Is genocide worse than anthropocide?

Here's an intuitive idea: It's bad to murder one person. It's even worse to murder two people. It's worse still to murder three people. And so on, until you arrive at the worst form of murder: genocide, which is the systematic killing of a group of people, usually based on religion and/or race.

If one genocide is bad, then two genocides is worse, and so on. But what if you committed genocide against all groups of people? That would be anthropocide, the killing of all humanity.

Clearly then, anthropocide is basically the single most evil thing that someone can do, short of throwing everyone in hell and torturing them forever.

(As an aside, I feel like torturing a single person for eternity is worse than anthropocide, because the former is an actual infinite of intrinsic badness while the latter is not.)

Anthropocide is clearly far worse than genocide. And yet, if someone did commit anthropocide and instantly and painlessly killed everyone by pressing The Button, no one would know. No one would know and no one would ever find out or care, assuming there is no afterlife.

In the case of genocide, however, many people go through the hellishness of that experience, and the survivors and families are traumatized. To a lesser extent, everyone who hears about what happened is haunted by the genocide too. 

Genocide purely adds to the problems of humanity, but anthropocide, technically, solves all of humanity's problems forever. So how is anthropocide worse than genocide?

Maybe this is just the old Epicurus argument against the badness of death in disguise. When death isn't here, there is no death to be feared. When death is here, there is no me to fear it. So whence the fear of death? Or put another way: When death isn't here, there is no death to harm us. When death is here, there is no us to be harmed. So whence the harm of death?

Alex Pruss suggests there are distributive goods and bads. [https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-epicurean-argument-on-death.html] 

These are goods and evils that cannot be located at a particular time, but nonetheless appear over a stretch of time or over one's life as a whole. I suggest that harms involve the loss of flourishing, while being impoverished is to have never flourished in the first place. The unborn are impoverished (assuming they would have lived a good life), but the unborn are not harmed by not being born. But it might sound strange to say impoverishment is not a harm. But it seems to me worse to lose something than to never have it in the first place (notwithstanding the common wisdom that "it's better to have loved and lost"). I suppose it depends on context: How painful is it to lose the thing in question versus how good was it to have it for a time?

In the case of one's life, it's not painful at all to lose your life because you have no conscious awareness of being dead. The badness of loss is realized when the loss is consciously experienced. 

If impoverishment is not a bad thing, then it's mysterious why God would create people. Presumably, God creates to maximize flourishing. But that implies that had God created nothing, the world would be a worse world compared to the one where God does create. You might say that God has options to create from a variety of perfect worlds. Perhaps one perfect world is one in which God creates nothing, and another is one in which God does create people. Maybe God, in his perfection, must create all perfect worlds, and so we live in a multiverse (Klaas Kraay's arguments to this effect come to mind).

Setting God aside, if impoverishment (i.e. a lack of flourishing) is not bad, then why would couples ever have kids? Presumably, couples have kids to maximize flourishing. This allows us to say that even though death or not-being-born are not experienced, they are still bad in the sense that their badness generates reasons for reasonable creatures to act according to those reasons.

I want to say badness must cash out eventually in terms of conscious experience, but maybe badness instead is anything that generates reasons in a fully rational person to avoid, disable, prevent, cure, or otherwise act against the badness in question. Bad conscious experiences certainly generate such reasons, but unconscious deprivation or impoverishment generates those reasons too. (Though this might leave it mysterious as to how unconscious bads generate those reasons. Even worse, it might just be circular: "I have a reason to avoid death." "Why?" "Because death is bad." "Why is death bad?" "Because it generates reasons to avoid it." It's perhaps then better to say something like: the difference between conscious flourishing and conscious not-flourishing is self-evident, and it's self-evidently the case that conscious flourishing is better. Deprivational evils are comparative evils, and comparative evils are as self-evidently bad as intrinsic evils.)

So if deprivation theory explains why death is bad, then deprivation theory explains why anthropocide is worse than genocide. Anthropocide, while not generating the reasons pertaining to intrinsic evils that genocide generates, still generates a vast amount more weight in the reasons from deprivation, or failing to maximize flourishing. So a fully rational person, cognizant of all the facts, would choose genocide over pressing The Button if forced to choose.

But is that true? Imagine you polled the world on whether we should collectively commit genocide against a group of people, say, Lithuanians. I'd imagine that 99.99% of people would vote no against genociding Lithuanians. But if you asked the world whether we should press The Button, I'd imagine that fewer people would vote no. I imagine that roughly 75 - 95% of people would vote no. Counter intuitively, we seem to acknowledge that there is something more pointless and gratuitous about genociding Lithuanians compared to killing everyone. Even nihilists who would press The Button uncoerced would not vote to genocide Lithuanians, I would think. 

There are existential reasons in favor of anthropocide that do not apply to genocide (at least, according to some forms of nihilistic thinking). In fact, it's exactly the existence of heinous evils like genocide that motivate the nihilistic reasoning behind wanting to press The Button. But even if there are unique existential reasons in favor of anthropocide that don't apply to genocide or murder, those reasons are surely overwhelmed by reasons pertaining to deprivation / comparative evils. Maybe deprivational reasons, being more abstract, are not as emotionally compelling as the visceral reasons against genocide, despite weighing far more.