The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions

by David Benatar

Ninety years are much closer to one year than to a thousand years.

Most humans have accommodated to the human condition and thus fail to notice just how bad it is.

Similarly, we expect recovery to take longer than injury, and thus we judge the quality of human life off that baseline, even though it is an appalling fact of life that the odds are stacked against us in this and other ways.

The fact that we fail to notice how bad human life is does not detract from the arguments I have given that there is much more bad than good. Human life would be vastly better if pain were fleeting and pleasure protracted; if the pleasures were much better than the pains were bad; if it were really difficult to be injured or get sick; if recovery were swift when injury or illness did befall us; and if our desires were fulfilled instantly and if they did not give way to new desires.

it is suggested that, without pain, we would incur more injuries.

It is also suggested that the bad things in life are necessary in order to appreciate the good things, or at least to appreciate them fully.

There is much pain that serves no useful purpose.

A life without pain would not be a human life.

That observation, even if true, would not detract from the claim that the quality of life of the infortunati is wretched.

Perhaps we would not be human if the quality of our lives were much better than it is. It does not follow that the quality of human life is good.

One way to ward off this implication would be to claim that there is a “Goldilocks” level of cognitive capacity. On this view, it is bad to have too little but also bad to have too much.

It is difficult to prove this to those who take it as an article of faith that humans have the optimum level of this trait.

But humans do suffer a great deal from such angst, which suggests that they may already have too much cognitive capacity for their own happiness.

If the choice is between a lower quality of life and a higher quality of life, the latter is preferable even if the enhanced beings with the better quality lives can no longer be categorized as humans.

Humans may not have “fallen,” but they are nonetheless low.

The optimistic delusions to which humans are prone do make the quality of human life a little less bad than it otherwise would be.

The quality of life just does not feel quite as bad as it would in the absence of the rose-colored glasses.

to palliate a predicament is not to elude it.

Although death is a release from innumerable living hells to which humans are vulnerable, it is remarkable how resistant humans typically are to death even when that aversion perpetuates their misery.

death is not bad for the person who dies.

For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation.

So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.

death is bad (for the being who dies) because it deprives that individual of the good that he or she would otherwise have had.

Sometimes, however, a longer life would either have contained no good or it would have contained so much bad that any good would have been outweighed.

It is possible for the quality of life, irrespective of which view of wellbeing one has, to be (or to become) so bad that death is better than continued life.

Death is bad not merely because it deprives one of the future good that one would otherwise have had, but also because it obliterates one.

Annihilation of a being may not be the worst of fates for that being, but it certainly seems to involve a very significant loss—namely, loss of the self.

“My death obliterates me. Not only am I deprived of future goods but I am also destroyed. This person, about whom I care so much, will cease to exist. My memories, values, beliefs, perspectives, hopes—my very self—will come to an end, and for all eternity.”

People have very strong desires not to die, and death frustrates these desires.

In other words, even when death is the least bad option, all things considered, there is still something lost.

If consciousness is viewed as a good independent of its contents, then even if the contents of consciousness are so appalling that it is less bad, all things considered, to lose consciousness permanently, the loss of consciousness may nonetheless be a bad and something to be mourned.

Thus, even when continued life would not have deprived the person who dies of any other goods, it would still be bad because it involved the annihilation of the being who dies. That is to say, death would still be an evil, albeit the lesser of two evils.

the bad of death first befalls somebody the moment that being dies. That is the point at which the person is annihilated and deprived of all future goods that she would otherwise have had.

The reason why death is bad for that person is precisely because it ends his existence and deprives him of all the good he would have had if he had continued existing.

This argument assumes that one’s pre-vital nonexistence and one’s postmortem nonexistence are evaluatively symmetrical.

We need to show why postmortem nonexistence is actually bad even though pre-vital nonexistence is not.

One important response to this problem is that while death does deprive the one who dies, pre-vital nonexistence involves no deprivation.

That is actually one reason why some people think that while death can deprive and is thus bad, it would not be good to live forever.

At the very least, the death deprives us of good that pre-vital nonexistence does not.

None of us has an interest in coming into existence. If we had never come into existence, no interest would have been thwarted.

However, once we do exist, we acquire and then have an interest in continuing to exist.

By coming into existence, many of these costs are inescapable, and one becomes vulnerable to others. This is why it is better never to come into existence.

We think it is bad to endure pain, suffering, frustration, sadness, trauma, to be betrayed, discredited, and to die. Coming into existence is the enabling condition for all these bad things and the guarantor of many of them.

The kind of existence we have an interest in continuing is existence as a person. This in turn requires sentience and sapience, both of which emerge slowly and in degrees after the human organism has already come into existence. Thus, coming into existence as a person is a process.

That is to say, it is bad both because it deprives us of further goods and because it annihilates us. In other circumstances, death may deprive one of no good. Then it is bad only because it annihilates us. If death is bad, then negative attitudes toward it are appropriate.

It seems unlikely that consciousness, so vulnerable even during life, could then survive the death and decay of our brains.

While mortals may yearn for temporally transcendent meaning, immortals may have no such need, but then the absence of such meaning would not be bad for them.

What it lacks is not shape but an end, yet this is precisely what is attractive to those who do not want the “ride” to the finish.

Our mortality is an unbearable limit that we seek to transcend. Yet it is an ultimate limit that we simply cannot transcend in any literal way.

We cannot preclude the possibility that somebody’s life may become unacceptably burdensome to him even though his death is not already imminent and he is not suffering the most extreme and intractable physical pain or irreversible loss of dignity.