Better Never to Have Been

Or, as Neil Young said,

“There’s one more kid that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool.”

But there is no-one who is harmed, or put at risk of harm, by the choice not to have them.

Is a nagging unfulfilled desire not harm?

Why stop at people?

The absence of pain is good even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone
…evidently there’s some literature within which this statement makes sense. For those of us who lack rudimentary skills on this topic, can you provide a basic bibliography?

Harry: did this book make you start doubting your pro-natalist views?

Well, there are a lot of things wrong with even the premises, as people are pointing out. For a stimulating counter-argument to the first premise, I’d encourage anyone to watch Melody Gilbert’s documentary, A Life Without Pain, about people who suffer from a congenital defect which prevents them from feeling pain.

Still, if there were an 8,000 word version I’d be interested in reading it.

Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence

It can be curtailed pretty easily.

His conclusion is that there is a powerful moral reason to try to bring about the extinction of the human species

If you haven’t looked already, some parts of Tolstoy, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” would be on point there.

abb1:

Benatar actually addresses the issue of suicide and the question, “If Benatar’s argument is sound, oughtn’t we all commit suicide?” His answer is, in my opinion, both clever and correct: there is a distinction to be made between starting a life and continuing a life. He argues that while no life is worth starting, perhaps many lives are worth continuing — that is, not worthy of ending (suicide) — for all the traditional reasons (I can’t remember exactly what he says, but I’d say e.g. the pain of the act of suicide, the pain caused to loved ones, etc.).

Even so, I think there is a case to be made that suicide — as a potentially rational and even virtuous action — has really received short shrift, both in popular consideration and elsewhere. Of course that argument would be distinct from Benatar’s.

A (rather weak) thought experiment that helped me to bring my initially foggy agreement with Benatar’s reasoning and conclusion into greater relief: compare an imaginary Earth on which life had never begun (for whatever reason — the soup was disturbed, or not disturbed enough) with the one we’ve got now, or even any Earth that we could plausibly have had (e.g. were we a more socially, politically, and environmentally virtuous species). Framed in these terms, I would strongly prefer No Life Earth to This Earth and most plausible variants of This Earth that I can imagine.

That said, I was strongly anti-natalist prior to reading BNTHB, so I wasn’t exactly a neutral reader.

Benatar’s conclusion is certainly provocative and I have not read his work (though I will now).

From what is stated here, he seems to run together two different principles- one a person-affecting principle (which applies to the absence of pleasure) and the other a non-person affecting principle (which applies to absence of pain). So the claim (4) that the absence of pleasure is not bad is interpreted as a person-affecting claim- if there is no one for whom the pleasure is absent, its absence cannot be bad. And yet the absence of pain is thought to be a good even if it is not good for anyone (3).

I would be inclined to reject both (3) and (4). Before any sentient beings inhabited the planet there was no pain on earth. But I can’t see why one would view the absence of pain itself as being good. Furthermore, before any human being existed there was no love (the highest of pleasures) on the planet. And I think that is bad. So my intuitions run counter to (3) and (4), but I guess my views simply run counter to common sense morality!

Cheers,
Colin

Two worlds: one where there is a torturer torturing a man in Abu Ghraib, the other where neither of these people exist, have ever existed. Clearly the first world, one where there is torture, is worse than the second world, where there is no torture, even though there is no-one in that second world who would have been tortured in the first world and can therefore be said to enjoy the good.

But that’s not clear at all. Many people have been tortured at one time or another — but spent most of their lives untortured and, taking all things into account, would not have wished themselves out of existence.

Isn’t one such person running for president of the U.S. right now?

That is, people should commit suicide if they reasonably judge that their future pains outweigh their future pleasures.

I think it’s much stronger than that: when you’re dead you don’t miss your future pleasures, you’re not worse off. So, the logical conclusion is that you should commit suicide as soon as you experience any pain.

I think it’s much stronger than that: when you’re dead you don’t miss your future pleasures, you’re not worse off. So, the logical conclusion is that you should commit suicide as soon as you experience any pain.

Except that anticipation of future pleasure may balance or outweigh present pain. Hence graduate school.

Or, to put it another way, the anticipation of lost future pleasures may be experienced as current pain. And actually, the mental aspects of pain may be much greater than the physical aspects, and the mental aspects may depend heavily on one’s concept of the future. So a person in a hospital bed in great physical pain but expecting a full recovery may be in much less pain overall than a person experience only mild physical pain who has an fatal disease.

“Once that position is established there’s no problem bringing new people into the world. If they don’t like it they can always kill themselves.”

You’re making an assumption about the interval between “brought into world” and “deciding to kill themselves”. In practice that is many years, at least. If that interval is sufficiently likely to be a net loss, then there is a problem with the scheme. Kill-self is not a remedy for whatever came before.

