I challenge you to both recognize and defend the unargued assumption that suffering is necessarily connected to life’s badness. Without this assumption, no argument from the empirical evidence of unacknowledged suffering can possibly succeed in establishing your conclusion.

For example, childbirth is routinely described as one of the most meaningful experiences of a person’s life. (by the way, “Meaningful” here refers to the property that an experience has that makes it contribute to the value of a life. The absence of this word from your essay speaks volumes about its confused and unargued assumptions).

If childbirth can be both intensely painful and subjectively meaningful, it follows that suffering is not necessarily connected to the badness of a life. It follows from this that the “evidence” you cite says nothing about life’s value.

Indeed, that human beings constantly seek difficult challenges, that we rejoice in overcoming difficult obstacles, that we would not plug into an experience machine shows that we are generally not pure hedonists about the good lfie.

Simply arguing that this common set of judgments is “mistaken” because it does not make the hedonistic pleasure=value equation that you do begs the question. You need to defend this equation, and the fact that you felt no need to in this essay is extraordinary. It is the (questionable) philosophical assumption that underpins the entire position.

N. Smyth,

I wager that every claim of meaningfulness derived from child-birth is made well after the actual fact of child-birth. It is evolutionarily beneficial to our genes that we tend to forget how hellish certain experiences are while they occur. Our genes don’t give a hoot if our life is good or bad, they just seek to reproduce.

Mr. Smyth, I’m not altogether certain that you can completely tar Prof. Benatar with the brush of the so-called “hedonistic ‘pleasure = value’ equation.” If I take this article at its meaning, it’s not merely that human lives are simply devoid of the quantities of mere pleasure that would make them more worth living; I also take it that most human lives are devoid of real meaning, period. Consider how so few people really contribute anything in the way of a lasting legacy, a benefit to others that keeps on giving decades, centuries after they’ve passed on. On the contrary, most people accomplish nothing, and by the reckoning of others who perhaps have not known or befriended them, may as well have never lived at all, for they have made such waste of their lives! Note how most of us–too many of us–grind through a cyclic process of self-sustenance, eating, sleeping, waking, going to work, contributing nothing at work that will affect people’s lives in any meaningful way for any duration of time. The cycle continues unabated, through generations.

This piece is quite similar to one written by the philosopher Richard Taylor: “The Meaning of Life,” from Taylor’s “Good and Evil: A New Direction” (N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2000). That essay is, if anything, even more sobering than Benatar’s.

This is an interesting post, and was entertaining to read. But defending such a stance is very difficult, first of all, because of the problem of the alternative: we do not know what could have been. It is impossible for humans to make claims regarding how good/bad a life (or life) is because we cannot compare it to what could have been, and we cannot rely on things that we do not know to argue something as tangible as life-production. What happens when we do attempt at arguing so is that we are left to rely on personal opinion (no matter how reinforced by scientific data) or general statistics (which are not yet proven credible, and even if they are, using it for argument may be tantamount to making hasty generalizations). Second, the discussion of life here has been very centered on the individual, not taking into account Life in general, and what an individual life can or cannot contribute to that. Social contribution should be as much of a factor as (if not more than) hunger, thirst, or physical pain, especially in the discussion of life-production. Lastly, at best, this article has only argued that Life sucks, but has not discussed if we even have 1) the capability to predict the outcome of a certain life or 2) the responsibility to make the choice whether or not this life deserves to be given a chance. Thanks for the great read.

“Chronic pain is common, whereas there is no such thing as chronic pleasure” is pretty daft. There are numerous things that provide sustained pleasure for hours, days and months. If I counted up all the hours I’ve spent lost in a good book, or laughing with friends, or simply working at something interesting and difficult, hours wondering around looking at things. Today, I have a hacking cough, which is at least an hour in all the minutes bent over trying to claw out my throat in pain. I also spent two hours reading a favourite novel, and curled up around a cat and a child and drifted in and out of sleep. A day with pain, but full of numerous small chronic pleasures.

Pain easily overpowers pleasure, but pleasure can last and create far more pleasure. The idea that the only things that give pleasure are food and sex is incredibly limited and well, daft. This seems to suggest that physical and emotional pain exist, but counters it with only physical pleasure. What about emotional pleasure?

No such thing as chronic pleasure? Have you never been in love?

I live with chronic pain every day of my life, sometimes to the point where I can scarcely function. Lots of other people are in similar situations. Why _don’t_ we just kill ourselves? Is the only possible conclusion that we are deluded? (Most people I know in situations like this tend to be cynical about life, not cheerfully optimistic.) Or could it be that there are, in fact, pleasures that make the pain worthwhile?

“[W]hat an astoundingly blinkered argument this is.”

We forget our little pleasures just as easily as our pains, if not more so. Draw a lovely deep breath or stretch your arms. You breathe and move many times a day and fail to even notice. Maybe pain or discomfort — an asthma attack, a limb asleep — would cause you to value the vast majority of the time when everything works beautifully.

We could measure the balance of pain and pleasure by comparing how much of each we get in a day, or a week, or a year. The year scale might be hard to recall, but I am certain that for me, in any given day, the pleasures of good sleep, wholesome food, freedom of thought and motion, clear air, beloved others, and the stimulation of the wide world outweigh the headaches, hunger, stress, and too-tight pants about 40-to-one.

Over a long life for a person of average health and wealth, it is likely similar: forty good, strong, coherent years per declining, ill, painful or senile year.

Your conclusion is ridiculous: that we (or our children) shouldn’t live because in theory life could be better. Work to make it better.

The discussion of our vale of tears concerns only the individual, not others. But the decision NOT to commit suicide is then “balanced” with the pain of others ? This analytic swerve leads to a suspicious conclusion. Given the author’s premises, I say, off with (your own) head !

A. Oliver: why does the fact that a claim is made after the fact invalidate it? What an absurd suggestion. If I see a pen fall off the desk, then later say, “the pen fell off the desk”, why does the fact that I am referencing the past invalidate my judgment?

Gordon Brown: nowhere in the article does Benetar make the argument you are suggesting. In fact, he could not, because he would then have to admit that *some* lives are in fact worth living (for some people do achieve extraordinary things). Read the title: “no life is good”.

If I recieved Benetar’s essay from a third-year student I would give it a C- and tell them that they can’t get away with assuming the truth of hedonism. Hedonism is roundly rejected in ethical philosophy. If you’re going to rely in ot as a central premise, you had better defend it.

Please forgive my ignorance in this matter, but the author never defined what was “good” or “bad” , he simpl stated thing where one or the other. To say a life is not good one must first define what good is and that is an issue for another series of essays. Professor Benetar lists hunger as a bad thing, or at the very least something to be avoid, however if we did avoid it we would not eat and subsequently perish, I’d argue hunger is good from the stand point of survival (which is what good or bad, maybe neither). Pain is Bad? Pain makes me remove my hand from a hot stove decreasing more pain and physical damage, perhaps that’s a good thing.
How is over estimating the quality of your life, or that of others an arguement for life is not good, who cares what I think about my life, good or bad, my opinion about my own life has got to be the most subjective measure there could be and is useless as an arguement for judging “life” in general. I can’t tell if the professor is trying to make a rationale arguement based on subjective measures, I thought rationale arguements were based on factual (air quotes) or atleast semi-provable theories? Life is not good based on there being more bad with out saying whose bad this is, how the bad is measured,or why it even matters if it is bad, this is not professor level arguement, this barely qualifies as drunken bar room musings.
If I were to argue we should not have more kids I’d have gone with the “there’s too many dang people already” arguement over life is not good. Atleast there are objective measures for that one.

It’s absolutely terrific to see an open-access article by Professor Benatar online. I think readers of popular media outside of South Africa will greatly benefit from being exposed to his work.

Nick Smyth-

Even if we can have meaningful experiences that involve suffering, suffering is a bad feature of those experiences, like the article states. Let’s not forget that the presence of suffering in a life often causes people to consider such a life more meaningful (as a coping mechanism)! The way a person perceives even such a simple occurrence as a pen falling off a desk can be influenced by seemingly irrelevant factors like the structure of the language she or he speaks. Judgments about abstract things like “goodness”, “badness”, “value”, etc., are even more vulnerable to cognitive biases.

I don’t think the experience machine is terribly relevant to this particular discussion, but Felipe de Brigard’s research indicates that the main thing the thought experiment shows is that people are prone to the status quo bias.

Lastly, if a third-year student managed to miss all but one theory of well-being discussed by the philosopher he or she was critiquing, mischaracterized the philosopher’s position as relying only on that one theory as a central premise, and consistently referred to the philosopher by the wrong name, what grade would be appropriate, in your opinion?

RAFAEL LUNA-

We can be pretty confident that if you didn’t exist, your life would not be bad. As for life in general, it does not have values or experiences, nor does it care what an individual can contribute to it. Social contribution is valuable based on how it benefits individuals, not some esoteric Life with the capital L. Finally, as discussed in the article, we have the (obvious) capability to predict the outcome of every life, which is death preceded by a generous amount of pain, frustrated preferences and a deficit of what some people consider to be objective goods. Does non-existing life care about “being given a chance”?
If so, I suppose that millions of people depositing used condoms into garbage cans are being terribly insensitive to its needs.

