Better Never to Have Been?
by Benjamin Studebaker
I have recently finished reading a fascinating and thought-provoking book by political theorist David Benatar, entitled Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. In this book, Benatar makes a rather unconventional argument–that to bring someone into existence is to harm that person, and that it is consequently generally wrong to have children, because to have children is to harm them. While I found Benatar’s argument most interesting, I ultimately found it unpersuasive. Here’s why.
Benatar’s argument turns on his belief in an asymmetry between pleasure and pain. Benatar observes an interesting difference in many people’s attitudes toward creating new people–while people are often inclined to argue that we should not create people whose lives will be full of suffering, they tend not to accept the flip side of that argument, that we have a moral duty to create people whose lives will be happy. If you knew that, were you to create a new person, that new person would experience tremendous suffering, and you decided to create that person anyway, most people would find that decision morally repellent. However, if you knew that, were you to create a new person, that new person would experience tremendous happiness, and you decided not to create that person, most people would say that the decision of whether or not to have children in that case was yours to make.
Benatar decides to accept that the intuition many people have for asymmetry is a good intuition. He argues that the reason we have this intuition is that while creating people does introduce them to harms that they otherwise could not experience, non-existent people cannot have experiences and so cannot be denied the hypothetical pleasures they would enjoy if they came into existence. On Benatar’s view, a non-existent person is spared suffering but is not denied pleasure. You can harm a non-existent person by bringing that person into existence, but you cannot harm a non-existent person by not bringing that person into existence, because non-existing people by definition cannot be benefited or harmed.
Benatar argues that all lives contain some suffering (indeed, he argues that human beings grossly underestimate the amount of suffering in their lives). Since all suffering is avoidable if we never came into existence, and if we never came into existence we could never regret the pleasures we would miss out on, Benatar argues that in every case, individuals would be better off if they did not come into existence. He applies this argument not merely to humans, but to all sentient beings, including most animals, whose lives also contain some amount of pain.
I think there is something contradictory about the asymmetrical view of pleasure and pain. Both pleasure and pain are experiences of the same broad type–if we can be spared one, we ought to be able to miss out on the other, or if we can’t regret the one, we ought not to be able to take solace in avoiding the other. Benatar anticipates this thought and notes two ways of rejecting the asymmetry:
- Non-existent people can both be spared pain and regret missed pleasure–in this case, the implication is that we have a duty to create people whom we have good reason to anticipate would be happy.
- Non-existent people can neither be spared pain nor regret missed pleasure–in this case, it doesn’t seem wrong to create people who are likely to have very unhappy lives.
Benatar argues that the conclusions that result from both of these symmetrical views are more counter-intuitive than his asymmetrical view, that it’s better not to come into existence. I agree that the proposition that we have a duty to create happy people whenever possible is rather preposterous. However, I’m not convinced by Benatar’s argument against 2.
Firstly, I don’t see why we would need asymmetry to come to the conclusion that we ought not to create people who will live miserable, unhappy lives. Presumably, parents generally love their children, or at the very least, they plan to love them in the event they do decide to have them. Parents derive much of their sense of self from the success (or lack thereof) that their children enjoy. Parents do not want to have miserable, unhappy children. When parents’ children are unhappy, parents feel responsible for that unhappiness and suffer in turn. Parents are likely to wish to avoid creating unhappy children for their own benefit. In addition, unhappy people are likely to be economically less productive, or even potentially parasitic, so the state also has a vested interest in not creating miserable people. It may feel better to ground our desire to avoid creating miserable people in an argument that it’s wrong to bring miserable people into existence for their own sake, but we have many good reasons not to create miserable people that have nothing to do with the interests of said people.
On a deeper level, I find myself rejecting one of the premises of Benatar’s argument–that non-existent people can benefited or harmed in any way. Non-existent people by definition cannot have experiences, and it seems to me that this means not, as Benatar argues, that non-existent people are spared pain but do not regret missed pleasures, but that non-existent people are spared nothing and regret nothing. The notion that we could do something to benefit or avoid harming a non-existent person seems nonsensical to me by definition. The question of whether or not people ought to have children is a question that those people ask first and foremost in reference to themselves. They ask “Do I want children?” “What kind of children do I want?” “Am I capable of providing the genetic background and good environment necessary to get the kind of children I want?” The focus is on their wants and desires, not the wants and desires of any specific child–at the point at which the parents are asking themselves these questions, no child yet exists, and the potential nature of that child is as of yet indeterminate.
