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Although the good things in one's life make it go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived.
I shall not claim that the never-existent literally are better off. Instead, I shall argue that coming into existence is always bad for those who come into existence. In other words, although we may not be able to say of the never-existent that never existing is good for them, we can say of the existent that existence is bad for them.
Nor is the harm produced by the creation of a child usually restricted to that child. The child soon finds itself motivated to procreate, producing children who, in turn, develop the same desire. Thus any pair of procreators can view themselves as occupying the tip of a generational iceberg of suffering.'
Should somebody's freedom to create a person be more inviolable than somebody else's freedom to have a friend or family member immigrate?
breeders enhance their value by having children. Parents with dependents are somehow thought to count for more. If, for example, there is some scarce resource -a donor kidney perhaps and of the two potential recipients one is a parent of young children and one is not, the parent, all things being equal, will likely be favoured.
The absence of bad things, such as pain, is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that good, whereas the absence of good things, such as pleasure, is bad only if there is somebody who is deprived of these good things. The implication of this is that the avoidance of the bad by never existing is a real advantage over existence, whereas the loss of certain goods by not existing is not a real disadvantage over never existing.
Now the problem is that a number of people have employed the present-life sense and applied it to future-life cases,13 which are quite different.
It does not follow, however, that if a life is worth continuing it is worth beginning or that if it is not worth beginning it would not be worth continuing.
For instance, while most people think that living life without a limb does not make life so bad that it is worth ending, most (of the same) people also think that it is better not to bring into existence somebody who will lack a limb. We require stronger justification for ending a life than for not starting one.
the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone,
whereas (4) the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.
we think that there is no duty to bring happy people into existence because while their pleasure would be good for them, its absence would not be bad for them
One might grieve about not having had children, but not because the children that one could have had have been deprived of existence. Remorse about not having children is remorse for
ourselves-sorrow
positive utilitarians-who are interested not only in minimizing pain but also in maximizing pleasure-would tend to lament the absence of additional possible pleasure even if there were nobody deprived of that pleasure.