“There’s no problem with hitting people. If they don’t like it they can always tell me to stop.”

Not saying I agree with Benatar, but superstitious people who believe in heaven and hell should pay attention. Currently people only live a limited period of time and have the option of killing themselves once they’re old enough if they decide life isn’t worth it. However, if you believe that there is even a small chance of a new person suffering the eternal torment of hell, then you might want to think long and hard about the morality of having children. (Although thinking long and hard about the evidence for the supernatural may ultimately be more productive.)

That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad-and considerably worse than most people recognise it to be.

That last bit is the crucial part. After all, if people can in fact judge the quality of their lives accurately, then the simple fact that most people don’t commit suicide–and hence judge their own lives worth living–is powerful evidence against Benatar’s position. So how, exactly, does he go about arguing that most of us are actually suffering a good deal more than we think we are? And what could such an argument possibly mean?

so basically this is the premises of Buddhism, taken to the maxxxx in a different direction.

the author sounds like he would love to be part of this group

However, if you believe that there is even a small chance of a new person suffering the eternal torment of hell, then you might want to think long and hard about the morality of having children.

Then there’s that whole problem of the disposition of the souls of aborted fetuses, for people who believe that fetuses have souls. If they go to heaven, then abortion is good for them: it sends them there without the ever-present threat of losing their chance that the rest of us have to deal with. Perhaps abortion is a sin that will send the person who does it to hell; but that person is still a hero in a larger sense, sacrificing their own soul to eternal torment for the sake of the baby’s eternal bliss.

If, on the other hand, aborted fetuses go to hell, then there’s no problem declaring abortion an unalloyed evil; but even if you do believe in original sin, it’s hard to love a God who would send a new baby soul to hell.

I always figured this dilemma (or, before the morality of abortion became a big deal, the equivalent question of why it’s wrong to kill newborn babies) was part of the reason limbo was once a popular if non-canonical idea in Catholic theology. But I could be wrong.

or, before the morality of abortion became a big deal, the equivalent question of why it’s wrong to kill newborn babies

Uh, let me stress that here I’m talking about equivalency in the mind of a person who accepts all these premises, which I do not…

” Sleep is lovely, death is better still, not to have been born is of course the miracle.”

This was written by someone who spent the last eight years of his life paralyzed, partly blind and heavily sedated on his “mattress grave”, which may explain why he took this philosophical position.

Silenus was so obviously right…

… that the point doesn’t seem to at all invite philosphic inquiry. But to each his own. People who actually imagine that it wouldn’t have been better never to have been born, have to, I guess, pursue a question that seems perfectly frivolous to me.

Please don’t object that someone who believes as I do is somehow compelled to support aborting every fetus. People who believe as I do would have long since arranged for our own speedy exit from this existence (this was Silenus’ third best alternative for mortal man), did we not acknowledge the hold that our attachments to this life exert on us. This hold is exactly what makes it better never to have been born. Just because we can imagine non-existence does not itself magically dissolve this hold, and put us somehwere that allows impartial discussion of the future existence of the human race. We’re already stuck. We are not God. We have no choice but to continue our own lives, and that of the human race, because we are not such beings as can stand outside this question to judge it free of constraint.

Hmm. I guess I don’t find it hard to disagree with the premises. I don’t regard it as “uncontroversial” that all pain is bad, nor that all pleasure is good, nor do I think that the value of lives is helpfully evaluated via a pain/pleasure calculus alone (or even mainly) and as soon as you let other values in then the argument is weakened.

Slocum 23: Except that anticipation of future pleasure may balance or outweigh present pain. Hence graduate school. (also Dan Simon in 29)

But this is not the whole story. You’re forgetting a powerful biological mechanism – self-preservation instinct. It’s vital for the species as a whole, but from the individualistic angle (what should I do with my life?) it manifests itself as irrational fear of death.

When you decide to go to graduate school you take it into consideration, otherwise, if built-in fear of death was not an issue, a heroin addiction followed by quick death would probably constitute a better plan.

(I haven’t read the book.)

It is commonly believed that 10^-200 is so close to zero as to be indistinguishable. Now let’s see what follows from this by really careful reasoning, without prejudice.

I won’t judge though — reasoning can be fun. There’s a new coal plant in Germany which emits no CO2 into the atmosphere. Took some reasoning to get there, I would bet.

Surely if you accept his oversimplification that pain and pleasure are the only things that matter in life, you don’t end up suggesting abortion, but rather a world in which a minority of people sacrifice themselves growing crops and opium (and other essential services) so the majority can spend the entire of their lives taking heroin.

a thesis that is both true and patently absurd

Not absurd at all. Sounds like a more or less standard nihilist angle with a slight twist, i.e.: “moral reason to try to bring about the extinction of the human species”. Though if thinking about extinction of the human species gives him pleasure – that’s fine too, along the same line.

