Planet of the Apes? It's a madhouse!

Norva Lo, Andrew Brennan (Newcastle University)

Abstract: In the final scenes of the Ted Post movie “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” (1970) a time-travelling astronaut, Taylor (played by Charlton Heston), decides – in his dying moments – to explode a doomsday device that will kill all life on earth. Three years later, Richard Routley published a paper arguing that the last man would do something seriously wrong – in fact, evil  – if he were to destroy “every living thing, animal or plant”.  Was Taylor an evil man?  Audiences at the time did not seem to regard Taylor as a moral monster, and we explore the relevance of Taylor's last despairing act to contemporary theories of respect for life, the question of whether human beings are specially valuable and to current issues in the philosophy of conservation.