A careful discussion about philosophical pessimism
May 19th 2024
Antinatalism is, broadly speaking, the philosophical position that it is wrong to have children, under some or all circumstances. Antinatalism is an example of philosophical pessimism because it suggests creating new life is bad. Any discussion about assessing how optimistic or pessimistic we ought to be about life is antecedent to the ethics of bringing a life into existence in the first place - otherwise "pessimism" is surely a referentless term. For that reason, I have decided to dedicate most of the opening of this article to Antinatalism, in particular discussing the work of David Benatar. We will also notice that, depending on the extent to which we believe in antinatalism, we are able to resolve other dilemmas that otherwise might be intractable later on. An extremely controversial and unusual view, this particular idea has fascinated me for a long time. Although the view that it is wrong to create humans under some, namely, the worst conditions is not too controversial, the view that it is always wrong to create new humans is very controversial (and rather pessimistic). The latter position is what I will be writing about in this article. I will not specify my personal views on this question, but rather will try to spell out the fascinating line of argumentation that results. The arguments below apply to all sentient beings and not just humans. This article focuses on humans as an example, partly because that is where this is most threatening to our intuition.
The main proponent of this view is a philosopher from the University of Cape Town called David Benatar, and he defends the view in the chillingly titled “Better Never To Have Been: The harm of coming into existence” (2006) and “The Human Predicament” (2017). You may immediately be thinking that this view is outrageous, obviously false, or intentionally and obnoxiously provocative. This is exactly what I thought when I picked up the books, but after reading both books I realised I could not have been more mistaken.
- If someone regrets not having children, it’s because they are grieving the lack of child raising experiences they missed out on, and not because they are worried they have committed something akin to murder by not creating the person that could have been.
- The presence of a genocide or war occurring on another planet would be cause for concern and sadness, but we don’t spend a moment worrying about the lack of pleasure all the Martians are missing out on by not existing.
Basically, if the person is never there, they can’t be worse off. (This is not the same as if the person does exist, but missed out on something good, because this then is bad because the person is there to experience the absence).
This analogy is slightly flawed, and is not supposed to prove the asymmetry, but rather show that an asymmetry is allowed. In this example, we are comparing two existing people, rather than one existing and one non-existing person. Here, healthy misses out on an instrumental good, that is recovery (the alleviation of a bad), rather than an intrinsically good thing. This is fine however, because it could be said that the absence of all goods is not bad for a never-existing person, just like the absence of instrumental goods is not bad for an existing person who doesn’t need them. This is an assumption, but one that is easier to digest than accepting the asymmetry immediately. We have argued in favour of this assumption previously.
This part of the argument does not take a utilitarian point of view for granted, as commonly misinterpreted. We could be utilitarian and antinatalist, but we don’t have to be. The key is just the values we assign to each part of the diagram. In any case, it will always be a net bad to make the person (considering that persons interests only). It is not a positive minus negative equation but rather a question of just how negative the life is (not whether it is good or bad). If we decide to accept the asymmetry, on the basis of it being a logical consequence of more critical intuitions that underpin it, we still haven’t ruled out all procreation. For example, if a life contained only a very small amount of bad, and was overwhelmingly good, although the net effect to the person is slightly bad, the interests of friends and family may outweigh the suffering the person endures in their life. If we decide to be utilitarian in this case we can have the child. This is where the second argument comes in... (TBC 2024)
The argument is set up in two stages. The first is called the asymmetry argument. We’re asked to imagine a hypothetical person, X, and an alternative scenario where X never came into existence. When the person exists, good things and bad things can befall the person. We should be careful not to oversimplify and reduce this to a hedonistic “pleasure” vs “pain” dichotomy. Good and bad could be pleasure and pain, but they needn’t be. We could cash out good and bad in any number of ways, like desires being satisfied, meaning being obtained in life, or objective goods like knowledge or love being found, and vice versa. However, when thinking about the case where this person never exists. It is said that the absence of the bad that person would otherwise experience, is good (in the sense that it is better than the existing person experiencing bad). However, it is not bad that the never-existing person doesn’t experience good (in the sense that it is not worse than the existing person who gets to experience good things, because the person is never there). The net effect of this is that it is always a relative disadvantage for that person to come into existence. At best, if a life contains 0 bad, we should be indifferent between both cases.
Here, it is always better to be B.
David believes the best way of explaining each of these cases is through this asymmetry. A few other explanations have been offered in retaliation that try to defend child bearing but also explain all these cases, to which David responded in “Still Better Never To Have Been: a response to some of my critics”. Others may argue that the entire concept of an asymmetry is wrong, because it sets up the answer before it begins, and it cannot logically be possible to asymmetrically compare the good and the bad. This however, is not true, and in fact we apply asymmetries like this all the time. Imagine a scenario where we have two people, Sick and Healthy. Sick can get sick, but also is able to quickly recover. Healthy never gets sick, but lacks the capability for quick recovery. Here, it is good that sick recovers and bad he gets sick. It is also good that healthy never gets sick, but also healthy is not at all worse off by lacking the capacity for quick recovery, because he doesn’t need it at all. It is better to be Healthy.
Clearly, this asymmetry holds.
This raises some immediate questions. Firstly, one might argue that it does not make sense for a never-existing person to be “benefitted” by not experiencing pain. It cannot therefore be “good”. However, we need to be careful with such a claim. Imagine a scenario where we have the opportunity to create a life with unusually extreme suffering. Say a baby that lives only 5 years in extreme pain, with no understanding nor pleasure to be found in its life due to a rare genetic defect. If we really believed that the baby could not be better off by never having come into existence, we would be indifferent between creating and not creating the baby. This seems wrong. Clearly, we should not create this baby, and we shouldn’t do it for that potential baby’s sake. Even though there is no baby who is strictly better off by our decision to not act, we should care about the potential baby’s interests in order to reach the only tolerable judgement here. David explains this by suggesting that the absence of the bad in the never existing X, is good (preferable to the alternative). There may be other explanations we could offer, but we will revisit this issue later.
It is problematic to assume this instead
If we cede that sometimes we can attach comparative weight to comparing between existing and non-existing beings to avoid the problematic case we outlined earlier, we might want to say that similarly it is bad that beings who never come into existence miss out on all the goods in life as well. For this reason, we need to simply weigh up the goods and bads in life, and reach our judgement based on that. This is where the asymmetry comes in. David argues that the reverse is actually not true, and that the absence of all the joys a person would have missed out on is not worse than the experiencing of those joys that the existing person has. This again can be defended by some particular examples:
- We don’t seem to have a moral obligation to create happy people. But we do have an obligation to avoid unhappy people (as mentioned before).
- The positive interests of the potential child is not a reason to create them, (but the negative interests of the potential child is a reason not to create them). For example, being extremely worried that you do not have a child because all the children you don’t have are currently missing out on life is seldom a concern, but being worried that the child you are about to create will suffer immensely is a valid concern. If the former weren’t true, we would feel an immense duty to have as many children as possible to alleviate those children we never have from never existing.
It probably isn't this either