Whether our lives are good or not depends entirely on the standard you judge the life by. Which standard is the proper standard to use, though, is not an objective fact. Not that the essay doesn’t take this into account, it looks at different standards to show that life is not good according to a range of definitions for good. This, however, was a finite number of standards, and surely we could find standards according to which human life would be good.

For example, if we say that what makes a life worth living is the opportunity to overcome obstacles, well the human experience is chock full of that. If we say that what makes life worth living is the opportunity to be creative, then life is clearly good at least for all those with the free time and inclination to be creative. Hell, if we simply declare conscious existence itself the standard for a good life, then life is good.

Likewise, if we say that lives are only good if they have a deep capacity for pleasure and plenty of opportunity to satisfy that capacity, then (depending, I suppose, on how you define “deep”) you rightfully say that life is not good. These judgments are all relative to the standard used.

Ultimately, however, there isn’t a correct standard for measuring a good existence against a bad one. All judgments on this matter are made according to standards that can be rejected. The vast majority of people, though, consider their lives worth living, and without a standard that can be said to be the true standard, it is impossible to prove that they are in error. While there will always be suicides, the vast majority of people that are born will come to prefer life to non-life, and as such, it is a safe wager that any children brought into the world will be grateful that they were able to experience life.

So, I have to say that the conclusion that we should stop reproducing (in other words, a species-wide suicide without bothering with knives and poison), is not well-founded.

[...] Ninguna vida es buena https://philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1902  por cadaverexquisito hace 2 segundos [...]

Things have changed since I studied philosophy 20 years ago. Had I written an essay so full of assertion and assumption and so lacking justification for those assertions and assumptions it would have been returned with a smile and a “come back when you’ve finished” comment.

The notion that good is a descriptor that can be applied to a life the same way it can be applied to a knife is the same basic category Aristotle makes (yet Benatar lacks Aristotle’s - and later students of emotion and affect like Nussbaum - insight into the nature of human happiness.

For all that, I enjoyed the sideswipe at secular theodicy, which felt wholly well-targeted.

Further quibbles: 1. I am not quite sure by what mechanism Benatar justifies cessation of procreation but not cessation of one’s own life. It feels as though he is using a fairly quantitative approach, yet his rejection of suicide seems more of a tabloid-ish 2ooh, I wouldn’t go that far” - precisely *why* wouldn’t he?

2. Why be so dismissive of self-reporting when saying we are too optimistic about our lives and then resort to lines like “no one would choose” to show how bad things really are - the latter seems as self-reported as the former?

3. “Anybody who doubts this should consider what choice they would make if they were offered the option of securing an hour of the most sublime pleasures possible in exchange for suffering an hour of the worst pain possible.”

- Anyone who writes this can’t have read Faust. Or perhaps studied philosophy because they flunked English Lit

GTW: There is clearly a need for an objective metric of the goodness of life. To deny this is to say that what people say is true, which is wrong on many levels (what they say is not necessarily what they think, what they think is clouded by cognitive biases, …). The fact that the goodness of life is subjective does not mean we have to take people’s hand-waving into account. Better standards have been proposed. So if you think any of the standards Benatar uses should be rejected, propose a better standard and argue why it is better. Don’t just dismiss them because they “can be rejected”, because the default standard of gut feel has been rejected many times over, in this very article no less.

Tim Cooijmans: The fact that there is a need for an objective metric (whether or not there actually is such a need) does not mean that one actually exists. It may simply mean that we need something that is not there. Nor does rejecting objective metrics imply that what people say is true, it simply states that truth does not apply here.

Until there is some factual basis for any particular standard, it is perfectly appropriate to simply wave them off as none of them are any more factually valid than any other. This leaves us in a position where we must choose our own standards. Meaning that Benatar’s conclusions are only persuasive if you already subscribe to his standards, even if all of his verifiable claims are true.

It would be impossible for me to propose a better standard and argue for its superiority. To do so would require a standard of standards, which simply moves the problem back a level. All the need in the world won’t pull an objective metric out of thin air.

Nihilismus uber alles. The notion that existence can be reduced to a formula: bad>good = life is bad! is absurd. This whole approach is mistaken. First, pleasure is not a motivation for living; it is an epiphenomenon of living, i.e., arises as an affect, as a feeling of mastery over life, whereas pain, is the feeling of failing to measure up to life’s challenges. Second, if pleasure and pain are understood ONLY as sensations, then the observation that we have more toothaches than orgasms, is empty of philosophical meaning. Third, reason is the slave of the passions (Hume), whereas for Benatar, reason reigns supreme, seemingly divorced from the passions that have given rise to it. So what is Benatar’s passion? The passion for philosophy, i.e., for talking about life as if he can stand above it and judge it from an “objective,” i.e., empirical, “solid ground.” But there is no such place, so Benatar is delusional, enamored with his illusory power to judge life, which gives him much ego pleasure, and solidifies his certainty, which is the measure of truth. The opposite would mean having to acknowledge there is no ground for making such “free” observations, which would be painful indeed.

CM: If you reduce Benetar’s arguments to their logical components, you see that his central inference is from empirical evidence of suffering and the pervasive misjudgment of suffering to the badness of all human life. This is already a bad argument (what about the few very rich people who live in affluence, slendour and happiness?) but if you honestly cannot see that the argument requires some form of hedonism to go through then I don’t know what to say: this is like trying to point out a chair to someone who refuses to see that the chair is there. The inference requires hedonism, at least a form of hedonism that says that suffering is necessarily bad.

Hedonism is the issue, here. Robert Nozick’s experience machine thought-experiment was designed precisely to test our intuitions about hedonism (do you NEED the Wikipedia or SEP link on that?). The idea that the experience machine scenario is “not particularly relevant” to hedonism is just about as false as philosophical ideas can get.

Benetar (don’t care how his name is spelled) needs to defend some form of hedonism. If you think that the silly dismissals of other forms of value amount to a defense of hedonism you are, again, wrong. A defense of hedonism would require not a dismissal of one or two rival theories, but a positive argument designed to show that all other genuine values are reducible to the value of pleasure (or, at the very least, the value of not suffering). I continue to await this argument, but I’m not holding my breath, because it would be staggeringly difficult to make such an argument.

@Nick Smyth:

Do You think that childbirth would be less meaningful (less good?) if it were not as painful? I’m not sure how relevant this question is, but it seems to me that You are implying this, so I’d like to check back.

@John Shaer:
‘If I were to argue we should not have more kids I’d have gone with the “there’s too many dang people already” arguement over life is not good.’

I think the point of philosophy is not to have a belief (e.g. “we should not have kids”) and then find the most effective way to argue for this position. That’s politics Rather it is to argue whatever seems to be the truth until we reach a reasonable certainty to base our beliefs on. Of course the first can be a used as a tool for the latter

@GTW:
“While there will always be suicides, the vast majority of people that are born will come to prefer life to non-life, and as such, it is a safe wager that any children brought into the world will be grateful that they were able to experience life.”

But those hypothetical children, that are not born, have no valid claim to life. They are not wronged by not existing and they are not missing out precisely because they do not exist and cannot have such feelings. On the other hand, those who reject their live, even if they are a small minority, _are_ wronged by having been born. They live only because their parents wanted to have a child. The child did not have any say in the matter, yet it suffers the consequences.

All the best,
rob

Oh, sorry for the smilies, the break the text-flow… also please pardon my english.

Rob: While you can say that those children who grow into suicides are wronged by having existence forced upon them, you can also say that those children who come to appreciate their lives have been benefited by having existence gifted to them. If significantly more children come to appreciation than rejection, then it’s a safe bet that bringing about life will lead to bringing about an person that would prefer being alive than one that would prefer never having existed. So, I find it quite difficult to see how you could blame parents for bringing a life into the world if that life is more likely to prefer its life than prefer its nonexistence.

You could argue that, in fact, more people resent their lives than appreciate them. I suppose we could try to find some statistics on this matter. I think you could also make an argument that it might be morally wrong to bring about children if you are in a situation that is likely to produce a resentful child (assuming that it is the goal of these parents to not increase human resentment), but that would only provide an argument against some reproduction, not all of it.

BOBBY: I’m sure nihilism is nice as a philosophical facade. But I bet you do not use it to make your everyday decisions. Instead, you avoid pain and suffering every step of the way, as if these were somehow valuable, every once in a while crashing into your easy chair to take a deep sigh and head on-line to tell the world how great nihilism is. Yet you don’t apply it.

Despite your alleged nihilism, you value things. What’s funny is that you value the same things every other sentient being does. You value sensations. Some of them you like, others you don’t.

Wouldn’t it be nice to invent an objective value system based on these things that all sentient beings have in common? Not only would it be nice, it is necessary. We should agree on some common value system, lest we fall back on our nature, which has been shown over and over again to be crap.

(Note that I said that this objective value system should be “invented”; it is not objective in the sense that it will fall out of the sky, it is objective in that it applies for all subjects.)

GTW: A popularity poll won’t do. What people say about how they assess their lives is notoriously unreliable. Even if we find some reliable way of measuring the value of a life to the person experiencing the life, there is still the asymmetry that, when considering the future welfare of a potential person, the suffering that their birth would entail is bad, whereas the pleasure that their birth would bring is unnecessary. I am not doing this argument justice here; Benatar establishes it in his book “Better Never to Have Been”, which is a rather rigorous work, unlike the casual article he wrote here.

