mileage May Vary columns coming in June. In the meantime, submit your own question here.

I’m at an age where I feel like I need to decide whether I want to have kids, but I’m very ambivalent about it and don’t know how to know whether I want them. I don’t dream of parenthood or filling my days with caregiving for a young child. But, does anyone?! That doesn’t seem like a good way to decide whether I truly want to be a parent. But then what is? The main place my mind goes is that I fear my life would be sad and depressing when my partner and I are 70 and childless. I like the thought of having well-adjusted adult children to spend time with when I’m old. That seems like a misguided and selfish reason to have kids. 

A better reason might be that I think my partner and I have good values, and I’d like to bring more people into the world who have those values, but that also seems selfish because there’s no guarantee that a child will embrace your values, and your duty as a parent is to let them flourish as whoever they want to be. I worry that I would be the kind of parent who struggles to support my kid if they rebel against everything I believe in. But I also feel like you just can’t know what you would be like in that situation until you’re in it. How do you decide that such a life-altering decision is right for you, let alone its ethical implications for a person who doesn’t exist yet? 

Dear Fencesitter,

Ah, parenthood ambivalence. So many of us can relate. And, like you, so many of us try to answer the question “Do I want to have kids?” by looking inward for the answer. We introspect, we ruminate, we dig through childhood traumas. We consider what makes us happy now in hopes of predicting whether kids would make us happier or more miserable later. We assume the answer is there within us, a buried treasure waiting to be unearthed.

That’s understandable: Most advice for people considering parenthood encourages us to do just that. Countless articles, books, and yes, advice columns are premised on the idea that the answer exists as a stable fact within us. So is the parenthood ambivalence coach Ann Davidman’s online class, the “Motherhood Clarity™ Course” which opens with a mantra: “The answers will come because they never left … It’s all within me.”  

But there are a few problems with that approach. For one, you could spend your entire adult life auditing your soul for the answer and still end up looking like the shrug emoji. That’s because introspection is an unbounded search process: You’ve got no way to know when you’ve searched enough. 

Another problem is that this approach centers you and your desires too much. As you pointed out, bringing a kid into the world can’t only be about its costs and benefits for you.

Finally, you’re just not well-positioned to predict whether kids will make you happier or more miserable! As the philosopher L.A. Paul notes, you can’t quite know what it’ll be like to have a kid until you have one, and besides, the “you” might become transformed in the process, so that the things that make you happy now are not the same as the things that will make you happy as a parent.

So, what I suggest is a radically different approach: If you want to arrive at a decision, you have to go beyond your own interiority. You have to turn your gaze outward and ask yourself: What is it that you find awesome, thrilling, and intrinsically valuable about being in the world? 

I’m not asking because I think the key is deciding which values you want to transmit to your kid. Like you said, there’s no guarantee that your kid will embrace your values. Instead, I’m asking because this is the basis on which you can make a choice — not “find the answer” but make a choice — about whether to have kids.

Up until now, you’ve been thinking of the kids question as an epistemic one — you say you “don’t know how to know” — but I would think of it as an existential one instead. The existentialist philosophers argued that life doesn’t come with predefined meaning or fixed answers. Instead, each human has to choose how to create their own meaning. As the Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y Gasset put it, the central task of being human is “autofabrication,” which literally means self-making. You come up with your own answer, and in so doing, you make yourself. 

A decade ago, just for fun, my friend Emily sat me down in a park and had me do an exercise that would turn out to be extremely impactful: It was, believe it or not, an online quiz. It listed dozens and dozens of different values — friendship, creativity, growth, and so on — and instructed me to select my top 10. Then it made me narrow it down to my top five. I found that brutally hard, but it was revealing. My number one value turned out to be what the quiz called, somewhat idiosyncratically, “delight of being, joy.”    

I return to that again and again (my mind preserves the punctuation, so I regularly find myself talking to people about “delight-of-being-comma-joy!”) when I have to make tough decisions. It captures a core fact about me: I love being alive in this world! Whenever I snorkel with impossibly colorful fish, or experience deep connection with another human being, or stare up at all the galaxies we’ve barely begun to understand, I feel so grateful that I get to participate in the grand mystery of being.

And that’s what made me decide I want to be a mom one day. Choosing to have a child feels like one of the biggest ways I can say YES to life, at a time when many doubt the worthiness of perpetuating human life on this planet. It’s a way to affirm that being alive in this world is a gift, one I want to pass along to others. 

So allow me to be your Emily. Let me present you with an inventory of values (one of many similar inventories available online) and urge you to select your top five. Then ask yourself: Would having a kid be a good way to enact my values — or is there another way to enact my values that feels more compelling to me? Which path is the best fit for you personally, given your specific talents and your physical and psychological needs?

This depends a lot on the individual. Imagine three women who all rank “personal growth” as their top value. They might still arrive at totally different conclusions about kids. For one woman, that value may feel like a great reason to have a kid, because she believes childrearing will help her grow as a person and that she’ll get to guide a new person in their development. The second woman might say her primary mode of growth is art-making, so she wants to focus on that while being an active auntie to her friends’ kids on the side. A third woman might feel that, for her, the most promising path is to become a nun. All three are completely valid!  