It seems to me that a consequence of Benatar’s argument is that one should not only not have children, but also strive to render the surface of the earth (and any other planet one is capable of affecting) incapable of supporting the evolution of sentient life at any point in the imaginable future.

More seriously: (or slightly more seriously)

‘1)The presence of pain is bad
and that
2)The presence of pleasure is good’

is self-evidently bollocks, as Max Mosley would be the first to tell you. Nor is it a part of ‘common sense morality.’ Generally speaking people who spend their lives avoiding pain and seeking pleasure are not looked up to by the community. Au contraire.

Glen Tomkins has a valid point. Similarly, lots of heroin addicts will tell you that it’s better never to start heroin, and yet they have compelling reasons not to quit.

I want to repeat that what is being argued here are questions of individual judgement, individual choices which are not right or wrong but matters of free choice.

Surely no one would argue that esthetic questions have right and wrong answers? It’s a matter of taste. No, I take that back. I know someone who argues that some music is intrinsicly good (Beethoven, Tchaikovsky) while other music is intrinsicly bad (Elvis, the Beatles, Metallica).

But surely nobody sensible would agree with him, right?

I’m pleased to see antinatalism being discussed here.

Antinatalism is incredibly easy to defend. Just think of the worst things that can happen to a person. What’s a little harder to defend is the decision to be an antinatalist and nonetheless remain alive – for reasons other than spreading the antinatalist gospel or otherwise being a utilitarian, that is. I know my preference is to be an antinatalist who affirms the lives of those already living. And yet there seems to be a potential inconsistency just in deciding to continue my own existence. If I say that a person should categorically not create a human life, because of the nonzero probability that their offspring will one day meet their end in agony and terror (whether buried alive, burned alive, trampled to death, etc), why not apply this reasoning to myself? It seems I should kill myself now, rather than face the risk that any of those things will happen to me one day. But because I hope for something better in my own case, I don’t do it. It seems hard to defend this difference in attitude without leaving the door open for a step away from categorical antinatalism. E.g. if I am willing to argue that a rational inspection of my life circumstances suggests that out of pure luck, utter contingency, my life has a good chance of being one of the lives that is worth it, then it may sometimes be possible to argue similarly even before a life is created.

The usual defense of this particular asymmetry of attitude is, I think, that there is a moral difference between gambling with your own life (by choosing to go on living) and gambling with someone else’s (by creating a whole new life). Does Benatar have anything to say on this point?

“I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

If Benatar’s analysis is correct, then why should one’s methods be restricted to means that are “morally permissable?” Forget suicide. This is an argument in favor of genocide, as efficiently and rapidly as possible. If it is better not to have been born, then it is probably also better for adults to die now, since the amount of pain in their remaining lives will outweigh the pleasure. By killing lots of people, you not only minimize the pain in their lives, but you prevent the pain of all their hypothetical descendents. By killing their loved ones at the same time, you minimize the pain of grief. It would probably be best to kill everyone as painlessly as possible, but even a horribly slow and painful death would prevent incalculably more pain the the years to come. Bonus points for exterminating all life with a central nervous system, but to do a thorough job, you need to kill everything to prevent evolution producing more organisms that can feel pain.

I agree with John Quiggin (#55) that point 3 is meaningless. That basically leaves points 1 and 2 in the utilitarian equation. We should probably add the word “some” before both “pleasure” and “pain,” but even then it is woefully incomplete.

Given that suicide is readily available, it would seem the revealed preference shows that non-existence isn’t what people prefer for the most part. Living is optional and this option protects people from possible bad outcomes of living. Benatar perspective would seem to suggest that making suicide more ready available is the right way to go and would eliminate most of the force of his argument for not creating people.

I recognize that one problem here is that other people come to depend on one over time and that suicide creates losses for those left behind, which complicates the analysis above.

“For the absence of pain to be good means that there must someone be around who actually finds some benefit in there being an absence of pain.”

Tracy W (#49) and John Quiggin (#55) – this is what I meant when I said that one must imagine that the proponent of the argument stands outside of material existence – it can be God or the devil, but not another human being (#27).

Better still would be a time machine, so one could send the nukes back to the dawn of creation and prevent all suffering of sentient creatures from ever having occurred. The only drawback is that this course of action requires sentient creatures to have evolved, developed the nukes and the time machine (and the philosophical argument in favour of using them), and acted accordingly. I guess temporal paradox makes the sum total of human suffering up to this point a kind of moral sunk cost.

