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

by David Benatar

Nor is the harm produced by the creation of a child usually restricted to that child.

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

What we mean when we say that somebody would have been better off not having come into existence is that non-existence would have been preferable.

Just as life can be so bad that ceasing to exist is preferable, so life can be so bad that never coming into existence is preferable.

Comparing somebody's existence with his non-existence is not to compare two possible conditions of that person. Rather it is to compare his existence with an alternative state of affairs in which he does not exist.

The expression `a life worth living' is ambiguous between `a life worth continuing'-let us call this the present-life sense-and `a life worth starting'-let us call this the future-life sense.12

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

coming into existence in the morally relevant sense is more like a very extended process than an event.

it is not the case that people are valuable because they add extra happiness. Instead extra happiness is valuable because it is good for people-because it makes people's lives go better. To think otherwise is to think that people are mere means to the production of happiness.

it is not only the ratio of pleasure to pain that determines the quality of a life, but also the sheer quantity of pain. Once a certain threshold of pain is passed, no amount of pleasure can compensate for it.

one can endorse the view that coming into existence is always a harm and yet deny that the harm is great.

One of the implications of my argument is that a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad-a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pin-prick-is worse than no life at all.

as pleasant as his life is, it has no advantages over never existing. Yet coming into existence has the d...

If all lives were as free of suffering as that of the imagined person who suffers only a pin-prick, the harms of coming into existence would easily be outweighed by the benefits to others (including the potential parents) of that person coming into existence. In the real world, however, there are no lives even nearly this charmed.37

Since all existers suffer harm, procreation always causes harm.

What matters is not that people have satisfied desires but that they do not have unsatisfied ones. It is the avoidance of frustration that is important.

Antifrustrationism implies that it would be better not to create people. Their satisfied preferences will not be better than the absence of their preferences had they not existed. However, their unsatisfied preferences-of which there will be many-are worse than the absence of their preferences if they were not created.

coming into existence will be a greater harm for some than for others. The worse a life is, the greater the harm of being brought into existence.

How well or badly a life goes depends not simply on how much good and bad there is, but also on other considerations-most prominently considerations about how that good and bad is distributed.

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.

pleasures and other goods can also be distributed too widely within a life, thereby making them so mild as to be barely distinguishable from neutral states. A life so characterized might be worse than one in which there were a few more noticeable `highs'.

Arguably, once a life reaches a certain threshold of badness (considering both the amount and the distribution of its badness), no quantity of good can outweigh it, because no amount of good could be worth that badness.5

The first, most general and most influential ofthese psychological phenomena is what some have called the Pollyanna Principle,' a tendency towards optimism.'

This selective recall distorts our judgement of how well our lives have gone so far. It is not only assessments of our past that are biased, but also our projections or expectations about the future. We tend to have an exaggerated view of how good things will be.10

most people believe that they are better off than most others or than ...

objective assessments of people's health, judging by physical symptoms, are not as good a predictor of peoples' subjective...

Another well-known psychological phenomenon that makes our self-assessments of well-being unreliable and that explains some (but not all) of the Pollyannaism just mentioned is the phenomenon of what might be called adaptation, accommodation, or habituation.

Although there is some dispute about how much adaptation occurs and how the extent of the adaptation varies in different domains of life, there is agreement that adaptation does occur.20

Because the subjective 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...

A third psychological factor that affects self-assessments of well-being is an implicit comparison with the well-being of others. 21 It is not so much how well one's life goes as how well it goes in comparison with others that d...

self-assessments are a better indicator of the comparative rather than actual quality of one's life. One effect of this is that those negative features of life that are shared by everybody are inert in people's judgements about their own well-being. Since these featur...

Of these three psychological phenomena, it is only Pollyannaism that inclines people unequivocally towards more positive assessments of how well their life is going. We adapt not only to negative situations but also to positive ones, and we compare ourselves not only with th...

Consider, for example, conditions causing negative mental states daily or more often. These include hunger, thirst, bowel and bladder distension (as these organs become filled), tiredness, stress, thermal discomfort (that is, feeling either too hot or too cold), and itch. For billions of people, at least some of these discomforts are chronic. These people cannot relieve their hunger, escape the cold, or avoid the stress. However, even those who can find some relief do not do so immediately or perfectly, and thus experience them to some extent every day.

Now add those discomforts, pains, and sufferings that are experienced either less frequently or only by some (though nonetheless very many) people. These include allergies, headaches, frustration, irritation, colds, menstrual pains, hot flushes, nausea, hypoglycaemia, seizures, guilt, shame, boredom, sadness, depression, loneliness, body-image dissatisfaction, the ravages of AIDS, of cancer, and of other such life-threatening diseases, and grief and bereavement. The reach of negative mental states in ordinary lives is extensive.

the intrinsic pleasures of existing do not constitute a net benefit over never existing. Once alive, it is good to have them, but they are purchased at the cost of life's misfortune

Given just how many negative mental states we have, the many desires for their absence are thwarted. We also desire pleasures and some of those desires are satisfied. However, as I shall show, there is a lot of dissatisfaction and not that much satisfaction, contrary to what many people think.

a desire must be present before it can be satisfied and thus we endure a period of frustration before the desire is fulfilled.

we usually persist in a state of desire for a period of time. This time may vary-from minutes to decades.

Very few people ever attain the kind of control over their lives and circumstances that they would like.

even though the desire remains fulfilled another desire arises in its place. Thus the initial satisfaction soon gives way to new desires.

Subjective well-being, he said, `reflects a balance between one's aspirations and one's situation-and with long term prosperity, one's aspirations tend to rise, adjusting to the situation'.33

Life, on the Schopenhauerian view, is a constant state of striving or willing-a state of dissatisfaction. Attaining that for which one strives brings a transient satisfaction, which soon yields to some new desire. Were striving to end, the result would be boredom, another kind of dissatisfaction.36 Striving is thus an unavoidable part of life. We cease striving only when we cease living.

Happiness, for him, is but a temporary absence of suffering. Satisfaction is the ephemeral fulfilment of desire. In hedonistic terms, there are no intrinsic pleasures. All pleasures are ...

we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life.

the state of having one's desires fulfilled can be attained in one of two ways: (a) having fulfilled whatever desires one has, or (b) having only those desires that will be fulfilled.38