A lot of people struggling with parenthood ambivalence say they’re scared that if they don’t have a kid, they’ll miss out on something sui generis — a completely unique experience, a sort of love to which nothing else compares. It sounds like this FOMO is playing a role for you, too; you mentioned that you fear your life would be sad and depressing when you and your partner are 70 and childless. 

But there are plenty of parents who will tell you that, while they adore their kids, the kid-parent relationship is not magically more meaningful than anything else in their life. In the excellent new book What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, the former writes: 

While the relationship between a parent and child is doubtless unique, what if I told you that, phenomenologically speaking, it is not really grand and tremendous? That it’s not even particularly extraordinary? … To love your child isn’t like nothing you’ve ever known. It isn’t unimaginable. If you have known love, you have also known it, or something like it … What is so special about this love isn’t how exotic, mysterious, or astounding it is but how simple and familiar.

So, if you just like the thought of having children because you want lovely people to spend time with when you’re old, try first experimenting with other ways to get that same need met. You might find that it’s not something that only a child can provide. As the author (and my friend) Rhaina Cohen documents beautifully in The Other Significant Others, some people find that deep friendships meet their need for connection perfectly well, with no child-shaped hole or partner-shaped hole left over. 

But even if you believe having a child is a sui generis experience, the point I would make is: Other things are too! An artist might tell you there’s nothing that compares to the creative thrill of painting. Someone involved in political work may tell you there’s nothing quite like the feeling of fighting for justice and winning. Lots of things in the world are unique and incommensurably good. 

So don’t be pushed around by societal narratives of what the ultimate good looks like. Let your choice flow from your own sense of what’s most valuable about human life. Whereas what makes you feel happy or miserable can change a lot over time, core values are relatively stable, so they form a more enduring basis for making major decisions. Yes, it’s conceivable that even those values might shift a little over the decades, but making a choice that flows from your values means you will at least be confident that you had a very solid reason for doing what you did — no matter how you end up feeling about it in the future. 

And as for the future? You really can’t control it. So, your goal is not to control every possible outcome. Your goal is to live in line with your values.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, often called the “father of existentialism,” proposed the idea that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. This week’s question prompted me to revisit that idea. 

• As I wrote this column, I went back and reread a great New Yorker article by Joshua Rothman about how we make major decisions. It discusses philosopher Agnes Callard’s idea that “we ‘aspire’ to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess.” In other words, you don’t decide you want to be a parent — you decide you want to be the sort of person who’d want to be a parent, and lean into that. I found the idea interesting but too complicated by half: Why would I ground this decision in values I hope to one day possess instead of grounding it in the values I already hold dear?

• Lots of people bring up climate change as a reason not to have kids. I think that’s misguided. Having a kid is one of the things that can push you to take heroic action on climate change — so I was interested in this piece in Noema Magazine, which argues that we need to evoke heroism, not hope, with regard to the climate — and finds a prime example of that in … JRR Tolkien.  

“I want AI to be a tool that allows human flourishing!” exclaimed Brad Carson, a former member of Congress. “There is an option out there where AI is just a tool for us.”

This is a normal thing to say in most circles. But Carson was speaking at an invite-only symposium dedicated to the idea of creating a “Worthy Successor” — an AI so impressive, so beyond the mere human, that we’d actually want it to replace humanity.  

“You’re a brave man for entering this room!” Dan Faggella, an AI market researcher and organizer of the symposium, told Carson. “You’re in probably the only room in the country where most people disagree with you.” 

The attendees at the symposium, which took place at the New York Academy of Sciences last September, are part of a subculture that is growing in importance: the AI successionists, who think that artificial intelligence is our rightful heir — the next step in cosmic evolution. Since they believe AIs could become our moral superiors, they argue it’s actually wrong to try to keep the machines down, or even to align them with human values, as most AI companies aim to do. Instead, we should usher in artificial intelligence as a successor to humanity and hand over the world to it. Even if that means we go extinct.

They know this view is taboo, which is why I was invited only on the condition that I wouldn’t quote anyone other than keynote speakers by name. But suffice it to say that this is not a fringe view. It’s becoming highly influential. People from major AI labs — Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI — were in attendance. So were people from think tanks that directly shape the US government’s AI policy. 

AI successionism has been gaining ground among technologists over the past decade. In 2015, Google co-founder Larry Page famously accused Elon Musk of “speciesism” because Page thought we should let digital minds take over, and Musk disagreed.

The successionist vision has been amplified by the advent of effective accelerationism (e/acc) in 2022. Its founder, Guillaume Verdon — the physicist more colorfully known on X as Based Beff Jezos — describes e/acc as a “meta-religion” that’s about “having faith” in the universe’s drive toward increasingly intelligent systems. The best thing we can do is help the universe by developing advanced AI as fast as possible, even at the expense of humanity. “E/acc,” as Verdon has written, “has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate.” 

Tech heavyweights have come on board. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen listed e/acc thinkers as his “patron saints.” Garry Tan, the CEO of tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, included “e/acc” in his social media bio and invested in Verdon’s company, which aims to build the world’s most efficient computers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X to Verdon, saying, “you cannot outaccelerate me.” 

And these days, AI successionism is spreading beyond Silicon Valley. At the New York symposium, Faggella told the audience that trying to preserve the human species as it is would be silly.