That’s an entertaining argument and one that at least one person I know has used in his own reproductive choices for the last ten years.

Another argument I enjoy is the one that our planet is currently the equivalent of an ocean life-raft. There’s limited food and space and bringing someone aboard means kicking someone else off, however discreetly indirectly it may happen on a global level. Every person born consumes resources that others will miss and taking them aboard the raft is the moral equivalent of asking someone else to die or risk death for the safety of someone close to you. How comfortable are you with that?

Bloix, even taking your point about someone standing outside material existance, I don’t see how Bentar’s point follows. I’ll pick as my someone standing outside material existance the Devil, who wants to cause pain. So the Devil doesn’t enjoy the absence of pain, by my definition, and if there is no one else around who cares that there is an absence of pain (which is the assumption Bentar states), how can the absence of pain be good?

…since the only real data point we have are the currently existing people and the ratio of 1 million suicides per year (or even the 10-20 million attemps) to 6 billion who somehow manage to get by is rather overwhelming

That doesn’t prove anything. One may conclude that most of them are simply prolonging the agony because of their superstitions and other irrational beliefs. One who sees clearly that human life is void of any meaning whatsoever will not be deceived by these statistics.

It’s the same sort of thing as the fact that most of the US military vote Republican.

Thomas Ligotti does this whole thing a lot more stylishly, btw.

I think I need to go play with my cat now.

Sentient people can delude themselves about how great their suffering actually is

Then their life is great.

re: playing with cats – Current 93: “Black Ships Ate The Sky”

I had already seen
Black Ships ate the sky
I was sweet sixteen
The fences folded
And the trees surrounded
Black Ships in the sky
Devouring the clouds
And the thought came to me
Just sweet sixteen and full of night
Who will deliver me from myself?
Who will deliver me from myself?
And I looked up at the sleeping lion
Black Ships ate the sky
Colours untold
Kissing my eyes
To unmake myself
And to be unborn
To be unborn
And not to see
Black Ships in the sky
With their cypress night
Following in the wake
Of the churning rudders
Of Black Ships in the sky
Cartoon Messiahs became
Cartoon Destroyers
If I was unborn
I would have nothing to be grateful for
I would have never seen love
I would have never held cats
I would have never buried my friends
And prayed for their souls
In reddening churches
I would never have kissed
And I would never have wept
And I would never have seen
Black Ships eat the sky
And I would have been unborn
And not have seen circuses
Whilst watching the flowers
Rise flags made of atoms
Who will deliver me from myself?
Who will deliver me from myself?
Who will deliver me
From Black Ships in the sky?
Black Ships ate the sky
And I am unborn…

They’ve gone to a better no-place.

plus the risk of unsuccessful suicide can be dreadful pain as well.

Ugh. Can’t write: unsuccessful suicide attempts can cause awful pain.

how good rocks are for that reason

I suppose it goes something like this: it’s ‘good’ that rocks don’t feel pain when it’s cold or, say, when you hit them with a hammer. But it’s not ‘bad’ that rocks don’t enjoy, say, the warmth of sunshine; it would’ve only been ‘bad’ if they were actually suffering from not being able to have that pleasure.

Sounds kinda silly, but here it is.

Eskimo: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” Priest: “No, not if you did not know.” Eskimo: “Then why did you tell me?” Annie Dillard

This one is fun.
It’s like listening to a bunch of brains in pyrex canisters communicating (telepathically maybe!) (or maybe wireless!) back and forth across the lab.

Pain is a signal, pleasure likewise. That’s all, there’s no moral component.
In a consumer nightmare hellscape like the contemporary, these processes of signal awareness are seen as qualitative states, conditions, modes of being.
So that the signal becomes Other, object, thing. This is a perversion, but merely one among many.

They can turned off or amplified, ignored or allowed to dominate the bandwidth of the receiving processor. For consumers that dominating is birthright, now. Things are bad because they hurt, good because the please.

Yet inasmuch as anything has a purpose they’re only there, as signals, to help stabilize gene transport across spacetime.

Sex is so intensely desirable because organisms with intense sexual appetites tend to out-produce their less-libidinous cousins, thus out-gene-transferring them.

Pain helps keep the organism from destroying itself, by linking “bad” sensation with “bad” behavior. Helping to maintain the gene-transfer vehicle. This, obviously, is the origin and rationale for corporal punishment.

Trying to re-conceive pain and pleasure in that context, as economic commodities subject to moral arbitration, is a downward reduction of life toward game.
Flattening, making it 2-dimensional.

Any objective moral eval done from outside the gene architecture collapses from its own weight, because there’s no floor, no ground. No other point toward which to make things relative. Cosmic solipsism. Who on earth cares if someone on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri has a really bad day?

