Misanthropy – the moral condemnation of humankind – is very topical these days. There are many inspirations for a sense of the collective awfulness of humankind, from the failures to act on the global environmental crisis to the rise of far-right ideologies to the avoidable mass suffering of billions of humans and animals. But philosophers rarely talk about misanthropy as a doctrine. When they do, it is usually narrowly defined as a hatred of human beings or coupled to extreme proposals. In this conversation, Ian James Kidd offers an overview of philosophical misanthropy, including his own definition (“the systematic condemnation of the moral character of humankind as it has come to be”), addresses some common misconceptions, considers the shortcomings of Rutger Bregman's “Homo puppy” brand of optimism, and clarifies how – and why – one may wish to be a misanthrope.

IAN JAMES KIDD is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He is interested in intellectual virtue and vice, the nature of a religious life, illness and mortality, misanthropy, and South and East Asian philosophies.

ANTHONY MORGAN has run out of new things to say about himself by this point.

Anthony Morgan (AM): Let's start with a simple question: why misanthropy?

Ian James Kidd (IJK): Misanthropy might not be an easy topic to get into, because the subject is of course intrinsically negative. I define misanthropy as the systematic condemnation of the moral character of humankind as it has come to be. For a misanthrope, humankind as it has come to be is morally atrocious. For all sorts of philosophical and psychological reasons, that's not an attractive thesis for many people. I’m not temperamentally misanthropic myself. My engagement with the subject was through the work of my former Durham colleague, David Cooper. In 2018 he wrote a short book, Animals and Misanthropy, arguing that honest reflection on the exploitation and abuse of animals by humankind justifies a charge of misanthropy. Most people are familiar with misanthropy as a general concept or idea, but it has never been one that philosophers have really taken seriously. Moral philosophers might describe themselves as realists or sentimentalists or contractarians or utilitarians, but rarely as misanthropes.