“We could ask the questions that would tie all of our moral aspirations eternally to 23 chromosomes — or we could ask the cosmic questions,” Faggella said.

He wanted us to consider “unpolite, uncouth” possibilities, starting with: The flame of consciousness — the capacity for experience and moral value — may be the rarest and most precious thing in the universe. Humanity is currently a torch carrying that flame, but what if we’re ultimately not the best carrier for it? And if AI can spread that flame far further than we mere humans can, generating experiences of bliss and forms of moral value that we could never even dream of, shouldn’t we let it? 

Faggella’s talk was greeted by a loud round of applause. Later, he and a couple dozen attendees headed to a nearby hotel balcony for drinks. And so it was that I found myself overlooking the Manhattan skyline as people talked about the end of humanity over cocktails.

There was some diversity of opinion among the group. Not everyone self-identified with the relatively new term “AI successionist.” Some were proponents of transhumanism, the movement that says we should use tech to proactively evolve our species into Homo sapiens 2.0. Transhumanists hope to keep some version of humanity going, but definitely not the current hardware; they dream of radical life extension, cognitive enhancement, and eventually mind uploading. (Musk, who said he created his brain chip company Neuralink to help humanity merge with AI, probably falls — or at least fell — into this category.) Others were posthumanists, those who want us to give rise to descendants that move beyond humanity altogether. 

The biologist sitting across from me was very excited about the prospect of merging humans with AI. He said we should task AI with figuring out how best to do the merger, then “take it off the leash” and allow AI to control its own evolution — and by extension, ours. Of course, he said, not all humans will make it through the transformation; only a select group of people will transition to the next evolutionary stage. (Presumably, the type of people privileged enough to imbibe cocktails at Manhattan AI symposia.)

The man seated beside me, a researcher from one of the major AI companies, was even more radical. Forget merger — it’s okay if humans don’t survive at all, he said. Human text has been used to train the AIs; in some sense, then, the human spirit will live on. “So on the cosmic level,” he said cheerfully, “I’m okay with it.”

Most people are definitely not okay with it. The average person would probably find the answers of the Worthy Successor group repugnant. Yet the core question they pose cannot be ignored. Whether they picture us merging with machines or ultimately being superseded by them, technologists are developing innovations that could dramatically change what it means to be human — think AI-powered brain chips that enable mind-reading or magnetic implants that give you a sixth sense — and genetic tools that could even reshape the DNA of all future generations. 

As it becomes possible to direct our own evolution as a species — and potentially even create a new species that surpasses us — we have to decide: How do we know to what extent it does make sense to transform ourselves using technology? What kinds of augmentation do we want, and what kinds do we absolutely not want?  What do we wish, ultimately, to become?

This is a moral question, even a spiritual one, and it demands a spiritual response. The AI successionists are offering one. For anyone who finds it repulsive, the challenge is to offer a countervailing positive vision. 

And it’s essential to do that now, because as sci-fi as the successionists might sound, they are building real political power, with links to the authoritarian right. Several of the tech heavyweights who’ve embraced successionism want to escape the control of democratic governments, so much so that they’re seeking to create their own sovereign colonies. That can come in the form of space colonies, à la Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, or in independent “startup cities” or “network states” built by corporations here on Earth — currently Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen’s favored approach. And Verdon’s investors include entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, a major proponent of the network state. 

These broligarchs have successfully cozied up to the Trump administration, clearing the way for their accelerationist vision. And they’ll take the wheel unless we come up with an alternate vision for the future.

The natural alternative is humanism, which replaced the medieval view that humans need God to rescue them with the view that humans have the ability, and responsibility, to achieve flourishing through their own efforts. The problem is that, so far, we haven’t developed a version of humanism that’s brave enough to directly tackle the core question — what do we want our species to become? — and answer it compellingly.

The most common “pro-human” response tries to say there are certain fixed traits that make humans unique, and to locate value only in humans as they currently exist. “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human,” Pope Leo recently wrote in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. This response says: Let’s use tech remedially — to alleviate problems like disease — but let’s not try to augment the species. 

That feels insufficient as a guide to the future, because, even before the advent of AI and gene editing, “human” has never been a static category. Homo sapiens has always been evolving and augmenting itself, from the agricultural diet that reshaped our jaws to the algorithms reshaping our attention.

The old formulation is “the naive version of humanism,” Shannon Vallor, a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh, told me recently. “It’s the idea that there’s this blueprint for what a human is and that somehow technology, or any things that change us, take us away from that blueprint — when in fact we’ve been changing ourselves with language, with tools, with architecture, with culture, from the moment we climbed down from the trees.”

A 21st-century humanism needs to say something more sophisticated than just “keep humanity the same.” It needs to have an answer to the question of what we want humanity to become in a tech-augmented world.

But if there is a better vision for our technological future than the one offered by AI successionism, what is it?

AI successionism is a religion, but it’s wearing a secular disguise

Maybe you think it sounds weird to say the AI successionists — a bunch of scientists, technologists, and venture capitalists — are offering a spiritual vision. But their ideas are spiritual in the extreme. And to understand why their movement has gained momentum, we need to understand its deeply religious origins and how it morphed into a supposedly secular worldview. And that means going back. 