Tim Cooijmans: I have to ask you to defend your assertion that “what people say about how they assess their lives is notoriously unreliable.” Actually, I would say that what you just said does not even make sense, as lives can only be assessed subjectively and cannot, therefore, be unreliable because that would require an objective assessment that self-assessment fails to match up with. You could, I suppose, hook a machine up to their brains and measure how often they objectively felt pleasure against how often they are objectively felt pain, but this would only prove them unreliable if the person was also trying to assess their life using a pleasure/pain standard, which I doubt that they would use.

The fact that their pleasure is unnecessary does not change matters at all. No one is claiming that human life, human pleasure, or human satisfaction is in some way necessary. We do not bring about future generations because it is necessary to bring about future generations, we do it because we wish to propagate the species.

We need not worry that we have done the next generation some harm by bringing them into existence, as they are more likely to prefer existence anyway. While it is true that the next generation exists only because this generation wanted them to, we would only need to be concerned that we had harmed them if it was likely that they would wish they had never been brought into existence. That does not seem to be the case.

First of all to Nick Smyth: very well articulated critique. I was equally amazed at the brazen attempt to identify the good life with hedonism (which is exactly what a pleasure-pain calculus amounts to).

Secondly, this line in Benatar’s post is problematic:

“…there is excellent empirical evidence for the conclusion that people’s judgments cannot be trusted as a reliable indicator of how good their lives really are.”

This move suggests that one’s self-reports about one’s own experiences wield less epistemic authority than “external” measures. If individuals are reliably reporting that they feel optimistic about their own lives, and that their lives are therefore well worth living, then that’s simply the end of the matter.

On what possible grounds could anyone tell me with a straight face that I’m wrong about my experience of enjoying my life?

This is an amusing essay.

The thought experiment in support of the imbalance between pleasure and pain (that most people will forfeit an hour of the greatest pleasure in order to avoid an hour of the worst pain) is poorly conceived though.

If one were to accept this offer then, during the hour of pain, one would be able to seek some comfort in the expectation of the pleasure which awaits. Therefore the pain could not be the worst pain possible (in that an hour of pain without such comfort would be worse).

Similarly, if one were to take the pleasure hour first, one’s enjoyment would be tempered by the fear of the pain which would follow. Therefore the pleasure could not be the greatest pleasure possible.

This may seem a fairly trivial quibble but the thought experiment requires an equivalence between the level of pain and the level of pleasure: the only way this can be made is to use the terms “worst pain possible” and “most sublime pleasures possible”.

And why are we only concerning ourselves with humans? If no life is good aren’t we obliged to drive every species to extinction or are non-human animals somehow managing to avoid all this pain and suffering?

My only disagreement here is with the final conclusion. There is a failure to consider a different option - to improve lives considerably. While having a youthful life of hundreds of years may not be possible at this moment, there seems to be no fundamental reason for it’s impossibility. The problems, while insanely hard are just now understood, and work is done to address them.

TIM: Thanks for the opportunity to clarify. Philosophy’s relevance for modern society approaches nil. But if philosophy comes out against life, its value to humanity is negative. That’s one meaning of nihilism. Now, life precedes thought much as an amoeba precedes humanity. When thought turns against life, it may serve the “thinker,” (i.e. making a living by publishing) but no longer serves the pursuit of wisdom. I take wisdom to be the awareness of the limits (telos) of knowledge. And while it may be interesting to invent an “objective value system,” if this were even possible (see Sam Harris) it sounds more like a job for psychologists and economists than philosophers, whose sole concern, in my humble opinion, should be explicating the structure of knowledge.

@GTW:
I agree that those children, who come to lead happy lives (in whatever way that is defined) do benefit from coming into existence. I would also agree that they are probably a (big) majority. But the important point seems to me: they are not entitled to be benefited that way. There is no requirement to bestow this benefit on not-yet-existing people. Otherwise there would be a duty to create as many of these happy people as possible - while that might be the view of parts of the catholic church it doesn’t seem that many people feel that way and act like it.
But on the other hand, I believe there is a duty to not cause suffering in others. And the suffering of one person is, for this person at least, not offset by the happy lives of ten other people.
So, even IF you are likely to “win” in the happy-children-lottery, i.e. the chances that your child will lead a happy live are high, it would not be permissible to play, because you would wager the wellbeing of an innocent person.

@Jon Kingham:
Usually human-antinatalism, or the arguments regarding suffering, apply also to all animals which are capable of suffering. But it does not necessarily include something like “drive to extinction”. It certainly does not for humans, the difference being that each human could for himself choose to not reproduce, something which other animals cannot.

Rob: I agree that the nonexistent are not entitled to be brought into existence or to have happiness bestowed upon them. Why then do you act as though the nonexistent are entitled to not be made to suffer? This too is a moral responsibility to something that does not exist yet.

Hypothetical happy people and hypothetical suicides are both nonexistent; if you say we have no moral responsibility to one on that basis, then we have no moral responsibility to either.

Our reason for bringing new children into the world is not that we must bring them in, we do it because we want to. This is perfectly acceptable, there is nothing inherently immoral about doing what you want so long as you don’t violate a moral responsibility in the process, and I think we’re agreed that there are no moral responsibilities to the nonexistent.

I suggest you to do to one of two things: either get some psychiatric help to come out of your nihilistic depression and see how beautiful life is or to dive into meditation to understand that both pain and pleasure are part of life and unavoidable. Through this practice you will be able to learn to observe both from a distance and will find peace in both.

But I sincerely hope you don’t teach this kind of stuff at a university, and if you do, I pity your students.

Cheers Rob, my use of the term “drive to extinction” was more of a rhetorical device. It should follow though that if no life is good and we therefore have a duty to avoid creating life then we have a concommitant duty to castrate those species who cannot choose not to reproduce, thereby resulting in their eventual extinction.

Benatar isn’t offering a choice to procreate or not- that already exists: he’s advocating a position whereby no new lives should be created because no life is good.

Fine, so we need to apply that to animals as they’re not in a position to choose, just as were this position to become a global policy (such as exists on a national level in China) state apparatus would be deployed to force dissenters not to reproduce.

Can Benatar really hold that all life should be allowed to die out for the sake of “the good”?!

@GTW:
You said:
“Why then do you act as though the nonexistent are entitled to not be made to suffer? This too is a moral responsibility to something that does not exist yet.”

I think that is something different, because, in a way, the judgment of my actions today can be changed by the future
Let me explain what I mean by that: I cannot be responsible for people who do not exist IF they WILL NEVER exist. But if they WILL exist at some time in the future, and their future existence and wellbeing will be affected by my actions of today, then I do have a duty to consider what my actions mean for the not-yet-existing person.

A common example of this is when we say we have a duty towards our children to provide them with a live-sustaining ecosystem, i.e. a duty to not totally ruin “nature”. It would be a moral problem, if we knowingly left them only a poisonous desert. I think that holds true even for our childrens children.

A more contrived/drastic example: I have a moral obligation to NOT bury a big timebomb on a construction site where a kindergarden is being build, even if I plan to set the timer so far in the future that only kids will be injured or killed who, presently, do not yet exist. (Just to be sure: it is the same if the timer goes off in the far future, where nobody who lives today is still alive, so _only_ people are affected, who do not exist while I plant the bomb).
In a way that is really not such a special case, because the consequences of my actions always happen after the action itself.

So I think there is a duty to not cause suffering for future people.

Of course, as with all duties, it is not absolute. There could be circumstances or reasons that would allow or even demand that I act against this duty, perhaps because it stands in opposition to other duties which are more important.

On a more general note, I also believe that the duty to cause happiness is usually weaker than the duty to not cause suffering. For example the obligation for you to give me money, if I need it, is weaker, than the obligation for you to not rob me of the money that I rightfully own. In a similar vein “causing happy people to exist” seems weaker thant “not causing unhappy people to exist”.

You said:
“Our reason for bringing new children into the world is not that we must bring them in, we do it because we want to.”

Probably right, for the majority. I guess there are also a few people who feel that they are indeed obliged to do it, maybe for reasons that are religious, or racist.
And surely there are also many people who genuinely believe (or would believe, if they took the time to think about it in the first place) that they are doing the child a favor, i.e. who believe that it is a good thing to create people in order to make them happy. The reverse question, if it would then also be bad to not create these people, probably never occurs to them.

“This is perfectly acceptable, there is nothing inherently immoral about doing what you want so long as you don’t violate a moral responsibility in the process,…”

agreed

“… and I think we’re agreed that there are no moral responsibilities to the nonexistent.”

Not agreed, as I now tried to clarify.
This asymmetry is also one of the main points Benatar makes in his book.
I think it is very plausible - which does not guarantee that I managed to make a convincing case for it myself

All the best,
rob

@Jon Kingham:
Hey Jon! As for Benatar, I believe he would not consider it acceptable to _force_ people to not procreate. Neither do I.

That is also a case of conflicting duties. It is difficult to discuss, so reader discretion is advised: yes, in a very theoretical sense there exists a duty to prevent people from procreation. How could that be achieved? If you kill somebody, you have managed to do it very effectively, of course. Therefore, if you killed _everybody_, you would certainly have prevented all the suffering of all the people that would otherwise have been born in the future. It goes without saying that the amount of suffering thus avoided is on a scale far beyond our imagination.

