Why it is better never to have been.

A little summary of the primary arguments of Benatar's anti-natalist book.

His primary thesis is that, due to the asymmetry between pain and pleasure, non-existence is always preferable to existence when it comes to the creation of new lives, because absent pains are good, and therefore that we have a moral duty to desist from procreation (His arguments don't apply to hypothetical lives that involve no suffering)

(Take note, the book seems to run on the assumptions of atheism and physicalism)

Background points and arguments:

pessimism: [He inserts a large array of facts about the thousands upon thousands of suicides, killings, rapes, natural disaster deaths, deaths from diseases, etc. that occur year in and year out, and also takes a quick gloss of the misery and destruction over centuries past. Human exploitation of non-human animals, especially in the food industry, where billions of animals are maltreated and slaughtered annually for consumption, human exploitation of animals for medical experiments, cruelty and violence in the animal kingdom and more.] The case for pessimism seems very strong independently of what one thinks about anti-natalism.

quality of life and psychology: There are all sorts of features of normal human psychology for example, the pollyanna principle, that pulls human beings towards irrational optimism, for example, they tend to have unrealistic views about their talents and abilities, they tend to blindly assume that their future is going to be better than average and very happy, they tend not to reflect much on, and/or recall, the bad events that happened in their lives and they tend to compare their lives more with others who are worse off rather than people who are better off. Additionally, subjective assessments of quality of life are a better indicator of comparative, rather than actual or objective quality of life. This ties into his presentation of hedonist, objeective list, and desire-fulfillment theories of quality of life. he argues that all lives are very bad on all three accounts. I'll just skim over the primary points of each:

Hedonist views: Due to the optimist bias, and general features of our psychology, we tend to ignore all the sources and occurrences of negative utility in our lives. For example, stress, boredom, pain and sickness, disappointment, general discomfort, hunger and thirst, and this is not even to mention the worst lives or worst parts of life, for example, old-age.

Objective List theories: (human lives are good or bad to the extent that they meet the items on the list of objective goods, e.g. healthy friendships, child rearing,) The problem with this view is that these lists tend to take a human perspective, rather than objective perspective. i.e. they're comparative, not objective, and the human perspective is manifestly unreliable given the optimist bias, and objective lists are restricted by what we normally expect to happen in a life, but why should this determine what a truly good human life is? For example, why shouldn't we create list items such as this: lives to age 140, never gets seriously sick, never loses a loved one. Comparing human lives with each other tells us nothing about how good or bad the baseline is, and makes us ignore bad parts of life that everybody experiences, but why should these factors be ignored when assessing overall well-being level?

Desire-fulfillment: Many humans have many unfulfilled desires, when they do fulfill their desires, this is very often not accompanied by pleasure, and in any case, they are only to be replaced with new desires, which again, either will not be satisfied, or will be, but often only to bring disappointment.

Also relevant is his argument, or Schopenhauer's argument, about how pleasure and satisfaction must continually be fought to obtain, whereas dissatisfaction and suffering come naturally. In other words, pleasure or happiness or general satisfaction are not the default states of life. For example sitting in idleness: boredom. No resources: hunger and thirst. Resources: bladder and bowel discomfort. The backdrop of life is suffering, there is such a thing as chronic-pain, but no such thing as "chronic pleasure".

Asymmetry argument:
Many reasonable people tend to make the following claims:
-There is a moral duty to avoid bringing unhappy people into existence, but there is no moral duty to create happy people.
-It is strange to say that you are having a child in order to benefit him, it is not strange to say that, with the interests of a future possible person in mind, you are choosing not to have the child (If you could coherently say the first claim, you would probably be committed to the view that many people would have a strong moral duty to have more children).
-we can regret having or not having children, but only having a child with a bad life can be regretted for the sake of the child (asymmetry in our retrospective judgments)
-we can be sad that inhabited portions of the earth or the universe contain suffering, but we cant be sad that uninhabited portions of the earth or universe have no life.

This leads us to the Primary thesis:

1 The presence of pain is bad
2 The presence of pleasure is good
3 The absence of pain is good, even though this good is not enjoyed by anyone
4 The absence if pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation

In other words, after point 2. you've lost the symmetry between pain and pleasure. There is an asymmetry between pain and pleasure, this asymmetry explain the first four assymetries.
[judgment in 3 is made in reference not to some actual non-existent person, but to the potential interests of a person who does not yet exist].