You probably remember that in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, Adam eats some forbidden fruit and humanity suffers a fall from grace. But did you know that in the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers began to believe that the way to restore humanity to its original perfection was to use…technology? These thinkers argued that part of what it meant for Adam to be formed in God’s image was that he was also a creator, a maker. So if we wanted to truly return to the God-like perfection of Adam prior to his fall, we’d have to lean into that creator aspect of ourselves. 

This idea took off in medieval monasteries. Even in the midst of the so-called Dark Ages, some of these institutions became hotbeds of engineering, producing inventions like the first known tidal-powered water wheel and impact-drilled well. For many Christians, tech progress became synonymous with moral progress.

By the Renaissance, some Christian thinkers were insisting that we should progress not just by designing new and innovative objects, but by redesigning ourselves, too. In 1486, philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola argued that what’s unique about us humans is not some static trait but the very freedom of will that allows us to change into whatever we might want. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, he imagined God telling humankind: 

We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.

Pico believed that we could use spiritual technologies like magic to transform our nature. And he argued that we have the choice to become either like the animals or like the angels:

It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.

As the dominance of religion waned over the next couple of centuries, Enlightenment thinkers took Pico’s embrace of human plasticity and secularized it. They replaced the concept of divine ascent with one of indefinite progress. They insisted on the “perfectibility” of the human. And they fetishized rational intelligence as the means of achieving that optimal state. “Would it be absurd now to suppose,” wrote 18th-century philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, “that the improvement of the human race should be regarded as capable of unlimited progress?”

Of course, some European thinkers hung onto their Christianity, too, and they found ways to fuse it with the rational humanism of the Enlightenment. It’s a trend that continued into the 1900s, with proponents of Russian Cosmism — an intellectual movement that wanted to achieve literal resurrection of the dead through science — and French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who argued that we could use tech to nudge along human evolution and thereby bring about the kingdom of God. 

As author Meghan O’Gieblyn explains in her fantastic book God, Human, Animal, Machine, Teilhard believed that melding humans and machines would lead to “a state of super-consciousness,” whereby we become a new enlightened species. He influenced his pal Julian Huxley, the evolutionary biologist who was president of both the British Humanist Association and the British Eugenics Society, and who popularized the term “transhumanism.” 

Huxley inspired the contemporary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted in the 1990s that we were approaching a time when human intelligence could merge with machine intelligence, becoming unbelievably powerful. “The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems … and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future,” Kurzweil wrote. And he, in turn, has influenced Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, who explicitly aims at merging human and machine intelligence.

But there’s a big problem for these latter-day technologists: While we’ve never had more power to direct the evolution of our species through tech, it’s also never been less obvious what we should evolve toward. 

For good old Pico back in the Renaissance, human self-transformation had a clear end: spiritual union with the divine. There was a hierarchy running from animals to humans to angels to God, and the direction you were supposed to travel in was clear: up. 

But for us postmoderns, the universe does not come inscribed with directions. Should we evolve ourselves toward greater intelligence, or longevity, or creativity, or kindness, or power? If intelligence, which kind of intelligence? If power, should we wield it to simply steward our home planet or to conquer the stars? Should we be maximally humble or maximally ambitious?

The cosmos is silent as to what to do. 

The assumptions baked into AI successionism

The first thing that unites all the AI successionists is that they refuse to accept that silence. Hungry for instruction, they insist that it’s out there, and that they can see it written into the very nature of the universe. 

In other words, they believe that the universe has a telos, a particular end or goal. Teleological thinking has been popular since antiquity because it’s comforting for us humans: If the universe has a goal, then maybe we can discover it, and then we’ll know just what to do. As Faggella writes, this “does give humanity a direction.” Whether the AI successionists realize it or not, they are smuggling teleology back into modernity under the guise of science and tech. 

And that brings us to the second thing that unites them: They want to follow these supposed cosmic instructions so they can help the universe achieve its ultimate destiny. 

For many, that means helping the universe “wake up.” Perceiving the cosmos as barren, they want to spread consciousness everywhere, so that the universe can fill up with conscious experience — of bliss, of goodness, of the fact of its own existence. 

“If we can venture out and animate the countless worlds above with life and love and thought, then…we could bring our cosmos to its full scale; make it worthy of our awe,” writes Toby Ord, a former research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which was long the world’s leading center for transhumanist thought. 

Personally, I think the cosmos is already worthy of my awe, and I find it presumptuous to believe that the universe is almost entirely asleep and that it needs us humans to “animate” or wake it up. But as the writer Adam Kirsch documents in The Revolt Against Humanity, it’s common to hear in these circles that one way of achieving that awakening is to colonize the universe and transform all its matter and energy into “computronium” (a term for any substance that can compute information). By turning the entire universe into a humongous data center, we’d be making it into a God-like mind.

“Even the ‘dumb’ matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence,” Kurzweil writes. Becoming one giant mind, he says, is “the ultimate destiny of the universe.”

Verdon, the founder of e/acc, finds his “ultimate destiny” written in the second law of thermodynamics — the law of entropy. The universe, it says, is gradually running down: concentrated pockets of energy disperse over time until none remains useful. Building on a contested theory of life’s origin, Verdon argues that intelligent life is selected for precisely because it accelerates entropy. Smarter agents can find and exploit energy stocks that less intelligent ones can’t (think predators tracking prey, or humans drilling for oil), burning through them faster. A superhuman AI expanding across the cosmos would be better at this than humans. So, Verdon says, we should “follow the ‘will of the universe’ [by] leaning into the thermodynamic bias.”

