  We are invited to consider a world in collapse where humanity is reduced to a single person who then proceeds to eliminate, to the best of their abilities, “every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs).” (1973, 16) With the demise of the last man (which we may suppose occurs immediately prior to the wholesale destruction unleashed), there are no humans—either others or the last man himself—who could be harmed by such an act and so, with clauses (1) and (2) satisfied, the act is permissible according to the “human chauvinist” Western ethical systems. (And even if “others” were extended to include non-human sentient creatures, still no harm, understood as suffering, would accrue given the act is done “painlessly”.) Yet, “what he does is wrong” and therewith we have a counterexample to such chauvinism and associated Western ethical systems, and a claimed need for a new ethic, “an environmental ethic”, capable of accounting for the wrongness of the last man’s act. (As in his logical work, Sylvan’s strategy is to try to isolate what is sufficient (in this case, for wrongness) by considering “distant” possible worlds.)