“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” –Samuel Johnson * Hangings will do that sort of thing: concentrate the mind. But how about a moral hanging? Does it concentrate the mind? And what is a moral hanging anyway? First things first.
A moral hanging, which is a technical term that I just made up, is when you know you’ve done something really bad that you can’t undo, and the more you live, the more you’ll keep doing it. It’s a hanging because getting rid of your future is the morally right thing to do. (Whether you it is another question.
) It’s also a hanging because you’re just hanging there. You can’t get out of it. In a book that is about to be published, , I raise the possibility that humanity itself might be subject to a moral hanging.
The rough idea is that the factory farming, deforestation, climate destruction, scientific testing of animals, and so forth that we engage in creates so much misery for our fellow creatures that it might be better if we no longer procreated—if we just let our species die out. The operative word here is . There are lots of good things we bring to the planet, and also much we can do to justify our continuing to inhabit the place.
We are beings that create and appreciate art and science and construct meaningful lives in ways that other animals can’t. And, if we tried, we could limit or eliminate factory farming and deforestation and mitigate climat.