They instinctively avoid unhappy children, because they don’t want unhappy children. They don’t feel duty bound to create happy children because the question of whether or not to have children is a question that is based on their interests. If parents want children, then they want happy children. But parents do not decide to have children because the children are likely to be happy, they decide to have children because they want them, and they only go through with having children they believe will be happy because they want happy children.
Human beings are very talented at convincing themselves and others that they are motivated not by their own interests, but by the interests of other people. There are hosts of moral theorists investigating the question of whether or not different people in different circumstances should have children based on the interests of the hypothetical children. All of these moral theorists are making a mistake–we cannot owe duties, either positively or negatively, to non-existent people. Whether or not we create new people is and ought to be entirely a function of what we want. We care about future generations not because they have intrinsic value, but because we want our offspring to be happy because they are our legacy, and we want to leave a good legacy. We want our children and their children to be happy because their happiness makes us happy.
A species in which parents did not connect their own happiness to the happiness of their children is a species that would not survive long. It is biologically inevitable that children and parents have a broad harmony of interests. There is no need to attempt to justify that harmony with appeal to altruistic moral characteristics that real people do not possess, despite their self-aggrandizing desire to believe that they do.
Benjamin Studebaker 
I am baffled. On one hand, I’m glad you didn’t do the whole song and dance about ‘the wonder of life’ that pronatalists/the childed usually sing to the unchilded. That always has the rider of ‘any honest disagreement implies you are a hypocrite for not killing yourself’, and yet some of us spend entire mornings ‘wondering’ just that. For me, I am deathly afraid, and suicide has the potential to make things worse, but there are many riveting reasons for livng other than actually enjoying it.
However, you had a very strange tack on denying the assymetry, and deplorable DNA worship, biological fatalism as bad as any Jihadist convinced of God’s will. First, life sucks whether parents want it to or not, the funny thing is how long we’ve known this for (refer to ‘Book of Job’, ‘Problem of Evil’ etc). As Schopenhauer said, it manifests itself as a birden, first to maintain, then to entertain, then to contain (which usually requires lots of pinewood and a bige ole hole). But with the first two, an indifferent universe can be at times arduous or bland to interact with. We can’t just ‘be’, boredom is the reward for homeostatic success. And persistence with boredom, earns death. SO what was the go-around for?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think immortality is any better, I just can’t see the point in existence at all. This is a pretty profound thought, and it must have even bothered God Himself, aware that for all His power, He wasn’t improving upon nonexistence, because nonexistence HAS. NO. NEEDS. Indifference is a privilege of the privileged and insulated, and nothing protects from the ‘outrageous slings of fate’ like nonexistence, and (only) nothing is as indifferent as nothingness. And if you are your own point, your nonexistence would have the same net benefits at much less effort! Sustaining tautologies is inefficient,at best! The void attains and sustains perfection with neither blemish nor effort. This has all been said by Philip Mainlander, but Orwell may have made it more palatable with his Donkey, who would as soon have no tail and no flies. Simple, negative utilitarianism. Don’t create problems just to solve them, just because you have tools to solve them with. Life would be a game, but for all the pain and seriousness that appertains on a subjective level.
But the truly loathsome thing is how you seem to take your cues from the machinations of nature. I am, as you can imagine, not enamored of this great, cold, clanking, rube goldberg assembly/dissembly line of existence. From. Decaying atomic cores to collapsing stars, everything is always ‘becoming’ and that ‘becoming’ involves ‘diminishing’. How can we sensitive beings, with axiomatic biases and rational tools, look to this for inspiration? Humbling, perspective, yes, but existence is futile, a stupendous waste, an arbitrary exercise and truly the last enemy to be conquered is life and your beloved, blind dna.
Your ending merely confirms to me the blithe moral nihilism of ‘breeders’. First you assert the non-personhood of the persona in potentia, so they thus have no rights to be considered, and anyway or procreation is so fundamental to our nature justifying it is too ‘academic’. Yet we consider the well-being of the unborn all the time, merely with the rider that they are expected to show up and claim said benefits at some point (‘future generations’ blah blah). If we construe life as an avoidable burden, we enter the logical paradox that the main profit was in avoiding the loss. The onyl way to win, is not to play. Ideally, with our big brains and itchy thumbs, we are the glitch in the matrix. We are Samson at the Banquet. We can bring this whole sucker down, and why not? I long to live to hear the discussion raised to a more empathic level. Surely, can we leave our fellow dna bots to prey on each other in one shape or another until the sun blows up and roasts them all? Seriously, get society to a point where a thimbleful of people are supported by automation while working on a doomsday device. When it’s all done, they can keep calibrating until most have ‘retired’, then, last one out, turn off the lights. Just bring it winding down to an orderly end, a euthanasia for humans, a bit of a cruder mercy for other animals (no worse than other extinctions, or us keeping them around to eat!). You know that left to nature She will make a bitch’s breakfast of it. Let us quit while we are ahead.