Any objective eval done from within the gene architecture will have bias-by-affinity.
My genes, or their hardware/software bundles, respond a certain way to the sight of lovely maidens dancing on a green sward by a murmuring fountain surrounded by flowers and bounteous trees.
The genes of a Komodo Dragon respond quite differently to the same sight.

Pain and pleasure aren’t things that can be assessed without their originating stimuli; why is this condition/event causing this sensation?
Why does my stomach turn when the President comes on the TV?
Why does my heart go pitty-pat when Amy Goodman comes on the TV?
Affinities, or their opposite.

Lugging genes up and down the landscape.
Either because things just evolved randomly to this order of complexity, or because it’s all actually going somewhere.

Figuring out which one of those conditions pertain will align any moral system we produce or encounter, either with that destination, or with the nihilist void.

Doing that figuring is actual work, and vital service to sentient beings such as ourselves.
The rest is bodiless uncommitted abstract wankery.

Unless I’m missing something, he seems to have missed that neither “pain” nor “pleasure” are single, absolute things. There are different levels of both. Is “a bit of pain” equivalent to “a bit of pleasure” and the same at the other end of the scale? And how about asymetries – does “a lot of pleasure” trump “a bit of pain”? How much pain trumps a bit of pleasure, and vice versa?

And what about masochists?

Enjoying particular pain is not enjoying general misery. I don’t imagine a masochist chooses the longest line at the supermarket or asks sneezers for a drink from their cup.

Well, this sounds like a book worth reading and puzzling about. But when I have dealt with similar arguments in the past, I have usually concluded that the author is leaving out of account massive amounts of important positive pleasures because he is working with a crude, simplistic and inattentive account of pleasure and pain.

I usually walk my dog late at night, when it is dark and quiet, and often stop just to watch and wonder at the amazing world he seems to inhabit, filled with smells and tastes and sounds that escape me. He’s an incredible creature, and the pleasure of just appreciating that as fully as I can- I’m not sure whether to call it an intellectual pleasure or an aesthetic pleasure – seems to me to be of a very high order and weight.

It is not a hot, passionate pleasure, or an ecstatic one. It isn’t a busy and colorful pleasure. It isn’t obviously corporeal, although it can sometimes bring a secondary feeling of lightness and relief from bodily pains and heaviness. And I’m not even convinced that it is a pleasure available to cognitively developed humans alone, since my sense is that other animals experience something like rapt wonder, but without the same kind of discursive accompaniment. But nevertheless it is a rich and profound pleasure that seems more than ample compensation for most of the griefs and anxious sufferings experienced during the day.

So even when my life has been at its lowest point, I wouldn’t have dreamed of ending it. Everything is just too marvelous and beautiful – even my own sufferings – and it all points in some way at wonders beyond our grasp. Even on days when my sensory experience of the world is little but an insubstantial gray nothingness, the sense of “nothingness” itself seems stunning and remarkable, since it only seems possible to me by virtue of a subtle emotional and intellectual comparison with an internally experienced infinite expanse of something else and better.

It seems to me that these experiences are available to anyone who stops for even for a moment to take things in, and their routine occurrence in even the busiest lives, and continuous presence as a kind of beautiful background hum, makes almost all the surface agonies endurable – which is part of the reason why most people do in fact endure them.

“Life is so full of pain and misery it would be better not to have been born.”
“But how many are so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand.”
Anon.

Hmm. I have 2 dentist appointments next week, and that’s just the beginning, ’cause I was putting it off for a long time. I wish it could be done under general anesthesia – a form of nothingness, albeit temporary. Incidentally, I was under general anesthesia twice so far and each time I noticed that my-self wasn’t too happy to come back. It was, like, hey, don’t wake me up, people, leave me alone. Probably doesn’t mean anything.

Furthermore, before any human being existed there was no love (the highest of pleasures) on the planet. And I think that is bad.

A whole conversation about a book by somebody named Benatar and nobody has yet observed that love is a battlefield.

Let me, then, be the one.

Anyway, a while back I started getting rather afraid that under some reasonable set of utilitarian assumptions, love might actually be immoral, since it compels people to distribute goods and affection in an uneven manner not conducive to efficient use of their declining marginal utility. Kindness to people you love is kind of like selfishness, unless you love everyone equally. But if I have to love everyone in the world equally, can I really love anybody? Maybe I have to be anti-love! Once again, a reasonable set of moral postulates leads to something that sounds like it came out of the mouth of a supervillain, in this case one who probably fights fuzzy creatures on a cartoon for very small children.

Abb1 – yes, that is how you could justify it. But the claim was not merely that a possible moral case could be made that the absence of pain is a good even if the reason that pain is absent is that rocks can’t feel pain in the first place. It was that this belief is a standard part of common sense morality. But, as far as I can tell, when people count their blessings, they don’t normally include a long list of things like all the rocks that can’t feel pain.