But, back in the real world, there is of course also a duty to not go around killing other people! This duty, in my (and, well, everybodies?) opinion, is much stronger than the duty to prevent the birth of new humans. So even antinatalists don’t run amok to implement that, which they nevertheless believe to be better. It’s just that if there are no acceptable ways to achieve this goal, to stop procreation, then, well, it just can’t be achieved and that’s it. Acceptable ways are, for instance, discussions like this one. I think nobody is delusional enough to believe that there is a realistic chance of causing voluntary human extinction. That doesn’t mean one should not strive to achieve it anyway. But neither does it mean that “involuntary means” are acceptable.

By the way, one last point which I think is important, though often overlooked: antinatalism is, at least for intelligent people, not a dogma. It is a conclusion at which one can arrive after thinking about the subject. That does not rule out errors. It could be that we are mistaken, and that further thinking and talking would reveal these errors. Then we would stop being antinatalists.
In his book Benatar states that he even hopes that this will happen. Antinatalism is not a pleasant worldview to have. It is not by choice that people think that way. Rather, given the available evidence, we just can’t help it.

All the best,
rob

[...] Philosophy Magazine carries David Benatar’s summation of the thesis of his antinatalist book Better Never To Have Been, prompting an interesting comment [...]

[...] https://philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1902 [...]

This is one of the cases where rationality proves its own inutility in matters of meaning.

Rob: Alright, I see what you are saying. One does not have a moral responsibility to bring children into the world, as there are not moral responsibilities to the nonexistent, and they would remain nonexistent in that case. However, since a child who is brought into the world would subsequently exist, we would begin having moral responsibilities toward them. Fair enough, and I can agree with that, since, as I’ve said, I don’t believe we have a moral responsibility to bring children into the world anyway, we do it because we want to.

However, your logic that the fraction of people who will reject life (not those who are unhappy, because there’s no contradiction between saying “I am unhappy” and “I prefer living,” but specifically those who will wish that they had never existed) is just bizarre to me, so I want to make sure that I really understand it before I respond.

If I understand your argument, it is this.

-We have no moral responsibilities to those who do not exist
-We do have a moral responsibility to not hurt those who do exist
-When reproducing, there is a chance that the child will come to hate life (which would count as hurting those who exist)
-Therefore, we fulfill all moral responsibilities and violate none if we simply stop reproducing.

Now, for myself, I find all this talk of moral imperatives to be divorced from reality. I don’t find morality apart from the context of a goal to be very meaningful (for example, you say that the responsibility to not cause harm is greater than the responsibility to cause happiness. In what way can we verify or measure this to see if you are correct?) But I want to make sure that I understand what you’re arguing before I try to respond.

“I have never been happier than I was when my father revealed that we depressed my mother and suffocated her.”

Full at: http://is.gd/vL6k3j

GTW, thanks for checking back.
(In general, I am delighted at the tone and quality of the comments here. Often this topic is accompanied by more ranting and insulting.)

Could it be that Your second paragraph is missing something? I can’t really grasp it.

As to Your understanding of what I meant, yes, You are correct and the four points sum it up nicely.

I honestly don’t know how morality can be checked or verified. It’s more that individual positions could be falsified, if they have internal contradictions or if strong enough counterexamples can be found. It is not seldom that someone claims to hold moral view X, but when confronted and forced to think really hard about it he sees that he does in fact not. But if someone genuinely holds completely different believes it is possible for him to have a consistend view that cannot be aligned with that of others. It makes not much sense then to say that he is “wrong”, when it is basically a question of values.

But since I not only think that causing suffering is bad, but also that most people agree with that, it makes sense for me to start there and try to see what conclusions follow from there.

All the best,
rob

Rob: I’m glad. Even though I am in complete disagreement with you and Benatar, I’m interested in the ideas being discussed, so I like keeping the tone civil.

The second paragraph is just a lead in to my attempt to frame your argument, it doesn’t really contain information.

For morality being checked and verified, I don’t mean proving that it’s wrong to cause suffering, what I mean is comparing two competing moral imperatives, in this case, whether it is more important to avoid causing suffering or to cause happiness. I was beginning to think that you were talking about moral imperatives in an almost categorical sense, existing apart from our goals and values, but now I see that that is not the case.

We are in complete agreement that one person cannot be “wrong,” when we are simply talking about differing values. And, in fact, that is why I asked, to ensure that we are both agreed that the claim “causing suffering is wrong” is rooted in value, not in fact. I am also willing to agree with you that causing suffering is bad.

Now, we are also in agreement that we have no moral responsibilities to those who do not exist. Strictly as a matter of value, however, we (well, not all of us, but many) value the existence of future generations and we value the existence of content people. We also value not inflicting suffering on others. Does this mean that we have reduced the disagreement to a question of how important it is to avoid inflicting suffering on others?

If this is the case, then couldn’t one justify reproducing simply by saying that they hold the preservation of the species as more valuable than the happiness of the species? Or (since I think a lot of people would take issue with that) by saying that they consider the collective happiness and experience of content in higher regard than the collective misery of those who would rather not have existed?

GTW:

“Does this mean that we have reduced the disagreement to a question of how important it is to avoid inflicting suffering on others?”

Yes, mostly so, but to be more precise: how important it is compared to other things that we also value.

“If this is the case, then couldn’t one justify reproducing simply by saying that they hold the preservation of the species as more valuable than the happiness of the species?”

Yes, I think one could say so. Disagreeing with that valuation though, I would then try to find out why the person sees it that way and how much unhappiness he would be willing to accept as “collateral damage” to the continued existence of mankind (I assume that there is, for everybody, at least a theoretical amount of unhappiness that would no longer be justified). Next thing would be to determine if the actual “unhappines-level” is above or below that threshold, which is where this article could come into play.

The question doesn’t come up with regard to humans very often, but it has practical relevance for animals. There we have the question wether it is right and/or important to preserve a species if that is only possible in a zoo where the individual animals are leading unhappy lives, not fitting their nature.
For example, how does the polar-bear-species as a whole benefit from its existence? I believe caged bear couldn’t care less whether or not there are other bears in remote zoos that he will never meet or know about.

For me personally the existence of a species, including homo sapiens, holds no value. Only the happines of the individual specimen that do (and will) exist has value. That is mostly because I find the concept of something having a value in and for itself strange. Things are only valuable _for_ someone. If everybody would happily agree to not reproduce and we would go extinct, then who would miss us?

Your last sentence takes a bit of a different direction, by referring to a “collective happiness” as having value. For me that makes no sense if it means that the existence of happy people has a value in itself. It does make sense if it is meant as “I like to see lots of happy people around me, the more the merrier” or something like that. But that I would consider selfish and not a good argument for a moral question.
It also provokes other questions:
if “the existence of happy people” is valuable, does that mean that more happy people are better then fewer? How many more? Why don’t we create as many as we can? How happy does one have to be to increase this collective happiness? Or how unhappy, to reduce it? Would global happiness be increased if we “removed” the unhappy people?
I reckon that the view, that the collective happiness has a value in itself, would be full of contradictions and unanswerable questions. Which usually means that people do not really hold that value, they just make it up because nothing better comes to mind. (A winking smily might be needed here.)

Another point for “causing harm is worse than not causing good” is this: we put people in jail, who steal from others. But we don’t punish people who refuse to give to charity or to individual beggars on the street. (Let’s ignore people who refuse to pay taxes because they don’t want to finance a wellfare-state or stuff like that).
That makes me think that we, as society, have somewhat of a consensus regarding this asymmetry. It also matches my gut feeling and I have not heard a convincing argument against it.
Nevertheless I think there _is_ also a duty to cause happiness. (It is just the weaker of the two.) That’s why I support campaigns like “The Life You Can Save”. Incidently, Peter Singer is also very controversial, probably more so than Benatar because his writing has more practical applications. He too disagrees with Benatar, but he has written an interesting article about the topic in the NYT: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/

No undue sidetracking intended, I don’t want to turn this into a Singer-discussion, of course. It’s just another nice example of how one can disagree yet still discuss things in a professional way.

All the best,
rob

Rob: Indeed, I don’t believe in the “collective happiness” being a reason to preserve the species. I did make it up simply for the sake of fleshing out another reason one may wish to preserve the species. What is meant by it, if anything, would be sum of all the pleasures felt by humanity. To value a “collective happiness” over a “collective suffering” would mean taking all the pleasures that humanity experiences and all the collective pains that humanity experiences and saying that one is worth enduring the other. It is not the people themselves that are being counted, it is the experiences. Even then, it is not a mathematical equation (i.e. it’s not a matter of assigning each pleasure and pain a number and then checking to see which number is greater), it is simply saying that one values the total “good” experiences enough to allow the total “bad” to exist.

But, again, it is just an example, and it is certainly not my reason, just one reason that one might have. I think that it is coherent, but admittedly, I haven’t spent much time probing it for contradictions.

I, too, do not say that the existence of the human species has a value intrinsic to itself, rather the human species values the human species. It is in the presence of humanity that humanity is valuable. On an individual level, a person can merely say “I value my conscious existence, despite the pain of my life,” and on a larger level a person can say “I value that my species continues to exist, despite its struggles.” Or, it could be the sake of something else, “I value that someone be capable of appreciating the beauty of the universe, and therefore I want humanity to exist so that appreciation of the universe’s beauty will exist.” Not that humanity has a value apart from that; if we were all to wake up tomorrow suicidal, then humanity’s existence would have no value (barring human loving aliens).

