人类的灭绝会是个悲剧吗？观点
阿拉巴马州哈利维尔镇附近的13号高速公路一个枝蔓丛生的地带。 WILLIAM WIDMER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
（本文发表于时报观点与评论版面，作者是Todd May。）
There are stirrings of discussion the days in philosophical circles about the prospect of human extinction. This should not be surprising, given the increasingly threatening predations of climate change. In reflecting on this question, I want to suggest an answer to a single question, one that hardly covers the whole philosophical territory but is an important aspect of it. Would human extinction be a tragedy?
哲学界近年来开始就人类灭绝的前景展开热烈讨论。鉴于气候变化的侵袭构成越来越大的威胁，这应该是不足为奇的。在思考这个问题时，我想就一个单一的问题做出回答，这个问题谈不上涵盖整个哲学领域，但却是其中的一个重要方面。那就是：人类的灭绝会是个悲剧吗？
炒鸡胸肉To get a bead on this question, let me distinguish it from a couple of other related questions. I’m not asking whether the experience of humans coming to an end would be a bad thing. (In the pages, Samuel Scheffler has given us an important reason to think that it would be.) I am also not asking whether human beings as a species derve to die out. That is an important question, but would involve different considerations. Tho questions, and others like them, need to be addresd if we are to come to a full moral asssment of the prospect of our demi. Yet what I am asking here is simply whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might em puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing.倔强青铜
为了探寻这个问题，让我将它与其他几个相关问题区分开来。我不是在问人类走向终结的历程是否是一件坏事。（在这些页面中，塞缪尔·舍夫勒[Samuel Scheffler]已经给了我们一个重要的理由，认为它会是一件坏事。）我也不会问作为一个物种，人类是否死有余辜。这是一个重要的问题，但会涉及不同的考虑因素。如果我们要对灭亡的前景进行全面的道德评估，就需要解决这些以及其他类似的问题。然而，我在这里要问的只是，如果这
个星球不再有人类，那是否将是一场悲剧。我要给出的答案最初可能看起来令人费解。我想提出，至少是暂时提出，人类灭绝既将是一个悲剧，又可能只是一件好事。
win10关机To make that claim less puzzling, let me say a word about tragedy. In theater, the tragic character is often someone who commits a wrong, usually a significant one, but with whom we feel sympathy in their descent. Here Sophocles’s Oedipus, Shakespeare’s Lear, and Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman might stand as examples. In this ca, the tragic character is humanity. It is humanity that is committing a wrong, a wrong who elimination would likely require the elimination of the species, but with whom we might be sympathetic nonetheless for reasons I discuss in a moment.
为了让这个说法不那么令人费解，让我来谈谈悲剧。在戏剧中，悲剧人物经常是做错事的人，往往是非常严重的错事，但他们的堕落会使我们感到同情。索福克勒斯的俄狄浦斯，莎士比亚的李尔和阿瑟·米勒的威利·洛曼，可以算是这一类的例子。在这种情况下，悲剧人物是人性。是人性犯下错误，消灭这个错误可能需要消灭整个物种，尽管如此，我们可能还是会同情他们，其原因我在后面会谈及。
猕猿To make that ca, let me start with a claim that I think will be at once depressing and, upon reflection, uncontroversial. Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it. This is happening through at least three means. First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in The Times exemplifies. Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwi be intact. Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and miry before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways. There is no reason to think that tho practices are going to diminish any time soon. Quite the opposite.按照英语
为了证明这一点，容我先提出一个观点，我认为这个观点将是令人沮丧的，但细想下来，又会觉得并没有什么争议性。人类正在破坏地球可居住的大部分地区，并给居住在那里的许多动物造成难以想象的痛苦。这至少通过三种方式实现。首先，人类对气候变化的影响给生态系统带去了灾难，正如时报最近一篇关于黄石公园的文章就是明证。第二，不断增长的人口正在侵蚀原本完整的生态系统。第三，工厂化养殖培育了数以百万计的动物，这
个过程给它们带来的只有痛苦和悲惨，之后再以通常非常野蛮的方式屠宰它们。没有理由认为这些做法会在短期内减少。事实恰恰相反。
Humanity, then, is the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.
小说人生
因此，对于有意识的动物来说，人类是毁灭之源，其规模之大令人难以理解。
To be sure, nature itlf is hardly a Valhalla of peace and harmony. Animals kill other animals regularly, often in ways that we (although not they) would consider cruel. But there is no other creature in nature who predatory behavior is remotely as deep or as widespread as the behavior we display toward what the philosopher Christine Korsgaard aptly calls “our fellow creatures” in a nsitive book of the same name.
当然，自然本身并不是和平与和谐的瓦尔哈拉神殿。动物杀死其他动物的方式在我们看来也往往非常残忍（尽管在它们看来并不残忍）。但在自然界中，没有任何一种生物的掠食行为比我们更深入、更广泛；而掠食的对象，正如哲学家克里斯汀·科斯加德(Christine K
英雄手抄报简单又漂亮orsgaard)在其细腻的著作中恰如其分地说到的，是“我们的生物同胞”，他的书正是以此为名。
If this were all to the story there would be no tragedy. The elimination of the human species would be a good thing, full stop. But there is more to the story. Human beings bring things to the planet that other animals cannot. For example, we bring an advanced level of reason that can experience wonder at the world in a way that is foreign to most if not all other animals. We create art of various kinds: literature, music and painting among them. We engage in sciences that ek to understand the univer and our place in it. Were our species to go extinct, all of that would be lost.
如果这就是故事的全部，那就不是悲剧了。人类物种的灭绝会是一件好事，仅此而已。但是这个故事还有更多内容。人类给地球带来了其他动物无法带来的东西。比如，我们带来了一种高级的理性，它能以一种对大多数动物（就算不是所有动物）来说是陌生的方式体验世界的奇妙。我们创作各种各样的艺术：文学、音乐和绘画。我们从事科学研究，试图了解宇宙和我们在其中的位置。如果我们的物种灭绝了，所有这些都会消失。
>韭菜蛋饼