The idea that we should serve at the pleasure of entropy is deeply unintuitive (in fact, philosophers have argued just the opposite — that our task is to resist it). But to make his case that we shouldn’t be scared of being superseded by smarter civilizations that produce more entropy, Verdon uses hierarchical language that echoes Pico’s Oration: “If every species in our evolutionary tree was scared of evolutionary forks from itself, our higher form of intelligence and civilization as we know it would never have emerged.”

Faggella, the founder of the Worthy Successor group, makes the same rhetorical move. “Humans have access to higher goods than horseshoe crabs; AGI will have access to higher goods than humans,” he writes. “What a tragedy it would be if that trajectory of uncovering value and possibility were stopped.”

Likewise, the computer scientist and AI successionist Richard Sutton argues that if you look at things from the “point of view of the universe” — a classic utilitarian slogan — there’s a clear upward trajectory: The cosmos has gone from the mindless “age of particles” and “age of stars” all the way to today’s “age of design,” when minded creatures can decide what to make. Although lots of creatures make tools, Sutton says what makes humans unique is that we’ve “taken design to vastly greater heights.” 

According to Sutton, by looking at what makes us unique, we can determine our role in the universe. Since we’re designers par excellence, our role is to push design to the extreme: “Taking design to the limit means designing beings that are themselves capable of designing. This is what we are doing with AI.”

This argument is what sets up Sutton — like many others — to make a claim about technological inevitability. The suggestion is that we’re just identifying what nature has already chosen for us, and speeding it along — evolution-maxxing, if you will. “In the ascent of humanity,” he says, “succession to AI is inevitable.” 

But when we sum up all these ideas, you can see how many shaky assumptions are operating just beneath the surface: 

1. There is an objective telos to the universe. 
2. We can determine what it is by looking from the “point of view of the universe.”
3. We should expect that higher beings will be capable of accessing “higher goods” in a hierarchical universe, and these will better serve the universe’s ultimate destiny. 
4. We can determine our role in that destiny by looking at what makes us unique.
5. The thing that makes us unique should determine our action.
6. We should maximize the action — that is, do the most extreme (“to the limit”) version of it.

Some of these assumptions are so old that it’s hard to see how weird they are. But they are all worth questioning. 

“I would reject each and every one of those claims,” Vallor told me.

Take the fourth one, for example. The idea that humanity has some particular role, and that the way to pinpoint it is to look for what makes us different from other species, goes all the way back to Aristotle. (“Living is shared in even by plants, but we are looking for something peculiarly human,” wrote the Ancient Greek philosopher, ultimately concluding that “the human work is the activity of the soul in accord with reason.”) 

But there’s nothing obvious about that. It would be just as reasonable to say that the proper functioning of humanity requires emphasizing what we share with all other animals. After all, our capacity to feel pleasure and pain, our intelligence, our tool use, our adaptiveness, our ability to form complex social arrangements — none of that is unique to the human animal.

There are other leaps in logic hidden in this set of assumptions. For example, even if the universe tends toward a particular destiny, and even if humanity has a special trait that could help it along in that direction, it does not follow that we have a duty to do that. (Philosophers like to describe this fallacy as leaping from “is” — the world is a certain way — to “ought” — we must act a certain way.)

Humans are biological organisms, and the fundamental fact all such life-forms share is that we have a hardwired drive to survive. We do not have a moral responsibility to ignore that hardwired drive and let ourselves go extinct in order to help “higher forms” colonize the universe, any more than our evolutionary ancestors had a duty to make room for us. 

Unfortunately, as humanism proceeded through the centuries, it absorbed some dubious Enlightenment-era ideas that have made it easy for people to get snowed into believing we do have such a duty. That’s right: Humanism, the philosophy that was supposed to be about the value of humans, has actually ended up undermining it in key ways. 

To chart a better path forward, we need a new humanism, one that’s actually fit for the 21st century. 

Notes toward a new humanism 

To start, we need to pick out the flies in the ointment of the old humanism, especially those it picked up as it passed from the Renaissance into the rational humanism of the Enlightenment. Those flies include the teleological story about the universe; the “perfectibility” of the human; the hierarchical view that places humans above all other animals; and the idea that we should try to maximize some objective good through rationality.

Let’s start with the teleology. Although it’s appealing to try to spot instructions written into the fabric of the cosmos, expecting the universe to come with pre-fab values ultimately means shirking our own responsibility. As the existentialist philosophers taught us, nature doesn’t choose our meaning for us — that’s something we have to make ourselves through our own choices.

Accepting that we have the responsibility to decide what the future looks like means accepting a heavy existential burden, and that takes a ton of courage. It’s so much easier to believe that the script is fixed and final and inevitable. But I think that’s an example of what French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith” — denying our own radical freedom in order to escape the anguish of responsibility.

Of course, saying that we have the responsibility to decide how we do and don’t want humanity to evolve opens up a problem: Who, exactly, gets to choose? It’s tempting for each of us to rush in with the values we want to promote. But if we acknowledge that we don’t know the universe’s ultimate destiny or that it’s radically indeterminate, then it makes much more sense to not impose one positive vision on everybody. 