For myself, I do not consider the question of happiness against unhappiness to be the most important one (defining the two as something akin to pleasure and pain or satisfaction and frustration). Rather, I think that the question that is important is Will-to-Life vs. Will-to-Death. If you could show me that any children I was likely to have would come to wish that they had never existed (not momentarily, mind you, since it’s not uncommon to feel that way for short periods of time, but rather to become dedicated wishers that they did not exist), I would not reproduce. If you could show me that this would be a global condition, then I would be an anti-natalist. For me, one’s desire to continue living or not is more important than the happiness one might or might not feel.

“Another point for “causing harm is worse than not causing good” is this: we put people in jail, who steal from others. But we don’t punish people who refuse to give to charity or to individual beggars on the street. ”

But don’t we do that less because “causing harm is worse than not causing good” and more because of where our responsibilities lie? I have a responsibility to all members of society to not rob them, largely because not robbing them simply means not going out of my way to hurt them. I only have a responsibility to cause good to a small number of people because I am capable of far less good. I would be thrown in jail if I failed to feed my child because society has decided that I am especially responsible for him. And, while there would be no legal repercussions, I could suffer a stigma for failing to provide for a sick parent or an impoverished sibling.

This is a practical matter. It is not difficult for a man to go his whole life without robbing anyone, but it would be very difficult for him to go his whole life providing for everyone, so society only expects a person to take care of a certain number of people. I do not think that this indicates a consensus that avoiding harm is greater than bringing about happiness, I think that it is a consensus that it is easier to avoid harm than it is to bring about happiness.

My own argument is this.
Assuming these three things (which I do not necessarily believe, but will assume for the sake of argument)
-Human life is more painful than pleasurable
-Human life is more injurious than beneficial
-Human life is more frustrating than satisfying
We still must contend with the fact that most people desire to live out their lives. To support this point, simply count the number of suicides against the number of non-suicides. If this is the case, then in spite of the three assumptions, the human experience is still desirable, at least for the vast majority of those who experience it.

How then can we say that it is a harm to create new life? If these three assumptions are true, and humanity still finds life desirable, then it would seem that all we have done is found three standards that humanity doesn’t really use to judge the goodness of their lives. You could argue that this is simply because people don’t really grasp these three facts, and have therefore deluded themselves into thinking they desire their lives where they otherwise would not. But, if it so easy for us to overlook the truth of these three statements (which are all statements about our experience), then clearly pain, injuriousness, and frustration are not a very big concern for us when reflecting on our lives, and clearly something that we can overlook so easily cannot be what makes life bad.

If human life is held to be desirable by so many who experience it, how can we say that it is a harm, except by using standards that almost no one seriously uses.

It seems to me, then, that so long as life is held to be desirable, we are doing no harm in creating more of it, even if claims about life’s painfulness, injuriousness, and frustration are true.

Ok, this will be a rather long post. Everybody who has more important things to do may stop reading

“To value a “collective happiness” over a “collective suffering” would mean taking all the pleasures that humanity experiences and all the collective pains that humanity experiences and saying that one is worth enduring the other.”

It may well be coherent to think so, but even then I doubt that the people who say that are really appreciating the kind of suffering that goes on in the world. Another way to phrase it, much more drastic and to the point than this article, is presented here by Zralytylen and Sister Y:
http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2010/12/worth-it.html
It is in light of such things as the holocaust that people regularily abuse phrases like “we must do everything to ensure that this can never happen again”, while at the same time happily creating more potential victims (and perpetrators!) of whatever terrible fate You can think of.

I just tried some of the interesting “quiz-games” here at TPM, and I would like to present one myself: imagine You are at a magical carnival with Your little daughter and You come upon an equally magical wheel of fortune. The operator, who You know for some reason to always tell the truth, offers You a try on the wheel. The wheel as 12 equally sized fields, 9 of which are labeled WIN the other 3 are labeled LOSE. The winner, he explains, will win a glorious future, with good health, a happy family, and vast riches. Optionally, if one so desires, he will throw in fame, for good measure. The loser however will remain subject to his normal chances, maybe he will do well too, maybe not. But one thing will be sure: at some point in the future an evil man will appear and rape the loser. There will be no escape from this fate. Last thing You are told is that You cannot play for Yourself - but You can only play for You little daughter.
The question now is: will You play? Would You, if the chances were better? Or even if they were worse, like 50:50? I guess not. I wouldn’t either. Even the question, if it were for real, would seem as an insult to me.

The trick here is that, in a way, everybody who has a daughter already chose “play” in an even worse lottery, because according to some official statistics a quarter of all women (in the US) is a victim of rape during her lifetime. Of course statistics will vary over time and country, and their reliability may be doubted in any case, but the exact number is not the point here. The point is that everybody can determine for themselves what is worth what. But it is a very different pair of shoes to force a risk, and even bad stuff that is 100% certain (like, for example, dying!), on another person.

“if we were all to wake up tomorrow suicidal, then humanity’s existence would have no value (barring human loving aliens).”

Hehe. Well, there are human loving animals and also animals that currently depend on us for feeding them. It wouldn’t be fair to them if we all just offed ourselves. Especially to those that we have bred and domesticated in ways that make them unable to care for themselves.

“Rather, I think that the question that is important is Will-to-Life vs. Will-to-Death. If you could show me that any children I was likely to have would come to wish that they had never existed (not momentarily, mind you, since it’s not uncommon to feel that way for short periods of time, but rather to become dedicated wishers that they did not exist), I would not reproduce.”

I concede that this cannot be shown, for we don’t know enough about the future. (A good place for a quote from Emil Cioran, who reportedly said: “My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.”)

But if we assume that we CAN look into the future then it would be a very sensible thing to abstain from creating such a person. (And the people who disagree here and say that the child can always kill himself later, if he doesn’t want to live, deserve to be slapped for their insensitive stupidity (and while I don’t think that You would say someting like that, such people really do exist), Ending ones life is a very tough choice, that is not at all comparable to never-having-existed.)

But we cannot see into the future. Anyway, I admit that only a small minority of children will ever come to feel like that (but we also have strong cultural biases against it, so maybe the thoughts do not form, while the feeling really is there - but that is speculation). But some certainly do, and for me even a modest risk of my child wishing for it’s nonexistence is too much. I think I would go insane with guilt and I have no idea how I could justify before my child what I have done it (btw., do you say “it” when referring to a child of unspecified gender?). It is not even a question of pessimism or being risk-averse (although I guess I am), but of playing russian roulette with the gun pointed to another persons head instead of ones own (I think I got that metaphor from Benatar).

“If you could show me that this would be a global condition, then I would be an anti-natalist.”

I’d say that if this were a global condition we would already have died out. It’s probably not something that is favored by evolution. A will to procreate, on the other hand, is probably the most important factor for which evolution will select, by any strange mental bias necessary.

“For me, one’s desire to continue living or not is more important than the happiness one might or might not feel.”

But not continuing life and never having lived is not the same. There are very basic desires, or instincts, that keep people going who, rationally and/or emotionally, do not wish to continue living. This is sometimes seen in people who attempt suicide by means like suffocation. They fail because they are overwhelmed by a panic that triggers defense mechanisms beyond their control. I believe that our brain has numerous ways to prevent us from killing ourselves, not all of which I would count as valid desires to live. But this again is not a real argument, but rather unfounded speculation on my part.

It is an interesting point to base the distinction on the desire to live, rather than happiness. The former can also include the hope for future happiness, when one is currently not happy. On the other hand, though that might be less common, it is possible to be happy while not having a desire to continue life (for example like Maude in “Harold and Maude”).
But does it also mean that You would accept a persons wish to end their own life? That would, while more painful for everyone involved, be kind of like fixing the mistake that the parents made, when they assumed their child to desire life. It is also very uncommon in our societies to tolerate such a wish, in a similar way that it is uncommon to acknowledge that the existence of a person can be a “mistake” that needs fixing.

“But don’t we do that less because “causing harm is worse than not causing good” and more because of where our responsibilities lie?”

Ok, that could be true. It probably cannot be strictly differentiated from each other, though. What can be said, I think, is that responsibility varies not only by “how well can someone manage to do s.th.” but also, and possible even more, by “how much is he to blame for the problem in the first place”. If I cause an accident because I drive too fast I have a stronger duty to provide help to the injured person than has someone who is just an uninvolved witness. For the same reason our greatest duty is for the wellbeing of our own children. Every kind of suffering that they endure is, in part, our fault.

“I do not think that this indicates a consensus that avoiding harm is greater than bringing about happiness, I think that it is a consensus that it is easier to avoid harm than it is to bring about happiness.”

I think it still does (because even poor robbers are sent to jail while rich scrooges are not), but I agree that both points are relevant.

“To support this point, simply count the number of suicides against the number of non-suicides. If this is the case, then in spite of the three assumptions, the human experience is still desirable, at least for the vast majority of those who experience it.”

It could also be because suicide is even more horrible than life, while initial non-existence would be best.

“How then can we say that it is a harm to create new life?”