Conclusion is that non-existence is always preferable, given that there is nothing wrong with non-existence, and that there is a lot wrong with existence, (he presents early in the book his favored view of harm, you don't have to compare two states of a person, one of which he is worse off, you just have to show that something is bad for someone, on condition that the alternative would not have been bad. [one advantage of this view of harm is that it solves the non-identity problem, insofar as it proves that the bad life brought into existence is indeed a harm, but that problem and the discussion it generated in the book is not relevant for our purposes].

With the above sorts of considerations in mind, you can see how existence is always a massive harm, and thus, from the point of view of utility and following the logic, non-existence is always preferable, and thus you wrong somebody by creating them, and in any case, the idea of there being a moral duty to bring into existence happy people, or a moral duty to have children generally, seems rather absurd or incoherent, and if the duty is based on the interests of the state, or the parents, or someone else, then it's still not showing how you can produce a human child for that child's sake. Also, he's quick to remind us that most people don't even procreate as a result of a rational decision, they just have sex and then get pregnant.

lives worth living ambiguity: lives worth starting vs lives worth continuing. An adult human being has an interest in continued existence, to kill him, (which he does not in any way endorse) even with the above considerations in mind, is to override that interest by force, and thus to wrong him. (same principle applies to suicide, he thinks. lives worth living/continuing should be held to different standards). In adult human life, people tend to have projects, life goals, connections with other members of the human species, and more. Before sentient life, there is basically nothing to defeat when it comes to killing, and it's not actually in the interests of the being to come into existence anyway. In light of these differences, death of an adult is worse than death of a fetus, and just because a life is worth continuing, does not mean it was worth starting.
A fetus and zygote do not have an interest in continued existence (or do, but in a very weak sense) thus it's permissible, actually obligatory, he holds, to abort fetuses before that point. (he discuses the legal concerns of all this in another chapter, but nevertheless defends a right to procreative freedom, not least because of the impractical concern and all sorts of possible moral violations to living people if a state enforced this view, plus this is a new and controversial view, and time will tell whether it survives the onslaught of objections)

responding to counter-intuitive objections:
-intuitions are often very unreliable
-If you reject the asssymetry, you are committed either to saying that we have a moral duty to bring (as many as possible?) happy people into existence, and that we should regret all those happy people whom we didn't but could have created, or that we don't have a moral duty to avoid bringing into being a child who will go on to have a very miserable and painful existence.
-human species will probably go extinct one day anyway, the sooner the better, because it will avoid so much pointless suffering.
-intuitions about causing massive amounts of harm to somebody would not be trusted in any other context, why should they be trusted here?
-extraterrestrial beings, living lives much worse than ours, but under the same spell of blind optimism, would find this view as applied to them counter-intuitive, but we can see, from the help of some distance from their lives, that their intuitions about this should not be trusted.

Objections and anticipated responses:
Many people say that their lives were worth starting. Actual response: Don't underestimate the impact of the aforementioned psychological phenomenon. Also, most people, depending on the time of their life, have said or thought both that they regret their existence, and that they were happy to have been born. (probably during most painful or most pleasant moment/moments respectively) It can't be the case that it was both better to have come into existence, and better not to have come into existence.

Radical counter-example: life of pleasure with single pin-prick a harm. Actual response: Bites the bullet and admits non-existence still preferable, though reminds us, of course, that even the best lives are nowhere near this level.

Failure to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures. Probable response: higher pleasure are not that great anyway, and in any case, the asymmetry still holds.

Logic failure of lives worth starting/worth continuing as regards suicide. Probable response: If people were fully rational, and had no family members/friends, they may well decide to kill themselves earlier so as to avoid later suffering.

Makes value judgments about life for all. Tells you how bad your life really is, irrespective of what you say or how you feel: Probably response: sufficient uniformity across all lives to be entitled to look at a baseline, and once again, people often making biased judgement about their life quality, not looking at their lives objectively and in isolation from distorting feelings/factors.

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memorable quotes:

And it is implicit in, or at least compatible with, Montesquieu's claim that "Men should be bewailed at their birth and not at their death.

If we count not only the unusually severe harms that anybody could endure, but also the quite routine ones of ordinary human life, then we find that matters are still worse for cheery procreators. It shows that they play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun - aimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring.

Children are brought into existence not in acts of great altruism, designed to bring the benefit of life to some pitiful non-bring suspended in the metaphysical void and thereby denied the joys of life.

Those who think that the law should embody the pro-life position might want to ask themselves what they would say about a lobby group that, contrary to my arguments in Chapter 4 but in accordance with pro-lifers' commitment to the restriction of procreative freedom, recommended that the law become pro-death. A legal pro-death policy would require even pro-lifers to have abortions. Faced with this idea, legal pro-lifers might have a newfound interest in the value of choice.