Extinction outweighs. Existence has intrinsic value.

The question of the ultimate or intrinsic good can also be asked as follows: Why should the world exist? What is the positive thing or characteristic about the world or objective existence that ultimately makes the world something whose persistence we want? This is a framing that has a ring of pertinence in this era of intensifying and cascading existential risk. Whilst prominent x-risk discourse has explicitly only avowed a utilitarian answer to this question (that is, when not pleading agnosticism), that isn’t always how it approaches the issue. Tellingly, when MacAskill in What We Owe the Future and Ord in The Precipice aren’t making a rigorous philosophical case (or arguing that we should wait a few centuries before doing more philosophy), but more rhetorically attempt to arouse in their readers a proper passion for the continuation of our future or sync with some deeply felt chord of truth within our psyches, their framings often take a spontaneously non-utilitarian form.

MacAskill (2022) for example, writes in the chapter 'Extinction':

“Now and in all the coming centuries, we face threats that could kill us all. And if we mess this up, we mess it up forever. The universe's self-understanding might be permanently lost and, within just a few hundred million years more, the brief and slender flame of consciousness that flickered for a while would be extinguished forever. The universe might return to the state it occupied for much of its first thirteen billion years: cold, empty, dead” (Ch. 5).

Even more telling is that to commence this chapter, he quotes the opening of Arthur C. Clarke's book Rendezvous with Rama, which describes a catastrophe befalling humanity, and says about it, "Six hundred thousand people died, and the total damage was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss to art, to history, to science—to the whole human race, for the rest of time—was beyond all computation" (Clarke, 1973, as cited in MacAskill, 2022, Ch. 5).

Ord’s project in The Precipice (2020), as noted earlier, isn’t so much to make a philosophical case for saving the world. His book is a low-down on existential risks and how we can confront them. So, freed from the obligation to uphold utilitarianism in this book— although he is a professional philosopher whose scholarly work is within the utilitarian tradition (Ord, 2014, 2015)—Ord proceeds even more to rhetorically elicit his reader’s passion for the world’s continuation in a non-utilitarian vein. For example:

“[B]ecause, in expectation, almost all of humanity's life lies in the future, almost everything of value lies in the future as well: almost all the flourishing; almost all the beauty; our greatest achievements; our most just societies; our most profound discoveries. We can continue our progress on prosperity, health, justice, freedom and moral thought. We can create a world of wellbeing and flourishing that challenges our capacity to imagine. And if we protect that world from catastrophe, it could last millions of centuries. This is our potential—what we could achieve if we pass the Precipice and continue striving for a better world” (Ord, 2020, Ch. 2).

Or:

“[A] world without agony and injustice is just a lower bound on how good life could be. Neither the sciences nor the humanities have yet found any upper bound. We get some hint at what is possible during life's best moments: glimpses of raw joy, luminous beauty, soaring love. Moments when we are truly awake. These moments, however brief, point to possible heights of flourishing far beyond the status quo, and far beyond our current comprehension” (Ord, 2020, Ch. 1).

The latter is more overtly within a utilitarian framework, but it still raises the question, is the highest good being posited to be the subjective experience of the good life, or things that are possible during life’s best moments, such as raw joy, luminous beauty and soaring love, regarded from a third-person perspective not for the state of experiencing them but for the very fact of them? Does value reside in the experience of being truly awake, or that which we would be truly awake to?

That it might be the latter is suggested by statements such as: “We often treat the value of cultural traditions in this way. We see indigenous languages and ways of life under threat—perhaps to be lost forever to this world—and we are filled with a desire to preserve them, and protect them from future threats” (Ord, 2020, Ch. 2). And: “[I]f 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. And since it appears to be only us who can bring the universe to such full scale, we may have an immense instrumental value, which would leave us at the center of this picture of the cosmos. In this way, our potential, and the potential in the sheer scale of our universe, are interwoven” (Ord, 2020, Ch. 8). We can thus see that when intuitively arguing the case that it would be preferable if the world goes on, even writers who otherwise espouse utilitarianism aren’t necessarily writing to the effect of, “Imagine the awesome feelings we could have by experiencing the amazing things there could be,” but rather often to the effect of “Imagine the amazing things there could be” (even if experiences are among those amazing things). In other words, they are appealing to a sensibility that values things not for what they are subjectively (or what it is like to experience them), but for what they are objectively (as they are regarded from a third-person point-of-view).

What such intuitive expressions also reveal, though, is that this sensibility is also one that values things not for some ethical value, but an aesthetic value. That which intuitively strikes us as good about the persistence of complex life or sentient civilization, about salubriously crossing the precipice of existential risk we stand at, or about the future that we could create, has some general positive quality that we may call "amazing,” that may make us go "Wow!" or which may be best represented for different people by some other articulation, but which is essentially aesthetic. It is with an aesthetic disposition that we have in us evoked the sentiment that "This is why the world should exist!" or "This is why our enterprise should persist!"—which is, ultimately, the sentiment that Ord and MacAskill wish to bring forth in us through their writings.

What is the connection between the objective aspect to what strikes us as good and its aesthetic nature? We have but seen that there is in or about us a sensibility that intuitively, at least, sees that intrinsic or final value—that for which ultimately we want the world to go on—lies in things objectively. The mechanics of this are yet to be seen, i.e., why and how we value things in an aesthetic mode when we value them for their own sake as described. We will now turn to this.