I’d rather say it is an unacceptable risk, because that seems sufficient to not create new life while being easier to defend.
To be honest I found the “life is bad”-point to be one of the weaker ones in Benatars book. Precisely because, as You say, most people consider their lives to be good, there is no absolute standard of judging quality of life, and because even a biased or mistaken happiness might be seen as happiness in the relevant sense.

“You could argue that this is simply because people don’t really grasp these three facts, and have therefore deluded themselves into thinking they desire their lives where they otherwise would not.”

Indeed I think that they do not have a clear grasp on the reality of suffering in the world, but it is hard to claim that they would think different if they… well, thought different, because obviously they don’t (and won’t).

“But, if it so easy for us to overlook the truth of these three statements (which are all statements about our experience), then clearly pain, injuriousness, and frustration are not a very big concern for us when reflecting on our lives, and clearly something that we can overlook so easily cannot be what makes life bad.”

Yes, that is, in itself, a good point. But is the question we need to ask really “is life bad?”? It is too hard to come up with a useful meaning for “bad”. Perhaps we should ask “is existence worse than non-existence?”. And that is, I believe, surprisingly easy to answer: yes it is worse. Which is, as I understand it, Benatars main point. It is worse because by coming into existence we become subject to varying degrees of suffering (but always at least a little bit of suffering, among a possibly otherwise happy life). By not coming into existence, on the other hand, we are not missing out on any of the good stuff, because without existence there is no “we” that could experience any lack of happiness. We don’t need the happiness while we don’t exist, therefore it doesn’t really count as “good” or valuable if we are created to receive it. But that we are spared the suffering is a good thing, even when there is nobody for whom it is good. That is because otherwise it would be bad, and “not bad” is good.

I don’t know how well I put that, probably not very (that’s why I don’t write books about it).

“If human life is held to be desirable by so many who experience it, how can we say that it is a harm, except by using standards that almost no one seriously uses.”

Perhaps the survey is skewed because we can’t include those who don’t exist. If, for example, right after WW2 we could have asked all of the practically infinite number of non-existing but hypothetically possible children of jewish parents if they would have preferred to be born, and experience the holocaust, I am sure the answer would have been “no, thanks” in many cases. Well, as sure as one can ever be about the wishes of non-existing people, that is!

All the best,
rob

Rob: I shortened up all the quotes to make this comment a little shorter. I took the first and the last sentence of the section I’m responding to. Hopefully that will make it easier to read, at least for whatever spectators might still be interested. I imagine, though, that there aren’t many people who want to read comments longer than the original article.

“It may well be coherent to think so but even then I doubt that the people who say that are really appreciating the kind of suffering that goes on in the world [...] But it is a very different pair of shoes to force a risk, and even bad stuff that is 100% certain (like, for example, dying!), on another person.”

+

“I concede that this cannot be shown, for we don’t know enough about the future. […] but of playing russian roulette with the gun pointed to another persons head instead of ones own.”

I imagine that most people would see preventing things like the holocaust from happening by simply not reproducing to be missing the point. Sort of like a painter who devotes himself to ensuring that none of his paintings are ever defaced, leading to him never creating any paintings. Yes, he has ensured that none of his paintings would be defaced, but in the process he makes it impossible to attain his (presumed) more primary goal, which is having paintings to display.

I think that what you said at the end of this first section is the most interesting part, though: that it is one thing to take risks for oneself and another to take risks for another, one thing to make judgments for yourself and another to make judgments for another. You repeat this idea when you use the metaphor of Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at someone else’s head at the end of the second section.

In this case, I think that the quality of life is irrelevant. Even a life of perpetual bliss is a life that the child didn’t choose, but was chosen for it. In almost every case where a person is capable of making their own decisions, making a decision for them would be seen as a violation of their right to make their own choices. However, in instances when a person cannot make a decision for themselves (such as a coma), it is considered appropriate to make decisions for them, so long as those decisions are made with the intent to benefit the incapacitated party. It seems, though, that this is because of inevitability, a person in a coma has to have people making decisions for him as he already exists.

So, then, the question becomes whether or not it is acceptable to make a decision for someone that they cannot possibly make, and which is also unnecessary to make.

In the case of the man in the coma, suppose I want to invest a sizable portion of his money into a company that I had good reason to believe would prosper, thereby doubling on his investment, but potentially costing him his money if the company fails. This is an unnecessary risk, I could easily just not bother myself with the investment. Is it acceptable to take this risk, regardless of the ultimate results?

I think the important question to ask in determining whether or not it is acceptable, is what the comatose man would have done were he able to make the decision. If he does not believe in investing, then I should not invest his money, period. Excluding that, surely he would have invested if there was a 95% chance of return, therefore it is acceptable to invest if I have good reason to believe that there is a 95% chance of return. Perhaps he’s risk-averse whereas I am adventurous. Maybe he would not invest unless there was an 80% chance of return, whereas I would invest all the way down to 60%. It would then be wrong for me to take the risk if it was less likely than 80%, even if I think it is wise to go down to 60%. The important thing is that I not make any decisions that would be contrary to his will.

He would probably be unhappy with me if I neglected to make the investment, having cost him the opportunity to double his money. I am certainly not obligated to invest (perhaps financial decisions just make me queasy), but he would prefer that I did make the investment if the risks were to his liking.

Just one more example before I make my point: it would almost certainly be wrong to play Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at someone else’s head, even if they stood to make a great deal of money from it (ignoring, for the moment, the responsibility to not kill someone and focusing only on the matter of risk). However, it seems that an exception could be made here for a man who regularly plays Russian Roulette, but is not in a position to decide for himself at the moment. I certainly do not have to play, but it seems at though taking the risk would not be immoral, since I would merely being doing what the incapacitated man would do if he could. I am deciding for him in accordance with his will.

And now, for my point: there are situations where it is acceptable to take risks with other people’s lives, and the rule for doing so morally seems to be that we take these risks only when they cannot themselves make the decision, and that we act only in the way that we believe that they would act if they could.

No hypothetical child can bring itself into existence. This decision must be made by the already existing, even if that decision is that no more children are to be brought into the world. We have no duty to bring a child into existence, just as one does not have to make the investment or play Russian Roulette, but if we desire to bring a child into existence, the question we must ask in order to remain moral is “what would the child decide if it could decide.” Probability can be taken into account, but not the actual results of the life since we can and need only take into account the information that the hypothetical child would have if that child could be consulted.

We cannot take any particular features of the child into account (if the child turns out to be very melancholy, for example, we can’t factor that into our thought experiment, unless we have good reason to believe the child will be melancholy), but just the general values that a human being is likely to have. Since the human animal is generally willing to prefer existence despite a great deal of mundane suffering, and a certain degree of extraordinary suffering, in all instances where that is the most probable life, it would be acceptable to have a child. If one is in a position where one’s child is likely to experience an excess of suffering, mundane or extraordinary (excess here being defined as “suffering to such an extent that the child would prefer to have never been born”), then in those instances, it would be wrong to reproduce because the child would probably choose never to have been born if the decision were up to them.

“But not continuing life and never having lived is not the same. […] On the other hand, though that might be less common, it is possible to be happy while not having a desire to continue life.”

That’s true, not continuing life and never having lived are two different things (although the final condition of the two is the same), but seeing that most people wish to continue their lives does support the idea that life is generally held as desirable. I’m not going to belabor this point, though, since you say that you found the “life is bad” point to be a weak one, anyway, so it would be unnecessary to try to argue against life’s badness.

In the case of happy people who no longer wish to continue life, if we had good reason to believe that most of the world would fall into this category, I would be an anti-natalist. Not cases like Maude, really, because her death was based on her belief that 80 was the right time to die. She was still grateful for her 80 years, she simply did not want to extend them. But, if we had a crystal ball that told us the next generation would lead lives full of pleasure and with a minimum of suffering, but would prefer not to have ever existed, that would be cause enough for me to not reproduce. But if the crystal ball told me that the next generation would lead lives full of misery, but would be grateful that they were alive, then that would be cause for me to support propagating the species. My decision would value their will more than their happiness.

“But does it also mean that You would accept a persons wish to end their own life?”

Yes. I’ve long maintained that if a person no longer wishes to live, the most sensible thing is for them to end their own life. I don’t generally apply this to short term miseries (such as suicidal feelings following a divorce or following the death of a child or the loss of a career), but in the event of a consistent desire to no longer be alive, I support taking one’s own life. I have no doubt that I am in the minority on this issue.

“Ok, that could be true. [...] For the same reason our greatest duty is for the wellbeing of our own children.”

I think that you have here expressed what I was trying to express, but far better than I did. You are correct that the more pertinent question is “how much is he to blame for the problem in the first place,” although I would rephrase that as “how involved is he in the first place,” to account for situations where there is no blame, merely responsibility. In the instance of causing a car accident, I have instantly become very involved in the situation and I am to blame. In the instance of, say, a brother who is down-on-his-luck, I am not to blame, but I would still be expected to offer assistance because I am involved in his well-being by virtue of being his immediate family.

“I’d rather say it is an unacceptable risk, because that seems sufficient to not create new life while being easier to defend.”

Yes, that would be a fair way of stating it. For my response, see the long argument above, where I tried to make the case for what constitutes taking an acceptable risk for another person.

“Yes, that is, in itself, a good point. [...] That is because otherwise it would be bad, and “not bad” is good.”

