Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

by David Benatar

the fact that one can construct a joke about the view that coming into existence is always a harm, does not show that that view itself is laughable nonsense.

true for lots of stuff

any self-consciously altruistic motivation to have children is thoroughly misguided where the intended beneficiaries are the children, and, as I shall argue, inappropriate where they are other people or the state.

adding more people is almost assuredly good for other people / the state, as Hanson says

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.

core claim of book but it seems like i probably disagree. bringing pleasure into the world is a good thing..

(3) 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.

disagree here. best part about this book, potentially, is that it forces me to admit that pleasure, on its own, is desiarble. Tb should be called, is the absence of pleasure bad?

Of the pain of an existing person, (3) says that the absence of this pain would have been good even if this could only have been achieved by the absence of the person who now suffers it.

the rejection of 4 seems to imply that people have an ethical obligation to bring joy into the world, and since they have the most control over their own joy, they should...

only a few also think that amongst these is a duty to bring happy people into existence.

trading off their potential pain, absolutely. maybe this should be called, the Tb that is, quite literally, "life is a trade off"

In other words, it would be wrong not to create such people if we could create them without great cost to ourselves.

agree, no doubt

Remorse about not having children is remorse for ourselves-sorrow about having missed childbearing and child-rearing experiences.

totally untrue, reasoning based on how people generally reason, rather than how they could reason

Similarly, nobody really mourns for those who do not exist on Mars, feeling sorry for potential such beings that they cannot enjoy life.28

another bullet I have to bite and include in the Tb, I think, when it is possible, that happy minds should be spread all across the universe. of course have to assume no externalities to other minds or possibility of future conflict, or at least weigh this in the trade off

Yet,

so far, this book made me more likely to want to have kids (also potentially include in the Tb)

Although we regret the suffering of distant others, at least when we think about them, we are not usually overcome with melancholy about

we should feel bad tho

it is not the case that people are valuable because they add extra happiness.

why couldn't this be a part of the equation?

apples. meet oranges

However, we would condemn breaking that person's arm in order to secure some greater benefit, such as `supernormal memory, a useful store of encyclopedic knowledge, twenty IQ points worth of extra intellectual ability, or the ability to consume immoderate amounts of alcohol or fat without side effects'.41

again, annoying, bc I might not do this

Finally, the hypothetical consent is not based on the individual's values or attitudes towards risk.

I think we should presume some amt of hypothetical consent

she can draw the distinction between children and potential children, and thus ward off the paternalistic objection that parents may inflict the harms of life on a potential child for that child's sake.

I agree with this distinction

B.

his assault on preference utilitarianism does seem pretty strong

it is better to have existed and lost (both by suffering within life and then by ceasing to exist) than never to have existed at all.

big q

they deny that coming into existence would have been a harm had their lives contained but the smallest amount of bad.

this is my camp

life in which all the good occurred in the first half, and uninterrupted bad characterized the second half, would be a lot worse than one in which the good and bad were more evenly distributed.

why?

bad.

eh, I disagree w his exs of distributional stuff. even tho I agree it could be true in theory

sense of well-being tracks recent change in the level of well-being better than it tracks a person's actual level of well-being, it is an unreliable indicator of the latter.

mmm there are degrees of reliability

people are more prone to comparing themselves with those who are worse off than with those who are better off.22

surely this isn't always true

However, even those who can find some relief do not do so immediately or perfectly, and thus experience them to some extent every day. In fact, if we think about it, significant periods of each day are marked by some or other of these states.

they are now but must they need be eventually?

How often does one feel neither too hot nor too cold, but exactly right?30

totally ridiculous, there's a buffer zone in which it doesn't matter

they are purchased at the cost of life's misfortune a cost that is quite considerable.

yes, that is a cost, we must consider the costs and the benefits

No desires for that which we lack are ever satisfied immediately. Such a desire must be present before it can be satisfied and thus we endure a period of frustration before the desire is fulfilled.

could be for like 10 ms tho, or your bodys systems could immediately fix it so you don't even know its bad until its fixed

Long incarceration followed by freedom simply is not better than lifelong freedom.

I would say it depends on the circumstances, could be better for some people

would be better if desire fulfilment required less unfulfilment along the way.

I agree

one's life would thereby transmute from the miserable to the magnificent. This is hard to swallow.

why? refuted "nothing is good or bad, except thinking makes it so"

However, most people regard it as tragic when somebody dies at forty (at least if that person's quality of life was comparatively good). But why should a death at ninety not be tragic if a death at forty is?

very true, some of us are hypocritical about this, but not all of us

Most people, however, find the idea of life's meaninglessness intolerable and suggest that our lives are meaningful.

I think life is most likely useless. but there are very few policy implications of that. beliefs should be probabilistic and actions should be based on the policy implications so I focus my actions in things which assume that life is somehow useful.

If one thinks that our extra cognition nonetheless makes our lives richer or better than those of non-human primates, we must concede that it would be still better if we were better equipped cognitively.

true, and I bite this bullet. this book would be hard to read if you weren't a bullet biter, though

That is unless we can show that we have the ideal degree of cognitive ability, which sounds suspiciously self-serving.

flash, q what should we worry about we define or calculate the ideal value of some parameter to be in the same reference class that we ourselves are a part of? a, that we are fucking biased

It is this that we take to be a virtue.

perspective taking is a virtue

bloody.

he does not consider the argument that things are getting better. contrast this with pinkers book, maybe

A charmed life is so rare that for every one such life there are millions of wretched lives.

finally, a falsifiable claim

of coital interests accounts for much procreation. Indeed many people are brought into existence not because their parents sought to satisfy their own procreative interests, but because their parents were satisfying their own coital interests.

lol

babies.

lol. such a roundabout way to say such a basic thing. good example of the stilted prose.

A legal right to freedom of speech, for example, exists not to protect speech that everybody takes to be good and wise, but rather to protect speech that at least some take to be evil or stupid.

q, what sort of speech is the freedom of speech meant to protect? a, the sort of speech that at least some find to be stupid or evil

safe, highly effective contraceptive substance could be widely administered without the knowledge of the population or the consent of individual people-in the drinking water, for example, or by aerial spray.

lol

wrong.

contrast this with the story in children of men, his proposal leads somewhat naturally to that

That delay in abandoning a legal right to procreate may be regrettable, but may be less regrettable than the alternative of prematurely abandoning such a right.

ah, he is willing to consider trade offs here!

Thus the reason why those with impairments are disabled, where they are indeed disabled, is not because they have some inability, but rather because society is constructed in a way that excludes people with that inability.

flash this maybe. q,

Instead it is the fact that society does not accommodate their particular inabilities. In other words, what makes the lives of the blind or deaf go worse is the discriminatory social environment in which they find themselves.

and this could be overcome via tech

Instead I shall show how my argument that coming into existence is always a serious harm bolsters the disability rights position against its usual opponents while showing that both it and the position it criticizes are wrong.

lol

It could still be argued that although people should be legally entitled to have children, they should not be immune from civil suit should those children be unhappy with having been brought into existence.

should children be allowed to sue their parents if dissatisfied ?