Hold onto your hat for some pretty serious philosophy with this one. Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence by South African philosopher David Benatar is not for the faint of heart.
His essential premise is this: It is always harmful to bring a conscious being into existence. Not just to the environment or other people, existence is inherently harmful to the conscious being themselves, and because (as moral agents) we can about reducing harm for all conscious beings, the only rational choice is to agree that no new conscious beings should be made to suffer that harm.
I know that sounds a bit extreme but stick with me. Benatar’s argument boils down to two basic premises:
- A person missing out on a future good isn’t bad. Let’s say there’s an outside chance that someone will offer you a surprise ice cream sundae as you go about your usual day tomorrow. That would be pretty good if it happened, but if it doesn’t, it’s not that anything bad has actually happened to you. Your life may just be very slightly less good than it would otherwise have been. As long as nothing bad happens instead, you’re probably perfectly content to just keep on keeping on, which brings us to our next point.
- A person missing out on a future bad thing is good. If we return to the premise of the first statement but swap our surprise sundae for a punch in the face, the calculus changes. If you don’t get punched in the face tomorrow, you’ll consider that a good thing.
So to review, missing out on good stuff is a wash but missing out on bad stuff is a good thing. Following this logic, Benatar argues that if someone is born as a conscious being then they can’t help but experience bad stuff. They could get sick, die of starvation, get into a life-long feud with an angry goose next door, or even just be very clumsy and stub their toe very often. It all amounts to a lifetime of some degree of misery. Benatar aims to show that forcing a conscious being to experience any degree of suffering must always be wrong.
On the flip side, there’s a chance that the same person could become a billionaire. They could fall in love, go to the moon, marry a Spice Girl, or whatever else you might consider an unimaginable stroke of good fortune. But this falls apart on two fronts.
First, we’ve already decided that missing out on a future good isn’t really bad and causing someone to suffer is bad. And second, once you’re trying to keep score on the amount of hypothetical good it takes to offset the hypothetical bad, you’re in Utilitarian territory and the slippery slope of the happiness pump is right around the corner.
Benatar expands this logic to speak on issues like overpopulation, abortion, and end-of-life decisions, and he does an artful job of articulation the difference between the right to exist and the right to continue to exist, explaining that while conscious beings should be prevented from coming into existence, conscious beings who already exist have a real interest in sticking around.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Benatar is on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Controversial Ideas, alongside some other (very controversial) intellectual heavyweights, and there’s no doubt that his argument is controversial. But try as I might, I can’t find a way out of his reasoning.
The few attempts to counter Benatar’s reasoning that I’ve found are forced to appeal to some external arbiter of morality (aka God), contextualize the value of conscious life in the capacity to experience pleasure (which Benatar specially warns against), or claim some intrinsic moral value to conscious life without being able to show from whence it derives.
As a phenomenon, biological life, which as far as we know is the only conscious life, has to prioritize its own continued existence. If it doesn’t, it’s not likely to last long enough to produce philosophers to question it. But Benatar claims that once we gain the capacity for moral reasoning, which is to say that we can care whether we cause a conscious being to experience suffering, and understand the implications of our reproductive choices, we’re honor bound to stop bringing new beings into existence.
I want to say that his arguments seem deeply counterintuitive, but do they really? Perhaps they feel deeply non-biological and entirely un-egotistic, but the duty of a moral agent has to be the pursuit of right action even when it requires sacrifice and a rejection of cultural norms.
The only argument I’m left with is that if we do intend to continue creating new conscious beings, the only moral choice has to be an unending commitment to reducing the suffering of our fellow humans. We must commit to a future as free from pain and misery as possible and take seriously the multitude of harms that are daily inflicted on conscious beings, both human and non-human alike. Without that commitment, we’re as well as condemning future generations to war, disease, and ecological collapse. If not in the near future, then just as much for billions of souls on hundreds of planets scattered across the galaxy that we hope to explore.