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Notes
See David Benatar [1].
As will be mentioned in note 13, there is strictly speaking a qualification: if one’s life contains no pains at all, then it’s not a harm to be brought into existence.
See Benatar, op. cit., ch. 2.
Awareness of this asymmetry goes back at least to Derek Parfit [9].
Not everyone accepts this asymmetry, though. See, for instance, Elizabeth Harman [7].
Benatar, op. cit., p. 34.
It is, after all, metaphysically possible to have many emotions toward all sorts of bizarre things. Moreover, this interpretation is supported by Benatar’s use of ‘regrettable’ in surrounding passages.
Benatar shifts between feeling ‘sad for’ and feeling ‘regret,’ so I assume he’s using the terms interchangeably.
Benatar recently has clarified this point explicitly. See David Benatar [2].
See David Benatar [1].
My way of elucidating this point is similar to recent comments from Benatar. See David Benatar [2].
See David Benatar [1].
It’s theoretically possible that one’s life contains no pains at all; in that case, non-existence and existence are equally preferable. The main point is that, given any even slight pain within one’s life, non-existence is preferable to existence. And this clearly covers all lives on this planet.
Preferable by whose lights? Feinberg invokes a “proxy chooser” for anyone who is too incompetent, due to disability, to express that it’s rationally preferable not to continue existing, where what’s rationally preferable is what’s required by reason. See Joel Feinberg, “Wrongful Life and the Counterfactual Element in Harming” in his ref. [6]. Presumably, for people who don’t yet exist, we would also want to invoke a sort of proxy chooser to determine whether the child’s life is worth starting. The proxy chooser simply represents the interests of the would-be child. Whatever that child’s interests, it’s rational — based on what’s good for that child — to prefer non-existence over existence, where what’s rational is required by reason. It’s unclear whether Benatar would endorse a proxy chooser model, but at least it’s amenable to his view.
By contrast, Feinberg thinks that one is rarely harmed by coming into existence. See Feinberg, op. cit., pp. 16–17.
The strength of this reason depends on how badly one’s life actually goes.
It’s worth noting that I’m arguing against only Benatar’s argument for anti-natalism via his Prudential Asymmetry. He also argues that we often overestimate the quality of our lives, which go much worse than we think. See David Benatar, op. cit., ch. 3. If all human lives go so badly that the bad outweighs the good, despite our thinking the contrary, anti-natalism would still be true even on my proposal. But I set this argument to the side for this paper.
This isn’t to deny Benatar’s plausible point that the threshold at which a life is worth starting is generally higher than the threshold at which life is worth continuing. See Benatar, op. cit., pp. 22–28.
See footnote 23 at Benatar, op. cit., p. 31. Also, my proposal, without the implicit “for X’s,” is equivalent to Benatar’s Fig. 2.2. See Benatar, op. cit., p. 39.
Even worse yet, this moral reason might be stronger than the moral reason for parents to promote their current children’s welfare or to do other moral good.
For simplicity, from this point onward I will drop the qualifier ‘in terms of the child’s interests’ or ‘grounded in the child’s interests.’ Throughout this paper, I will be interested only in that class of reasons. Of course, there might be other reasons — e.g., grounded in the interests of parents who would like a child — that could be relevant.
See Jonathan Dancy [4].
Alternatively, one could think that all genuine promises are entered into freely, so coerced “promises” aren’t really promises at all.
One could be a skeptic about disablers generally. I don’t think that this view is promising. The case for disablers is made even stronger by the fact that there is a strong parallel between disablers, in the moral case, and defeaters within epistemology. A defeater is a reason that defeats a reason to believe some proposition P. There are at least two sorts of defeaters: rebutting and undercutting defeaters. They each defeat reasons to believe some proposition P but by working in different ways. Rebutting defeaters provide reasons to believe that ~P, whereas undercutting defeaters undermine one’s reason to believe that P without also being a reason to believe that ~P. To use a simple example, suppose that someone’s testimony gives me a reason to believe that P. A rebutting defeater would provide independent reason for believing that ~P, and I would have to weigh that reason with my reason to believe that P to determine whether to believe that P. But an undercutting defeater would be, for instance, reason to doubt the reliability of that person’s testimony. Perhaps I learn of my testifier’s bias or some other impairment. Importantly, this reason would undercut my reason to believe that P — perhaps with the result that I no longer have any reason to believe that P — but without generating a reason to believe that ~P. See Michael Bergmann [3], ch. 6 for a nice overview on defeaters.
Of course, there are simplifying assumptions in abundance here. As noted earlier, the intensity of pleasures and pains is not all that matters — distribution matters, too. Likewise, we need not assume that the strength of moral reasons is the same as the intensity of the pleasure or pain. It needs only to be a function of the intensity of the pleasure or pain. We also need not assume that a pleasure with intensity of 90 completely outweighs a pain with intensity of −90; it might only partially outweigh that pain, depending on one’s views of how to balance pain and pleasure. As before, though, I think nothing crucial hinges on these simplifying assumptions.
See Jeff McMahan [8].
For a similar proposal, see David DeGrazia [5].
Fictional characters might seem to pose a special case, but I set those aside for now.
See Benatar, op. cit., pp. 34–35.
See McMahan, op. cit., p. 63.
It has become clear, in conversation and in written comments on this paper, that not everyone shares this intuition. Some people are prepared to say that it is fitting to feel relief, for the sake of a non-existent child who would have been miserable had she existed, that she doesn’t exist. And, more generally, they reject my proposed principle that it’s fitting to feel some emotion E, for the sake of X, only if X exists. However, if you reject my intuition about the fittingness of relief, it then becomes puzzling why you wouldn’t also reject Regret Asymmetry 1 and 2: it’s puzzling why it would be fitting to feel relief, for the sake of non-existent people, but not regret, for the sake of non-existent people. And if you reject both Regret Asymmetry 1 and 2, those cases provide support for neither my explanation nor Benatar’s.
See especially David Benatar [2].
References
Benatar, D. 2006. Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Benatar, D. 2013. Still Better Never to Have Been: A Reply to (More of) My Critics. Journal of Ethics 17: 121–151.
Bergmann, M. 2006. Justification without Awareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dancy, J. 2004. Ethics without Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
DeGrazia, D. 2010. Is it Wrong to Impose the Harms of Human Life? A Reply to Benatar. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 31: 317–331.
Feinberg, J. 1994. Freedom and Fulfillment: Philosophical Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Harman, E. 2004. Can we Harm and Benefit in Creating? Philosophical Perspectives 18(1): 89–113.
McMahan, J. 2009. Asymmetries in the morality of causing people to exist. In Harming Future Persons: Ethics, Genetics, and the Nonidentity Problem, ed. M. Roberts and D. Wasserman. New York: Springer.
Parfit, D. 1986. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Don Hubin, and anonymous referees for helpful comments while working on this paper. Thanks also to participants in Don Hubin’s graduate seminar on reproductive ethics at The Ohio State University in winter 2010 and to David Benatar for a productive and interesting meeting with the seminar.
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McLean, B. What’s So Good About Non-Existence?. J Value Inquiry 49, 81–94 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9455-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9455-8