Abstract
This paper will directly tackle the question of Benatar’s asymmetry at the heart of his book Better Never to have Been and provide a critique based on some of the logical consequences that result from the proposition that every potential life can only be understood in terms of the pain that person would experience if she or he was born. The decision only to evaluate future pain avoided and not pleasure denied for potential people means that we should view each birth as an unmitigated tragedy. The result is that someone who seeks to maximize utility could easily justify immense suffering for current people in order to prevent the births of potential people. This paper offers an alternative framework for evaluating the creation of people that addresses Benatar’s asymmetry without overvaluing the potential suffering of potential people.
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Notes
Doyal and Baum focus their criticisms on Benatar’s use of the Rawlsian veil of ignorance and maximin. Although both pieces are well argued, they miss the central point of Benatar’s argument. Rawlsian justice and maximin merit only a few pages in Better Never to Have Been; Benatar explains how his thesis operates in numerous other ethical frameworks including deontology and utilitarianism. Belshaw raises a number of objections to Benatar’s argument without acknowledging that they have been addressed extensively in the book. Belshaw’s central argument is that Benatar’s philosophy runs counter to the way most people think about birth, something Benatar readily acknowledges.
The numerous responses on the web ranging from popular media to blog posts offer even more superficial analysis.
Smilansky provides an exception to these reviews and offers a much more thought out critique of Benatar’s starting premises, but unfortunately is not able to develop his position given the page constraints of a book review.
(Smilansky 2008)
Benatar does not use a set category to define what constitutes good and bad other then to suggest that pain is bad and pleasure is good. Benatar makes it clear that no matter what specifically constitutes “good” and “bad” most people would admit that both exist for every person alive, which is enough for him to make his claims.
Benatar rejects the strong person-affecting view, which argues that since one cannot compare the state of nonexistence to existence one cannot harm a child through its creation. He cites Feinberg to suggest that harm can occur even if it does not make a person worse off (Benatar 2006, p. 20–22).
Benatar provides several non procreative examples of his asymmetry, including the idea that the absence of life on Mars does cause most people to regret all the wasted potential for pleasure on the desolate planet (Benatar 2006, p. 35 note 28).
Benatar also claims that his asymmetry is able to solve major problems in population theory like Derik Parfit’s “repugnant conclusion” (Benatar 2006, pp. 168–172). The repugnant conclusion is the argument that maximizing utility in regards to population could result in a huge population of individuals that have lives barely worth living. Even though each person is barely happier than having not being brought into existence, the total net happiness would be greater than a smaller population of individuals leading happy lives. Benatar’s asymmetry undermines this argument, because future pain would be accounted for when one makes a decision to bring a new child into existence.
Although potentially acceptable from a utilitarian standpoint Benatar believes that a child is always harmed by coming into existence.
It should be noted that the argument does not require infinity to be effective. If one examines only the harms of life and not the benefits, as Benatar asks, then it would require no more then preventing several future generations to outweigh even grievous suffering today.
At first this argument may appear to be even more radical and disturbing than Benatar’s initial claims. If one views life only in terms of its bad qualities, however, then it is easy to view death as simply another pain that could have been avoided by not being created, rather then an unpleasant but necessary component of a normal desirable life.
This ethical objection may be able to be forestalled if those implementing involuntary extinction only killed individuals seeking to have children. Any deontological prohibition on murder should logically apply to giving birth, because given Benatar’s argument any given birth is likely to be worse than any given death (this will be detailed in the section “Birth vs. Death.”) Society treats murder in self-defense as acceptable; it could be argued that murders in self-defense of potential people were also justified. Defending this connection goes beyond the scope of this paper, but hopefully points at the far reaching consequences of Bentar’s logic.
If one views death as an intrinsic harm then the scales tip even more decidedly against the parents, because they will die inevitably, whereas if the child is never born it will not die.
Benatar hints at the possibility of such an asymmetry early in his work, but does not develop the idea (Benatar 2006, pp. 36–37)
This admittedly begs the questions of who determines the overall utility of a potential child’s life and how they do so. The method of evaluation remains a weak point in all applications of utilitarian philosophy, but the two-part test still offers a useful guide on the ethics of child creation. The difficulty of utilitarian evaluation, while substantial, still proves less problematic than many other methods assessing the ethics of procreation, which fail to account for the pain or pleasure of a potential person. At the very least, most individuals will agree on cases of obvious harm and benefit, which provides a useful though imperfect tool.
References
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Acknowledgements
I have many individuals to thank for offering helping suggestions and corrections to my paper. First, I owe a debt of gratitude to my anonymous reviewers whose comments guided me to create a much clearer argument. James Stacey Taylor, Seth Gannon, Tim O’Donnell, and Bill Glod all offered useful criticisms that I incorporated into my paper. Finally, I would like to thank Brita Dooghan whose extensive editing and insightful comments made this work possible.
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Packer, J. Better Never to Have Been?: The Unseen Implications. Philosophia 39, 225–235 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9267-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9267-4