And what does it mean to say that something is good even if there is no one around that can think it is good? Would a universe merely consisting of rocks moving in curves really be a good universe? This is the bit I can’t make sense of.

On thinking more about it, while I am not an expert in philosophy, my understanding from philosophers is that there is no one, inarguable, view about what is good which every rational person must agree to, similar to the proof that there is an infinite number of prime numbers. People have strong intuitions about what is good, and often find agreement, but there’s no absolute mathematical-level certainty about what is good.
Yet Benatar bases his argument on the premise that there is a good (the absence of pain) even if there are no people around to think that it is good.
I can believe that even in a universe without any sentinent beings there would still be an infinite number of prime numbers. What I have trouble with is believing that in a universe without any sentinent beings it will still, definitely, be a good thing for there to be an absence of pain. I can’t make sense of Benatar’s premise.

We could always adopt the principles of :

Hence, all newborn infants must sign (by proxy, naturally) a disclaimer clearing their parents of responsibilty for their entry into this vale of tears, otherwise surely there would be lawsuits.

“and used to use the view that abortion is always obligatory as an example of conceptual space that no-one occupies. “

Actually, it is occupied by some fraction, (Thankfully small!) of the environmental movement.

I am truly amazed. What is the fouding of the assertion : pain is bad, pleasure is good ?

What kind of oil? I won’t stand for coconut oil.

I would strongly prefer No Life Earth to This Earth

Seriously? It is difficult for me to imagine earnestly holding this preference.

I suspect that those who want completely to deny there is any force to the argument are more or less smuggling their own pro-attitudes toward and attachment to existence into the picture. Most of us commenting here have an unusually good shot at a groovy kind of life; so if one thinks it’s just obvious that human existence on the whole is better than its nonexistence, I’d have to wager that the thought is due to a failure to imagine the vast suffering that suffuses the world outside the world of one’s own personal experience.*

That being said, with all the valuation-relevant facts in view, there’s no accounting for taste. (Full disclosure: I choose existence too. Kind of presupposed by the existence of this comment.)

What I really want to question, then, is the ease with which some want to dismiss premise (3). Consider the following thought experiment:

A universe contains all and only that which is necessary for the existence of its sole sentient inhabitant S. S exists for a total of 20 minutes in a state of the most excruciating pain imaginable, then vanishes. During his brief existence, S had no opportunity to begin, or even conceive of meaningful projects. Indeed, the only thought that occurred to him, when any thought did, was “Please make the pain stop!” There are no other witnesses to S’ existence, and no one will ever no S existed.

Consider then the claim:

(T) It would be better had S never existed.

Now, are we really all that puzzled about what T is “supposed to mean“? I think not. Maybe there’s an argument that it makes “no sense”to talk about a “better” state of affairs that is void of valuers. Maybe. But if anything should be prima facie puzzling, it is T’s denial.

* SIDE NOTE: I also think it’s rather too easy to dismiss the argument based on its use of the value terms ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure’, when these could be so easily recast in the terms of whatever theory of value you prefer. (Sorry Chris.)

Michael Drake, I’ll give you an answer that seems reasonable to me.

When we try to imagine worlds and think about which ones would be better, it’s only natural for us to imagine more pleasures and fewer pains. Like, the world would be a better place if there were lots of simulacra who had lots of money who gave money to anybody who wanted it whenever they wanted it. Nobody would have to lose money when you get more, only the simulacra lose it. You could have as much money as you wanted!

Similarly, in an ideal world, any time you wanted a cow would walk up to you and prepare a barbeque pit, and then it would carefully and happily slaughter itself. Meanwhile lobsters would walk out of the ocean to jump on your barbeque. Put another shrimp on the barbie, mate!

In an ideal world every woman would be ready to have sex whenever a man wanted to, there would be no STDs, and there would only be pregnancies when everybody involved wanted them and all the details would work out for the best.

In an ideal world everybody would win when they attempted great feats, except occasionally they might have losses and setbacks that would make the eventual victory feel better. Whenever there was a competition both sides would win.

And nobody would ever die unless they decided the whole world was such a horrible place that they wanted to die.

Well, but the way it is now, we have feedback loops. The money goes in a cycle, people do things for money because they want other people to do things for their money. Women don’t generally enjoy having sex with every man who wants them. Lobsters do what works for their own survival, to the extent they can. Destroy the feedback loops to give people only successes, and what happens to the system? Why have a world where women are always available instead of a world where everybody is happy with no sex? Why have a world with easy food when you could have one where you’re happy without eating? Wouldn’t the best world be one where an infinite number of S’s do nothing but live forever, and are blissfully happy the whole time?