I must disagree that “not bad” is good. Not bad is not bad, it is an absence. If we were to assign “bad” and “good” numerical values, “not bad” might just be zero (all things that are good are also “not bad,” but it is possible to be “not bad” without being good, which in a numerical sense, would just be zero). If I can continue with the numbers metaphor, an anti-natalist world would be a 0 in terms of good and bad (as you said, it is too difficult to actually define good and bad. Here, I hope, we can get by with a fuzzy notion of bad as having something to do with suffering and frustration, and good as having something to do with pleasure and fulfillment. This is not how I would usually define them, but I do so here for convenience), pure neutrality, at least as it regards humans.

With that in mind, I’m afraid I remain unconvinced that existence is worse than non-existence. Non-existence is simply neutrality: no good, no bad, no happiness, no pain. Existence inevitably contains pain (which we can count as a negative in the numbers metaphor), but also happiness. While it is true that the non-existent do not miss happiness, we still have to take happiness into account to say whether or not the existence is a harm. Only if existence turns out to have a net value of less than zero could we say that existence is worse than non-existence.

Which brings us right back to the initial question of “is life bad,” or, is existence a less than zero. Every experience can only be meaningfully evaluated from the point of view of the one who experiences it. There’s no objective metric for us to calculate all of the pleasures and all of the pains to see whether or not they are above or below zero, we would have to ask the ones experiencing them to add their own values. You can imagine the strange values we might find: for some a pepperoni pizza would balance out three punches to the face, some romantic would probably say that watching a sunrise balances our dysentery, a miserable man might say that boredom alone is bad enough to make existence a <0.

GTW:
“Hopefully that will make it easier to read, at least for whatever spectators might still be interested. I imagine, though, that there aren’t many people who want to read comments longer than the original article.”

No, probably not. Perhaps we should write a book ourselves! But seriously, although I would like it if what I write was valuable for somebody, I mostly write [here] to provoke interesting answers that _I_ can then read.

“I imagine that most people would see preventing things like the holocaust from happening by simply not reproducing to be missing the point.”

Surely. I like You painter-analogy. Yes, it is somewhat like that. The question, with regard to procreation, would be: what is the primary goal, and why? And then, what risks (and for whom) are acceptable to pursue that goal. I guess one thing that irks many antanatalists is that so many people do not even know what their goal is nor have they thought about the different sides of the problem. Not that they have different values or considerations. But anyway, that is more a personal flaw (of those anti-natalists, me included), and does not really help the philosophical questions.
The only goal (I can think of) that is focused on the potential child could be described as “creating someone in order for him to be able to experience happiness”. (I try to exclude all possible selfish goals, because I consider them to obviously invalid.) But I cannot agree with this goal, because I don’t consider creating subjects of happiness, where there were none, to be valuable. I also cannot understand how others can see that as valuable while not feeling a duty to create as many happy new people as possible.
In Benatar’s book there is the example of the person who gets artificially implanted with the deep desire to see red trees, and then the trees get painted red, and the desire is satisfied. This is meant to say that people are not really helped if we ourselves create the need for help in the first place.

“So, then, the question becomes whether or not it is acceptable to make a decision for someone that they cannot possibly make, and which is also unnecessary to make.
[...]
And now, for my point: there are situations where it is acceptable to take risks with other people’s lives, and the rule for doing so morally seems to be that we take these risks only when they cannot themselves make the decision, and that we act only in the way that we believe that they would act if they could.”

That sounds sensible. But when can it be said that we are right to believe that we know what they would want? It is difficult in the case of the comatose man, but at least, if I know him, and he has told me about his wishes earlier, I have a chance to believe that I can be reasonably sure. For hypothetical people I only know the rough situation that they will be born into, which might give us some hints (but then again it probably won’t, because there are lots of studies showing that individual happiness is not very dependent on predictable circumstances, like for example wealth). Wich leaves us with statistics. Here, where I live, in 2009 about 1.12% of all people choose to die by their own hand. But that doesn’t say us a lot. Many of them probably enjoyed significant parts of their life before they decided to end it. On the other hand there are some who wish to die but, for any number of reasons, don’t commit suicide anyway.

“Probability can be taken into account, but not the actual results of the life since we can and need only take into account the information that the hypothetical child would have if that child could be consulted.”

It might be nitpicking, but I would say that we at least need to take into account every information that _we_ have. Otherwise it would be ok to defraud the comatose man if we know he would invest because he’s not as good informed about our investment-trap as we ourselves are.
But, more to the point, maybe the hypothetical child would choose not to live? By living he would gain nothing that is of value to him, because he has no wishes or desires that need fulfillment through life. Of course one could say that he also does not wish to avoid pain and suffering. I’m afraid I can’t really explain why I consider that to be something different. Even someone who has no needs would be harmed if his tranquil state was disturbed by additional pain.

“Since the human animal is generally willing to prefer existence despite a great deal of mundane suffering, and a certain degree of extraordinary suffering, in all instances where that is the most probable life, it would be acceptable to have a child.”

Does “most probable” mean something like “at least 51%”? Or more like “99%”? At any rate, we would be creating, with probability X, a life of unnecessary good, and with probability 1-X a life of unnecessary bad. I still think that the suffering of the second group may not be risked to facilitate the happiness of the first.

“Not cases like Maude, really, because her death was based on her belief that 80 was the right time to die. She was still grateful for her 80 years, she simply did not want to extend them.”

That seems most likely, yes.

“But if the crystal ball told me that the next generation would lead lives full of misery, but would be grateful that they were alive, then that would be cause for me to support propagating the species. My decision would value their will more than their happiness.”

Mine would not, but the reasons I could give could have strange implications, which need more thought.

“[...] but in the event of a consistent desire to no longer be alive, I support taking one’s own life. I have no doubt that I am in the minority on this issue.”

Which is too bad, really. I think to be allowed self-determination in this question is one of the most fundamental requirements for real freedom and human dignity.
But that is not to say that there are no exceptions. There can be cases where I would see a moral duty to stay alive. For example when one has voluntarily taken responsibility for somebody else. Like ones own small children.

“I think that you have here expressed what I was trying to express, but far better than I did.”

Thank You.

“In the instance of, say, a brother who is down-on-his-luck, I am not to blame, but I would still be expected to offer assistance because I am involved in his well-being by virtue of being his immediate family.”

Although I feel the same I am not sure if there are good reasons why that should be the case. I did not choose my brother, so why should he be more entitled to my help than anybody else who needs it? For practical reasons, of course, since families would not “work” very well otherwise. And for selfish-gene- reasons, which are not (moral) reasons but merely explanations. But apart from that?

“I must disagree that “not bad” is good. Not bad is not bad, it is an absence. If we were to assign “bad” and “good” numerical values, “not bad” might just be zero (all things that are good are also “not bad,” but it is possible to be “not bad” without being good, which in a numerical sense, would just be zero).”

Syntactically that is certainly correct. But it’s not quite what I meant. By “not bad” I did not want to describe “absence of badness” in itself, but rather the difference between “bad” and “not bad”/”nothing”. Here I think that “bad” is really “worse”, and “not bad”/”nothing” is “better”, therefore it is a good thing, to be in the second state, and not the first. Or, with numbers: 0 is better than -1, but +1 is only better than 0 if somebody cares for the +1. In the cases of +1 and -1 the person exists, at state 0 he doesn’t. Existing at state -1 would be worse than 0, not existing, but 0 would _not_ be worse than +1.
I guess my expressive power is approaching it’s limits here.

“You can imagine the strange values we might find: for some a pepperoni pizza would balance out three punches to the face”

Hehe, very colorful example. Applying my POV I would argue that this is only because he likes pepperoni pizza. But everybody would dislike being punched in the face, or rather, being punched in the face is in itself a harm for everybody, no matter if he has a special animosity towards getting punched (or not, because he doesn’t exist).

All the best,
rob

PS: if I have repeated myself there is no need to reply to those specific points again. Maybe in some areas we can only agree to disagree, because I’m not sure I have many more arguments.

