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

by David Benatar

The central idea of this book is that coming into existence is always a serious harm. That idea will be defended at length, but the basic insight is quite simple: 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. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence.

One can never have a child for that child's sake. That much should be apparent to everybody, even those who reject the stronger view for which I argue in this book-that not only does one not benefit people by bringing them into existence, but one always harms them.

This is because sentient existence comes at a significant cost. In being able to experience, sentient beings are able to, and do, experience unpleasantness.

It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.6

Thus any pair of procreators can view themselves as occupying the tip of a generational iceberg of suffering.'

The recognition of how unlikely it was that one would have come into existence, combined with the recognition that coming into existence is always a serious harm, yields the conclusion that one's having come into existence is really bad luck.

Those with pro-natal views are more likely to pass on their genes. It is part of the pro-natal bias that most people simply assume that passing on one's genes is both good and a sign of superiority.

If 'backward' is understood as `primitive' it is procreation that is backward, and rationally motivated non-procreation that is evolutionarily more recent and advanced.

Notice, by extension, that in a democracy those committed to non-procreation could never, in the long run, prevail politically against those committed to procreation.

Should somebody's freedom to create a person be more inviolable than somebody else's freedom to have a friend or family member immigrate?

Increasing one's value by having children might be like increasing one's value by taking hostages. We might find it unfair and decide not to reward it. That may make children's lives worse, but must the cost of preventing that outcome be placed on the shoulders of those who do not have children?

When a person claims that his life is so bad that he would be better off dead, he need not mean literally that were he to die he would exist in some better state (although some people do believe this). Instead he may mean that he prefers not to be, rather than to continue living in his condition.

My argument so far rests on the view that there is a morally important distinction between future-life and present-life cases. There are some lines of argument that threaten to diminish the importance of this distinction and thus weaken my case.

For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur.21 None of this befalls the non-existent. Only existers suffer harm.

In other words, judged in terms of the interests of a person who now exists, the absence of the pain would have been good even though this person would then not have existed.

If I am correct then it is uncontroversially the case that (i) is bad and (2) is good. However, in accordance with the considerations mentioned above, (3) is good even though there is nobody to enjoy the good, but (4) is not bad because there is nobody who is deprived of the absent benefits.

If pain is bad and pleasure is good, but the absence of pain is good and the absence of pleasure not good, then there is no symmetry between pleasure and pain.

In the second comparison, however, the pleasures of the existent, although good, are not an advantage over non-existence, because the absence of pleasures is not bad. For the good to be an advantage over non-existence, it would have to have been the case that its absence were bad.

It is good that existers enjoy their pleasures. It is also good that pains are avoided through non-existence. However, that is only part of the picture. Because there is nothing bad about never coming into existence, but there is something bad about coming into existence, it seems that all things considered non-existence is preferable.