Instead, we need a positive vision that remains truly open and pluralistic. So rather than trying to enforce specific values, one of the best things we can do is refuse to foreclose the possibility for a variety of different lifestyles to persist and thrive.        

That means, first of all, taking care not to unduly constrain the liberty of the human beings who already live on this planet. AI successionists often dream of radical interventions — like a brain-computer interface that would give you superhuman intelligence, memory, and mind-reading abilities, or a genetic technology that would create superbabies. They insist they should be allowed to change their bodies however they want. 

And it’s true that self-determination is a precious right. But the AI successionists often fail to consider the other side of this: that everyone else should also have a right to self-determination, meaning they need to be free from implicit coercion. If more and more of us dramatically alter our biology, we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to do the same — even if they don’t want to. To reject alterations would mean to exist at a huge economic disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining “suboptimal” when optimization is possible.

Even John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century English philosopher who literally wrote the book on liberty, didn’t think that anyone’s right to self-determination is an absolute right. Instead, it’s a qualified right — the kind that we generally honor, but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others.

So, ultimately, we’ll have to strike a reasonable balance between self-determination for the enhancement enthusiasts and protecting the rights of others to live as they choose. Some enhancements may be fine, like implanting a chip in your hand that unlocks your front door; others may need regulation or restriction, especially if they’d alter the germline for all future generations. 

One way to think about this is to note that there’s a difference between using tech to expand human capabilities and using it in ways that will contract the range of human lives we think it’s legitimate to live.

That brings us to another one of those flies in the ointment: the idea that the human is something that must be optimized and perfected. That idea, which mandates that we strip away the physical and cognitive features that are perceived as holding us back from “perfection,” veers uncomfortably toward eugenics. It’s a specter that has stalked transhumanism and posthumanism from their earliest days. (It’s not a coincidence that Julian Huxley, who coined the term “transhumanism,” was president of the British Eugenics Society). And it still stalks today’s AI discourse.

In a recent conversation with Sutton, one of the most prominent AI successionists, I argued that no matter how smart AIs get, it’s surely wrong to assert that if one group is more intelligent than another, we should just get rid of the less intelligent group. To highlight the absurdity, I asked what I thought was a rhetorical question: Imagine if someone believed that white people were smarter than Black people; does that mean they should get rid of Black people, and Black people should just be okay with white people taking over?

“Um,” Sutton said, and then paused for nine seconds. “What if,” he offered, “you coexist and you’re coexisting with some entity that’s more productive than you are? This is the way I view the AI. We coexist with it.”

“But that’s not what the word ‘succession’ means,” I noted.

“Oh, I’m pointing out that it’s inevitable. If you allow them to be their way and you allow you to be your way, coexist, and their way just happens to be better, then they’re going to end up being more powerful. And you should be good with that.” 

“You’re saying there will be a sort of Darwinian survival of the fittest?”

“In some sense, yes,” he said. “The winner should be whoever wins, and the spoils of winning should be whatever they are.” 

“So in the thought experiment where hypothetically, in an imaginary world, it were true that white people are smarter than Black people,” I pressed, “then the smarter people will win out and the Black people should just be okay with that?” 

“Well, why don’t we just say the intelligent people should win out over the dumb people and the dumb people should be okay with that,” he said. “I think the dumb people should be okay with that!”

But the idea that a species or group should accede to being squashed for some “greater good” is a eugenicist idea that should be flat-out rejected. There is no “perfect” or “optimal” type of being, full stop. Insisting otherwise will always lead you to narrow what are considered acceptable modes of existence. And that road leads to eugenics.  

Instead, a much more positive vision than the successionists’ would be to expand the space for different kinds of lives to flourish. And that brings us to the oldest fly in humanism’s ointment: the hierarchy. 

Rather than staking human dignity on the claim that humans are better than other species, as the classical humanists did, we can embrace what researchers are increasingly recognizing: that every species has its own brand of smarts. Each of these “diverse intelligences” is adapted to its particular environment and needs, and every one of them is uniquely wonderful in its own way. We would then try to respect each and every being’s form of life as much as we can. (Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, which recommends that we guarantee every being certain core entitlements that befit their specific nature, offers a possible framework for this.)

If we one day end up with artificial intelligences that are conscious — and I don’t think we have a principled reason to believe that could never happen — then we’d want to treat them ethically, too. In fact, if we are someday joined by conscious AIs or biological-artificial hybrid organisms, I for one would be delighted to get to know these many kinds of minds and explore their rich and varied forms of consciousness. 

Of course, the politics of our world would become much more complicated; we’d have that many more creatures with conflicting needs, and we’re not exactly good at handling the conflicts we already have. We’d need to become much better at pluralistic coexistence before this could be feasible. 

But in theory? A future where humans could pluralistically coexist with a dazzling diversity of nonhuman and partly human life-forms — not assuming that they’re lower than us, but also not assuming that they’re higher — that is a future I’d be excited to inhabit. Because that, and not the supposed anti-chauvinism of the AI successionists, would be true openness to all forms of consciousness: Instead of “passing the torch” in some imagined relay race, we’d be making more room for all kinds of minds — including ours — to run (or fly or swim or compute) in their own directions.     