But I will never hear this conversation, no-one wants to assess the cumulative and intrinsic suffering of life, all life, and take a real share in fighting such an obscure, pervasive phenomenon that we have one or two biases towards. It takes an odd willingness to divorce emotions from the formation of opinions, and incisive intellectual inquiry. Occasionally, we do look up from our rutting and our swilling and by god, the whole thing is pointless Can we follow through on our most human curse of reason? For if there is a better way of forming opinions than reason, why, they must be better….for a reason!
Non-existence does not have characteristics of any kind, because non-existence cannot be experienced. One doesn’t “improve upon” or fail to “improve upon” non-existence, because non-existence is not a state that can be experienced as good or bad. The very concepts of “good” and “bad” are concepts that require existence to have meaning.
I argue that we consider the unborn not for their own sake but for ourselves. We cannot properly consider the interests of non-existent beings because they have no content. Our broad benevolence toward future people rests not in substantive intrinsic moral concern for them, but in our own desire to believe ourselves to be leaving behind a legacy we believe to be good.
By construing life as an “avoidable burden”, you have supposed that we can experience non-existence as a burden lifted. We cannot. The non-existent cannot experience non-existence. I do not think it necessarily “emotional” to point out this contradiction in terms.
Once we recognize that non-existence is not an option, that if we cease to exist we cannot experience anything, then we are left with the question of whether we like what we experience in aggregate or believe there are things we might do to better our aggregate experience. If the answer to either of these is “yes”, we have reasons for living, either to continue enjoying what we enjoy or to seek out pleasures we have yet to attain.
Dude…..just…..could you not be so goddamn semantic about the ‘nonexistent’? I read about some couple in the midwest who the husband told the wife he wouldn’t wife her if she didn’t let him rape any daughters shw popped, while she was expected to jump on the sons. She dropped 1/each. True story. I think these kids would be better off unborn. And pardon mon francais but fuck you and your benefits. Breeding is deplorably selfsih, for the most pointless and speculative hedonism. Just leave them in peace and safety. Nothing is more peaceful or safe than the Void, so don’t start up your bulshite engines. Don’t you get it? Experience doesn’t matter, in fact it lends itself to boredom. Non existence isn’t good, it’s just ‘not bad, consistently’. The best way to avoid searching for meaning in a meaningless universe? Not to be conscious. Or are you aggrieved that no-one will know what stewards of earth and art you were if you don’t breed? No-one will never need your preeeecious http://cl.jroo.me/z3/M/u/L/e/a.baa-My-Precious-.jpg pleeeeeeasures if you don’t force them to dread boredom and pain in this plainly absurd plane of existence?
And you seriously overestimate life. IN aggregate, counting obligations, drudgeries, ablutions, boredom, pain, disappointment, betrayal, deprivation etc life has waaaaay more ways to go wrong than right, as would be expected of recombining matter in a decaying universe.. Before you retreat into that atheist fail-safe (hedonism) read some benatar and Schopenhauer, they lay in wait for pollyannas like you. Btw religious people have even less argument for life so, not what I was going for. I do maintain though, that breeders are either mindless conformists or selfish moral nihilists looking for entertainment.having an existential crisis. Life is underwhelming and overtaxing. Yall can have it back I aint payin it forward.
The void cannot be experienced, therefore it cannot be characterized. The nonexistent cannot experience peace or safety (those would be benefits and pleasures, the very things you’re claiming have no meaning). Indeed, it’s bizarre that you would apply these adjectives to the void given the impossibility of anyone actually experiencing it.
I don’t experience existence as a perpetual search for meaning in a meaningless universe. I experience it as a quest to gain benefits and avoid harms. It’s a game that is fun to play, and the benefits of playing well are very enjoyable. I don’t need enjoyment to have any independent meaning, the mere fact that I enjoy things intrinsically gives those things meaning. I have read both Benatar and Shopenhauer–this piece, if you read it, is a critique of Benatar. I find the argument quite unpersuasive for the reasons I give here. I ask that you consider the substantive content of the arguments I give in this piece. I’m happy to discuss them with you.