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.
Category: Politics
Concerning the nature of man and the state, and how best the latter can be structured to augment the former.
The Inevitability of Cooperation
I’ve been thinking lately about why we cooperate with each other–why we form communities and states. The typical Hobbesian answer to this question is that we cooperate in order to protect ourselves from violence. There is truth in that answer, but security concerns, while a primary motivator for cooperation, are not the only motivator. This is important, because there are those who oppose cooperative institutions on the grounds that a world without cooperative institutions isn’t as dangerous as Hobbesians commonly believe, suggesting we should become total individualists (e.g. anarchists, transcendentalists, etc.).
Religion and Children
Generally speaking, I’m a proponent of freedom of religion, even in cases in which the religious beliefs in question are rather extreme. I do not think the state should go about preventing people from being Amish, even though by being Amish those individuals reduce our collective economic efficiency. Being Amish is no more debilitating to our economy than many other behaviors adults routinely engage in legally, and a good deal less than some–the Amish do contribute to society, albeit in economically less efficient ways. Some individuals (typically both the very poor and the very rich) lead wholly unproductive lives. However, I’m not so sure I can take this permissive attitude in certain cases involving children.
Disability or Inability?
Today I’d like to consider an argument briefly referenced by David Benatar in a book of his I have been reading on a different, tangentially-related subject. It is an argument made by some disability rights advocates. They maintain that efforts to eliminate genetic handicaps and birth defects are discriminatory and unethical on the grounds that disability is a social construct. I’d like to investigate this argument and see if it holds water.
Citizens Using State Programs Unaware that they Use State Programs
One of the things I’m fond of doing on this blog is chronicling just how much the general public doesn’t know about statecraft and speculating how that public ignorance might debilitate the quality of our governance. Today, I ran across a study from Cornell’s Suzanne Mettler detailing a curious phenomenon–many (and in some cases, most) of the beneficiaries of government programs are completely unaware that they themselves benefit from government programs.
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