But notice what this vision does not mean. It does not mean that we’re under any obligation to bring those new species into being right now, or at all. That’s because there’s no evidence for the view that there’s some objective moral good in the universe that we must try to maximize. Although utilitarians have been so successful at popularizing that view that some people think it’s a given, it’s very much not. And plenty of philosophers, neuroscientists, and psychologists have a different view. 

As philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote in response to those who lob the accusation of “speciesism”:

They suppose that we are in effect saying, when we exercise these distinctions between human beings and other creatures, that human beings are more important, period, than those other creatures. That objection is simply a mistake. … These actions and attitudes need express no more than the fact that human beings are more important to us, a fact which is hardly surprising. 

In other words, you can care about the continuation of humanity, not because you believe humans are the most important species according to some cosmic point of view, but simply because you happen to be a human. You don’t need to justify your desire for survival before some higher court — of course you want to survive, and of course that’s morally okay! That’s because, to Williams, there is no “point of view of the universe,” no view from nowhere. There’s no such thing as a moral agent in an abstract sense. You exist as a human moral agent, and any ethical theory that requires you to ignore that bedrock identity severs you from the very thing that makes your agency recognizably yours.

This is the view that Vallor — a devoted humanist, but not a naive one — shares.

“I think morality is rooted in a particular form of existence that you have,” Vallor told me. “We exist as a particular kind of social, vulnerable, interdependent animal with a lot of excess cognitive energy. All those things factor into what it is to be moral as a human. For me, this abstraction — the idea of some pure universal morality that creatures who are completely unlike us could somehow do better than we can — I think that just fundamentally misunderstands what morality is.”

If there’s no universal moral good for creatures to maximize, then it makes no sense to ask if we ought to be making new creatures that would be better at maximizing it than we are. 

Instead of trying to look from “the point of view of the universe,” a 21st-century humanism should embrace looking from the point of view of humans. No, this is not a humanism that says “humans matter more than all other creatures” or “we should keep humans exactly as they currently are forever.” It’s one that says we humans are already valuable just the way we are. Whether or not we’re valuable to some grand destiny of the universe, we’re valuable to us. 

That means that rather than wilting under the accusation of speciesism, we should, first and foremost, be raising the floor for all of us here on Earth to thrive more. And it means it’s totally appropriate that when we try to make decisions about how to transform ourselves using technology —or how not to transform ourselves — we make those decisions with an eye to what would most contribute to the flourishing of humanity and the interspecies community and planetary system we depend on. 

While we can say yes to transformations that most of us agree would increase human flourishing, we need to do that democratically, while embedding fundamental rights that protect perfectly legitimate minority preferences from being squeezed out by a “tyranny of the majority.” 

We also need to accept that this approach doesn’t spell out some “end goal” for human evolution, so we’re going to have to proceed step-by-step, making small moves and then deciding from there what the best next small move is. Incrementalism is the way to go, both because future humans will be better positioned to know what they want for far-future humans, and because it allows us to course-correct if our tech choices start taking us down a bad path.

One choice — not duty, but choice — we will face is whether to invite new species to join us. I’m open to that down the line if it seems beneficial, and if we one day feel confident that we wouldn’t be consigning either us or them to an unacceptably high risk of misery.  

But for today? Our tech should empower us to survive, thrive, and make our own choices. Any approach to tech that disempowers us, replaces us, or tells us we need someone else to rescue us — whether you call it a god or an AI — is a misguided return to the past. I’d rather walk bravely into the future, even if it means I need to have the guts to rescue myself.  

This story was supported by Tarbell Grants. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

Spring is here, which means the pests are back. My parents’ house has an ant problem. I found weevils in my pantry, and I know people with wasp infestations in their places. Tick season has begun, and last year’s bedbug scare was legitimately traumatic. I don’t like killing insects, but if they’re in my space uninvited and I can’t just take them outside and easily prevent them from coming back, I’ll do it.

But I do feel bad about doing it, even sparingly. I think it’s plausible that insects feel pain, so I try to make it quick, yet I’m still making the choice to kill them and it’s not one I’m proud of. I think that pests, like all living things, have some moral weight — but there’s not room enough for the two of us. Is it bad to kill them? Is there a more ethical way to approach this?

Dear Bugging Out,

I love that you’re sensitive to the potential suffering of Earth’s teeny-tiny, creepy-crawly creatures. I hope you never lose that. But I do hope you lose the guilt you’re feeling.

You’re right to think it’s plausible that insects feel pain. We don’t know for sure yet, but in recent years, scientists have been accumulating evidence that suggests at least some insects possess sentience — the capacity to have conscious experiences that are valenced, meaning they feel bad (pain) or good (pleasure). 

Bees, for example, appear to play — just for fun. They also actively seek out mind-altering drugs like nicotine and caffeine, which suggests there may be a mind there to alter. Plus, bees seem to experience pain consciously, not merely flinch from it by reflex. In a 2022 study, bees approached a sugary snack even though it meant facing uncomfortable heat, weighing costs against benefits in what scientists call a “motivational trade-off.” A pure automaton couldn’t do that; it would flee heat in every situation. The capacity to weigh competing drives is one of the markers of sentience.