Rob:
“Surely. I like You painter-analogy. [...]This is meant to say that people are not really helped if we ourselves create the need for help in the first place.”
Admittedly, I think the only reasons anyone reproduces for are selfish, at least selfish with respect to the child itself. I have tried only to show that it is not a harm to bring the child into existence, not necessarily that it is valuable to do so as that could lead, like you suggest, to a situation where one is compelled to create as many people as possible. It seems clear that we don’t reproduce for the child’s sake, we reproduce for the sake of the already existent.
There are a number of primary goals people might have. The truest reason for most people is simply the enrichment of their own life, but if pressed to give a larger, more overarching goal, I imagine it would be simply the perpetuation of the species. In that case, one need only reproduce enough that humanity has a robust existence, not necessarily to create as many people as possible.
“That sounds sensible. [...] On the other hand there are some who wish to die but, for any number of reasons, don’t commit suicide anyway.”
I suppose we would have to start with a flattened out conception of human nature, modified only by traits we have good reason for believing they will inherit. From there, we would have to analyze the situation it would be born into.
Statistics may be helpful here, but the most relevant statistic (from my point of view) would be difficult to obtain. The most important question for me would be “do you prefer existence to nonexistence?” since, as you pointed out, one may prefer to have never existed but be unwilling to take one’s own life. As for how we would obtain this data, well, I leave that to people who are in the business of collecting data.
I would say that the hypothetical person would prefer existence to nonexistence in nearly every instance that does not involve inordinately extraordinary suffering (just some examples: a life of forced prostitution, a life a slavery, a life of severe unyielding famine, a life of torture). This, however, is rooted in my personal view of human nature and human value. In order to say this with any kind of authority, I would need data from psychologists or perhaps neuroscientists. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that the relevant questions are how much suffering the average person can endure before preferring his nonexistence, and what is the likelihood that the hypothetical child will endure that level of suffering. Neuroscience and psychology can try to account for the first question, statisticians can try to account for the second.
“It might be nitpicking, but I would say that we at least need to take into account every information that _we_ have. [...] Even someone who has no needs would be harmed if his tranquil state was disturbed by additional pain.”
I meant only to say that we need not take future events into account if we would have no way of knowing them. Yes, I suppose we should take all the information that we have into account, in the case of some kind of special information.
Most human beings value conscious experience itself, even in spite of the pain it entails, up to a certain point. I imagine that our hypothetical child would hold that value as well. I think, though, that this is an area where we must agree to disagree. I would expect any hypothetical child to be eager to experience life, barring extraordinary suffering, but I don’t think you share that expectation.
“Does “most probable” mean something like “at least 51%”? Or more like “99%”? At any rate, we would be creating, with probability X, a life of unnecessary good, and with probability 1-X a life of unnecessary bad. I still think that the suffering of the second group may not be risked to facilitate the happiness of the first.”
I think this is another point where we must simply agree to disagree. For me, the unnecessary bad is worth bringing about so long as people continue to prefer their own existence. This is a value judgment, though, and so I think this is a point at which we can go no further.
“Although I feel the same I am not sure if there are good reasons why that should be the case. [...] But apart from that?”
I think that it is because the world is full of people who need help, and it would be impossible for any one person to help them all. Blood relations and friendships allow us to prioritize who is first in line to receive our help. It would, by necessity, have to be a little arbitrary, as it is basically just organizing society into groups that have special responsibilities toward each other. This is a particularly effective organization since we are more emotionally motivated to help those close to us.
“Syntactically that is certainly correct. [...] Existing at state -1 would be worse than 0, not existing, but 0 would _not_ be worse than +1.”

This too, is a place where I think we will simply have to agree to hold different views, as I consider 0 to be worse than +1, and I consider +1 to be better than 0. But, then, I suppose that’s the very essence of our disagreement, that I consider existence better than non-existence.
“Hehe, very colorful example. Applying my POV I would argue that this is only because he likes pepperoni pizza. But everybody would dislike being punched in the face, or rather, being punched in the face is in itself a harm for everybody, no matter if he has a special animosity towards getting punched (or not, because he doesn’t exist).”
But the extent of the harm is subjective. A man with a glass jaw would be harmed far more than, say, a trained martial artist. And it’s not hard to imagine masochists or people in fight clubs who actually come to regard a punch to the face as a positive experience. Likewise, a vegan, for example, might regard the pepperoni pizza as being a greater harm than a punch in the face.
The experiencer is the measure of each experience.

I’ve really enjoyed this discussion, but I think we’ve reached the point where we are down to a couple of basic questions that we have irreconcilable views on. At any rate, I’m glad that we were able to have it, and glad we were able to keep it amiable.

This article is based on what I think is a mistaken concept of the relationship between pleasure and pain. The two are not polar opposites and they cannot be quantified and compared. The relief of pain is itself an intense pleasure while the loss of pleasure is not necessarily painful. This partly because pain is suffered while pleasure is enjoyed and the prospect of newmeasures tempers the loss of old one’s. And pain itself may be pleasurable if it is endured to accomplish a worthy goal which breeds a pleasurable sense of satisfaction. Life can be very painful and still be good.

GTW, I agree. Differing basic values cannot normally be changed casually, nor can they be easily justified. Still, it is good if one is able to discuss them from time to time. It was very interesting to learn about Your views.
Thanks & all the best,
rob

[...] there any good people? David Benatar doesn’t think so. The question itself is more questionable than any answer one might give, but set that aside. What [...]

1) I want to contest the assumption that strife is a negative feature of human life in general. I will concede to Benatar that life is filled with rare moments of rapture, joy and pleasantness. But, the dearth of these elements doesn’t signify the impossibility of leading a good life. Rather, one is made knowledgeable about how good one has it, or is when one suffers to realize a good. Let us consider the following thought experiment:

Suppose there is a graduate student who has been studying philosophy for 12 years at university. He has painfully made his way through both analytic and Continental graduate programs. He feels a sense of completion that he can now look upon German texts in their original language, and has been given some opportunities at synthesizing these traditions. It takes a huge amount of time and commitment to do so. At the end, however, he feels pretty good about having endured the entire process to become Dr. X. The fact that Dr. X has endured and experienced these things and can attest to a level of value. It is only valuable because of the suffering and the time it takes to learn philosophy.

Benatar might object that the judgment that one’s suffering is unreliable in assessing the value of one’s experiences. Yet, these judgments are rarely ever made in a vacuum in which one person judges the worth of his life without community constituting the possibility of making such a judgment in the first place–this is also a problem of invoking controlled social psychology experiments that abstract individual behavior from the role of community. If I celebrated the worthwhile aim of collecting the fingers of my undergraduate students, there would be no role of communal consensus in the worth of that activity. The hedonic - perspective of Benatar is incomplete to our participation in the very structure of our appraisal–due mostly to the fact that life is filled with a variety of goods, not just good and bad actions.

2) Since life is filled with a variety of goods, there is no single value monistic measure that can compare to the many examples of goods. Moreover, this pluralism about values makes truly objective assessment hard about the moral life. For now, I won’t commit to its impossibility, but I will think absolute objectivity in moral theorizing rather naive. The naivete comes in the form of thinking that there are such things as thin properties when it comes to values. Certainly, life can look with a hedonic calculation that it is mostly bad when bad and good are the only measures of its worth. Going to graduate school would be mostly bad, and no one would aspire to keep the discipline of philosophy alive given all the heartache, uncertainty and pain of the process if values were only measured from pleasure and pain aggregate calculation. One could have went to law school instead or joined a monastery.

Instead, values are all thick. It is a huge myth that values are simply reasons to phi given some normative concept. Right, wrong, good and bad are all oversimplifications of concepts that carry descriptive and normative content. A more precise normative language, such as entertaining more candidate goods about life, shifts the priority of normative evaluation from actions people do, to the type of people they are. This is where Benatar should’ve started rather than offer an analysis that doesn’t bear out in lived-experience, but instead proffers a view based on epistemic unreliability.

3) The epistemic unreliability itself carries with it assumptions of human life from the social sciences informed by controlled settings that might not bear out perfectly in human life. This is what it is to theorize in some traditions of philosophy in which you offer a schema in which the schema is a time-slice of either a scientific finding or conceptualization and then you universalize it to bear out all instances of whatever is under discussion. Rather, you should look to the hermeneutic context of a situation and make yourself aware of the limits of how phenomena take their meaning in relation to the background in which it occurs (historically, linguistically etc). Moreover, you should look to the phenomenological undercurrent of an experience to see how people actually live through scenarios before judging about them.

[...] Benatar has written a post in The Philosophers’ Magazine about how life isn’t that great, concluding that we shouldn’t bring more of it in to the world. An excerpt: Consider [...]

“What does he offer us? Phenomenology! That ball of fluff. That cotton candy!” — Edward Feigenbaum

[...] my old philosophy proff: https://philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1902 Lol. *fml* [...]

[...] Benatar hävdar följande i ”No Life Is Good”, publicerad i The Philosophers’ [...]

Unoriginal: http://www.sacred-texts.com/tao/ycgp/ycgp03.htm

According to the author’s logic, no one can be rich or poor, tall or short, fat or skinny. David Benatar has gotten confused over semantics. He accepts that comparative claims about the good life are reasonable, but what he fails to understand is that when we say “he is living the good life” we are making a comparative claim. We are saying his life is much better than average.

Well, its mostly silly, but I did like these lines:
“People tend to forget how much of their lives are spent tired, hungry, thirsty, in pain and being either too hot or too cold or in need of voiding their bladders and bowels. The same is true of how much time people spend bored, stressed, anxious, fearful, frustrated, irritated, sad, and lonely, to name but a few examples.”

E.M. Cioran explored much more interestingly than here the notion that there is “Trouble in Being Born.” But it’s not a metaphysical issue, but a psychological issue. Fernando Pessoa noted that life may indeed be a “vale of tears” but when it is so, we dry our eyes and move on. Most of the time, we’re not crying at all. So the notion that life is not “good” is mostly a cry baby’s argument. Dry your eyes and move on. The best one can do with this argument is note that life can be hellish, which is true enough, but as Churchill noted: “When going through Hell, keep going.” So the argument here is easily defeated by the simple observation made near the top of the responses that our genes don’t give a damn about how we feel, they just want us to procreate. Is that a design flaw? The answer “Yes” is nonsense.

[...] My morning mood, of a groping necessity, seems to find its way to philosophical pessimism, the view that human life is not justifie. So the philosopher David Benatar: “no life is good.” [...]

[...] further #unpopular reading: No Life is Good by David Benatar [...]