But I digress. Apart from such fantasies, people make choices about what to do. In general people want to make the world a better place for them, and their choices reflect that desire. And in that context, it makes sense to try to make good things happen more than it makes sense to try to prevent bad things from happening. It’s a matter of outlook. If you try to make good things happen then every time something good happens is a success. If you try to eliminate bad things then every time something bad happens it’s a defeat. One way you get a lot of successes. The other way you get an almost unlimited sequence of defeats.

In that context, what does your twenty-minute universe mean? It has no connection to anything else. I have no chance to help anything good happen there, or prevent anything bad either. It sounds sad about the creature who wants everything to end for 20 minutes before it gets its wish. It sounds sad about the universe where nothing happens except to help S survive in agony for 20 minutes. The difference between S being in agony and S being blissfully happy is only a minor difference in S. If I could change that for him without undue cost, I would. But I get no choice in that.

So, let’s imagine there are an infinite number of universes which last for varying amounts of time, and an infinite variety of things happen in them. If I had the ability to destroy some of those universes because I thought it was better that they not exist, would I? I think probably not. My thought is that I wouldn’t reduce the variety of experience available in the universes.

If there are an infinite number of universes, and you could destroy every one of them that contained any unhappiness, would you?

Would you destroy all but one of them, the one you thought was the best?

Well, but I don’t know how to destroy universes. How about this lesser goal. Instead of killing everybody in the world, would you want to kill everybody in the world except the one who’s had the happiest life?

Would you have a cutoff? Kill everybody whose life has fallen below some minimum of average happiness, and leave the rest?

Michael Drake – Benatar’s claim was that an absence of pain was a good thing even when there was no one around to enjoy it. The claim (T) “It would be better had S never existed” makes sense because I can think it. But if I couldn’t think it because I had never been born, and if no one else had ever thought it as they had also never been born, then how can that claim make sense? What basis is there for that claim?

I can grasp the concept that the square root of two would still be irrational even if there was no one around to think that it was irrational. But I’m having trouble grasping the concept that there is something that is good even if there is no one around to think it is good.

Let’s imagine a case like yours but S exists for 20 minutes and spends them doing whatever you think makes up a good life, given that it lasts only 20 minutes and there’s no one else in the universe. My candidate for this is that S spends the 20 minutes eating really good Belgium chocolates, but your mileage may vary. However also assume that S does not get to the point of drawing any conclusions about what is good anymore than he did in your scenario. Consider then the claim “(U) It was a good thing had S existed”. I can make sense of (U), as I can make sense of your claim (T). Benatar’s argument rests on there being no such symmetry, that (T) is different to (U).

As for “I’d have to wager that the thought is due to a failure to imagine the vast suffering that suffuses the world outside the world of one’s own personal experience.” Indeed, I am guilty of failing to imagine the vast suffering that suffuses the world outside my own personal experience. I do however have an ideal that one’s views of the world should be based on evidence where available, not on imagination. And the evidence is that most people around the world prefer being alive to being dead. Countries around the world show continued increases in poplation (see http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/country/aoportal.html) which is not compatible with the hypothesis that a majority of people are committing suicide because they don’t consider life with living. If you look at http://worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl/hap_nat/nat_fp.htm, lots of people around the world report happiness. The link records self-reported happiness around the world. Using the standardised scale of 0-10, and looking at the populous countries of China and India, in China the average score for happiness was 6.73 in 2007, in India it was 6.67 in 2006. If you wish to convince me to abandon my pro-attitudes, I suggest you either come up with some convincing evidence that life for most people is not worth living, or that you come up with some argument as to why we should base our views on imagination rather than on evidence. I can’t promise to be convinced by whatever argument you come up with, but at least it would lead to a more interesting debate than the ploy of “well, you believe that because you haven’t imagined something totally different”.

M Drake, I don’t see anything puzzling about Benatar’s claim. It just seems silly to me.

Like, say I have a toothache. That’s not good. The toothache tells me that I have a problem that needs to be fixed. If a dentist can fix the tooth so it heals up, that’s good. If the dentist instead cut the nerve so that I no longer felt pain from that nerve, it wouldn’t be nearly as good. I’d still have an infection. I woudn’t have the feedback that told me when I was doing other things that damaged those teeth.

Often pain is part of a useful feedback loop. Pain isn’t evil, it’s a signal that is often useful. I find it more plausible that tooth decay is evil than tooth pain.

The problem is that things happen that are bad for me. The problem is not that I find out about things that are bad for me and that knowing about them disturbs me.