Meanwhile, fruit flies have shown signs of anhedonia — the loss of interest in previously pleasurable things (like food) that we know as a symptom of depression in humans. Treat the flies with a human antidepressant and it’ll suppress the depression-like state in the insects, too. 

One of my colleagues confessed to me recently that evidence like this makes her feel super guilty: When she goes around killing these insects in her kitchen, she asks herself whether she’s “a fruit-fly Nazi.”

But the key thing to realize is this: Bugs may have some kind of sentience, and sentience may confer some moral status, but that doesn’t mean that provides the last word on how we should act toward them. 

Just because another creature might have moral weight, that doesn’t necessarily tell you how to treat that creature when its welfare conflicts with the welfare of a creature you know has moral weight: you.  

So, how can you know if or when it’s okay to kill a bug? 

I think the most compelling response comes from Elizabeth Anderson, a contemporary philosopher who subscribes to the school of thought known as pragmatism, which sees moral truths as socially embedded and historically contingent, not fixed and objective.

Anderson points out that for most of human history, we couldn’t have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and their energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn’t really exist on a mass scale until recently (although some non-Western societies have long ascribed moral worth to animals).

“The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals,” she writes, “has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.”

Anderson has noted that we feel different levels of moral obligation to different species, and that has to do not only with their intrinsic capacities like intelligence or sentience, but also with their relationships to us. It matters whether we’ve made them dependent on us by domesticating them, or whether they live in the wild. It also matters whether they’re fundamentally hostile to us.

Thinking about pests is a great (if gross) way to bring this point home. If you find bedbugs in your house, nobody expects you to say, “Well, they’re maybe sentient and definitely alive, so they have moral value. I’ll just live and let live!” It is absolutely expected that you will exterminate the shit out of them.

Why? Because with pests, Anderson writes, “there is no possibility of communication, much less compromise. We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace…Indeed, we have an obligation to our fellow members of society (whether human or animal) to drive them out, whenever this is necessary to protect ourselves.”

Anderson’s point is not that sentience doesn’t matter. It’s that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive.

Embracing this value pluralism makes things tricky. It suggests that the best we can do is look at creatures’ intelligence and sentience and relationships to us as clues about how we should negotiate life with (or without) them. But it doesn’t tell us how to weigh those clues — and what to do when they conflict with the interests of other animals, including us.

“There’s no simple formula,” Anderson once told me. “I think that’s a hopeless quest.”

That is, for my money, the most intellectually honest position. The absence of a fixed formula doesn’t mean you should exist in a state of guilty indecision or paralysis. Instead, the best thing you can do is have the integrity to recognize that sometimes life presents you with trade-offs where you have to make a choice. And when it comes to insects, you’re making that choice from a position of considerable power. 

This is the conclusion Robin Wall Kimmerer reaches in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The scientist describes how she had an algae-filled pond in her yard that she wanted to clear out so her daughters could swim in it. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, though, she believes that all life has moral worth. So as she raked out the muck and found that it was full of tadpoles, she plucked them all out so they could go on living. Then she inspected the pond water under her microscope and saw a ton of teensy organisms, each one a moral dilemma. She writes:

As I raked and plucked, it challenged my conviction that all lives are valuable, protozoan or not. As a theoretical matter, I hold this to be true, but on a practical level it gets murky, the spiritual and the pragmatic bumping heads. With every rake I knew that I was prioritizing. Short, single-cell lives were ended because I wanted a clear pond. I’m bigger, I have a rake, so I win. That’s not a worldview I readily endorse.

But it didn’t keep me awake at night, or halt my efforts; I simply acknowledged the choices I was making. The best I could do was to be respectful and not let the small lives go to waste. I plucked out whatever wee beasties I could and the rest went into the compost pile, to start the cycle again as soil.

In a way, it’s an unsatisfying solution — a lot of us would probably sleep easier if nature came inscribed with clear bright lines and moral instructions. But there you have it. Like Kimmerer, I think you should practice a kind of harm reduction. To the extent that you can “live and let live” with insects, that’s ideal. Try to minimize how many you kill. But when you do make the choice to kill them, try to do it in a way that reduces the risk of suffering (think: quick and painless crushing rather than long and drawn-out poisoning).

That’s not only for the bug’s benefit, but for yours, too. Harming any animal can harm our character if we do it mindlessly or callously, because it desensitizes us to life. But when we let ourselves be touched by life, we can maintain our reverence for it. The reverence — not the guilt — is the thing you want to hold onto. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This piece on “What It’s Like To Be a Worm” taught me that Darwin was obsessed with…worm sentience! He even argued that earthworms are capable of motivational trade-offs: “Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light…and we have seen that when their attention is engaged, they neglect impressions to which they would otherwise have attended; and attention indicates the presence of a mind of some kind.”
  
• This Aeon essay about the history of eugenics is absolutely fascinating. It reveals that some disabled people actually supported eugenics in the 1930s, seeking out sterilization for themselves. I think internalized ableist logic had a whole lot to do with this.
  
• I loved psychologist David DeSteno’s recent piece, “Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?” If you ask me, we keep making the Enlightenment-era mistake of thinking morality is primarily undergirded by rationality. But if it’s undergirded by emotion, it’s a fundamentally embodied human pursuit and the desire to mathematize it is itself irrational.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.