Owen Clifton, who successfully defended his PhD this fall, has a paper in The Philosophical Quarterly, which asks the question, and is titled, “Does the value of rational activity explain the badness of human extinction?” The abstract and a link to the open-access article are below.
Abstract: Why postpone human extinction? The dominant view is utilitarian: postponing extinction matters if it maximizes the net sum of happiness that is ever enjoyed. But, many object, we have reason to make people happy, not to make happy people. Plus, the utilitarian view does not explain why failing to postpone extinction matters terribly if the future it would cost our species is utopian, but not if it is dystopian. For, a dystopia may contain a greater net sum of happiness than a utopia. I therefore consider a budding alternative: postponing extinction matters if it ensures the ongoing instantiation of rational activity. Regretfully, I show this view faces objections analogous to, but more robust than, those that beset its utilitarian rival. For example: we have reason to make people rational, not to make rational people. I conclude by pointing to another alternative that critics of the utilitarian view ought to investigate further.