And I get to choose what I think is bad. There’s nothing particularly startling about deciding that everything’s bad on average and everybody would be better off dead. But it doesn’t lead anywhere I want to go. In my observation this view has mostly been propounded by guys who think it will get them laid. And it sometimes works.

You put your students through this shit?

So many things are wrong with this argument, I don’t know where to begin.

I am flabbergasted.

” I am arguing a counterfactual because Benatar is arguing a counterfactual – that it would be better if we had never been born. I am enjoying this argument for its own sake, I don’t need it to reflect the real world in any way. I find the mental exercise of contemplating different universes to this one interesting.”

Yup
An experiment in formal logic and rhetoric. A sub-genre of a sub-genre. Scholasticism. At best brilliant, but brittle always.

So, David Benatar’s conclusion supports the idea that if someone could be murdered by an overdose of pleasure, that would be moral, or perhaps even imperative?

Morphine overdoses all around!

I would imagine that my commitment to existing is stronger than my commitment to Reason; so if reason shows I would be better off not existing, then I’m willing to reject reason and take existing as one of the many irrational things we do, because that is the kind of creature we are.

For that matter, I’m more committed to existing than I am to being good. So that if you manage to convince me that exisiting is evil, then OK, I’m evil. Compare Nietzsche, for example.

What I do find interesting though is trying to say consistent things about what things would be like if they were different (and trying to say true things about the world is now).

Yes, it’s a pleasure to do that. But there are subtleties in deciding how that applies to the world we know, because it involves assumptions that are false.

I’m not sure what point you are trying to make.

That conclusions drawn about imaginary universes may not apply to the one we’re in.

So for example we have the imaginary universe that lasts only 20 minutes, with only one sapient entity in it. This was carefully chosen. When there are many entities and we try to decide what’s good for them, there’s the question about present good versus future good. How do you know the thing that looks bad now isn’t going to lead to something very very good later for somebody else? How do you balance out the people and the times? If you admit you don’t know how things are connected together, how can you be sure the current badness won’t result in something that’s worth it 20 years down the road, beyond the time you can predict? Well, none of that matters in a universe that only lasts 20 minutes and only has one individual in it.

But our universe will probably last more than 20 minutes and unless I’m a practicing solipsist it probably has more than one person in it.

“But I claim that what we are discussing are not statements that are true or false. We’re talking about judgements, about choices, about what we think is good and bad.”

I rather agree with you. This is the problem I have with Benatar’s premise number 3. I find the idea of a situation being good even if there is no sentinent being around to care rather incoherent. Good/bad are inherently judgments, choices, and for those words to have meaning there must be some one doing the judging and choosing.

When Benatar imagines a world with nobody in it, Benatar is doing the judging. It’s an imaginary world inside Benatar’s head. Benatar gets to decide what he thinks is good or bad about it.

OK, Tracy W, let’s agree to agree about it.

I’ve read many dismissive, angry comment threads dealing with Benatar’s book, so it’s refreshing to see people taking it seriously here, even if they don’t agree with Benatar’s conclusions.

One misconception that seems to appear here is the idea that Benatar does not take happiness or pleasure seriously. In fact, Benatar merely argues that, in deciding whether to bring someone into being, that person’s happiness and pleasure do not weigh against his future suffering in the decision to procreate or not.

The asymmetry that is the core of Benatar’s argument is that, while absent suffering is good, absent pleasure or happiness (where no one will miss it) is – no matter its profundity – merely neutral. This asymmetry seems strange, and many are quick to claim they don’t see it when faced with its consequences, but rejecting the asymmetry leads to some morally hideous consequences. While I agree with Benatar, the argument is relatively new, and I think there are good arguments on the other side (for instance, is coming into existence – or the existence of humans or life in general – an agent-neutral value?). As Benatar argues, we should hold off on nuking the planet just yet (especially since people who exist have a moral right to continue to exist, even if death would be instantaneous and wouldn’t cause them to subjectively suffer). Benatar argues that death is often a harm.

A final note on suicide – suicide and antinatalism don’t really have much in common. One doesn’t imply the other, although antinatalism does give support to the idea of rational suicide, and the suicide-minded are more likely to take suffering seriously, and therefore be psychologically prepared to hear Benatar’s argument. People who equate them are conflating evaluations of present lives with those of future lives. Benatar, however, is sympathetic to the suicide and the would-be suicide. He does not think a right to suicide solves the problem of antinatalism, because through existing we form attachments that make existence into a kind of trap. See especially pp. 219-220 for his discussion:

Procreators would do well to consider this trap they lay when they produce offspring. . . . Once somebody has come into existence and attachments with that person have formed, suicide can cause the kind of pain that makes the pain of childlessness mild by comparison. Somebody contemplating suicide knows (or should know) this. This places an important obstacle in the way of suicide.