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Notes
I have not had sight of the guest editors’ introduction, which explains why I am not responding to anything they might say there.
Thaddeus Metz and Ema Sullivan-Bissett in David Benatar, “Every Conceivable Harm: A Further Defence of Anti-Natalism”, South African Journal of Philosophy 31/1 (2012): 128–164; Christine Overall in David Benatar, “Not ‘Not Better Never to Have Been’: A reply to Christine Overall”, Philosophia 47/2 (2019): 353–367; and Thaddeus Metz again in David Benatar, Thaddeus Metz, Jason Werbeloff and Mark Oppenheimer, Conversations about the Meaning of Life, Johannesburg: Obsidian Worlds Publishing 2021.
Some of the latter comments, I acknowledge, could be interpreted instead as humorous. It is sometimes hard to tell the difference in written rather than oral renditions, but I’m certainly not averse to humour.
I mean parallel things in claims (1) to (3):
(1) the presence of pain (whether imposed or not withdrawn) is bad
(2) the presence of pleasure (whether provided or not withdrawn) is good.
(3) the absence of pain (whether withdrawn or withheld) is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone.
To clarify, this is deprivation in either of the senses.
See David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006, Chapter 6.
David Benatar, “The Wrong of Wrongful Life”, in American Philosophical Quarterly 37/2 (April 2000): 175–183; David Benatar, opus cit., pp. 22–28.
It also rests partly on empirical evidence, not all of which is psychological.
For reasons that are unclear to me, part of Professor Hauskeller’s response to my quality-of-life arguments are presented as part of his response to arguments about axiological asymmetry. For clarity, I consider them here, where they fit more naturally.
David Benatar, The Human Predicament, New York: Oxford University Press 2017, pp. 76–83.
Better Never to Have Been, opus cit., pp. 4, 31.
Emphasis added. I have made this clear in various places, including David Benatar, “Still better never to have been: A reply to (more of) my critics”, The Journal of Ethics 17/1–2 (June 2013): 121–151 (and especially pp. 135–138).
As Erik Magnusson notes, I did also discuss the risk argument in Better Never to Have Been, although it is true that the discussion in Debating Procreation is longer.
David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation: Is it Wrong to Reproduce?, New York: Oxford University Press 2015, p. 111.
Thad Metz does consider that I might respond that “expected value” rather than mere “value” is the relevant guiding principle for public policy. He rejects this point by saying that even if the chances of discovering extra-terrestrial life were much greater, government should still not fund such research. What this shows is that the likelihood of discovering extra-terrestrial life is not the only relevant variable. My point is that there are a number of reasons, other than Professor Metz’s, that make it reasonable to reject the idea that most of a state’s resources should be devoted to searching for extra-terrestrial life.
A “positive impact on” is not equivalent to “interacting with”. Professor Metz’s focus on the latter results in some of his arguments sounding more persuasive than they actually are. For example, in seeking to show that terrestrial meaning is more important than cosmic meaning, he asks who would “ditch” their “spouse and children in order to join the crew of a starship” in pursuit of an attractive extra-terrestrial. However, trade-offs between relationships, while sometimes necessary, are not always so. Some people can engage in activities that have meaning from the perspective of humanity, without sacrificing their personal relationships. There is no in-principle reason why the same could not be true of cosmic meaning. Your activities here on earth could have import for beings across the universe, in just the same way that a scientist’s work in the lab could have import for people around the globe.
These words were her daughter’s reaction, but Professor Overall says that she agrees.
Of course, I cannot be sure that Professor Overall will not nonetheless interpret my arguments personally, as she seems to have done in claiming that:
When I presented a paper critiquing Benatar’s anti-natalism at a conference he hosted in 2008, he
informed me that I should contemplate the fact that if I had not had my children, they would not have to suffer.
It is not called procreation for nothing. On the other hand, birds and bees, roses and rabbits to it too. To the extent that, roses, for example, are being creative in procreating, it must be a minimal sense of “creative”.
I used this term in Debating Procreation, opus cit., pp. 129–130.
Or a mother, where the new mother is not also the one providing most of the procreative labour. (It is hard to see how one could “appreciate” in the sense of “being grateful” for one’s own procreative labour.)
Professor Overall ignores another distinction: (i) Being aware of some of life’s hardships, and (ii) being aware of all of them. (See her comment that author Alison “Wearing has not overlooked the discomfort of being a writer”.) I am not denying that people have some awareness of life’s suffering. I am saying that the psychological evidence demonstrates that people tend to have an overly rosy view of life’s quality.
Better Never to Have Been, opus cit., p. 63.
Thus, it is not true, as Professor Overall alleges, that I accept the individual’s authority over assessments of their own inner life “but only in regard to an individual who, as it happens, assessed the bads in his life as not worth the goods – that is, someone whose judgment suits Benatar’s own theory”.
For example, she says that “most people don’t calculate the meaning of their lives as merely a mathematical sum, the subtraction of suffering from pleasure, desires unfulfilled from not fulfilled, or supposedly objective goods not acquired from those acquired.” One can be at least as mistaken, if not more so, about the meaning of one’s life as one can be about its quality. For more on the relationship between the meaning and the quality of life, see The Human Predicament, opus cit., pp. 64–67.
I have raised and responded to such arguments elsewhere. See, for example, The Human Predicament, opus cit., pp. 83–91.
The language of “edicts” and “directives” is uncharitable, to say the least, given the connotations if not also the denotations of these words. An edict is that “which is proclaimed by authority as a rule of action” or “an order issued by a sovereign to his subjects” (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973 p. 629). One denotation of “directive” is “an authoritative order or instrument issued by a high-level body or official” (Merriam Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/directive (Accessed 19 July 2021). I doubt that most moral philosophers see themselves as offering “edicts” or “directives”. A more charitable and reasonable interpretation is that they are arguing for conclusions about what people ought to do.
I do not know why he thinks this. Demonstrating his claim would require an extensive comparison of different areas within applied ethics. I realise that this would be a mammoth undertaking and thus I am not faulting Professor Smyth for failing to provide the evidence for his impression. Instead, I am registering my own impression that procreative ethics is not much different, in this regard, from many other areas of applied ethics.
Given the authority he grants to subjective assessments, he might be obliged to think that subjective reports of one’s temperament trump whatever inferences others might make.
I purposefully use the somewhat vague phrase “rather than to individual persons” in order to gloss over different ways in which Professor Smyth speaks about personal views of ethics.
Benatar, “Still better never to have been”, opus cit., p. 125.
Here I am simplifying the question for the sake of clarity. My asymmetry argument suggests how we should understand “net good for X”.
There is a crucial disanalogy here, namely that we are not comparing the interests of the red ball. This is because red balls do not have (morally considerable) interests.
Now, obviously, it is harder in the case of the red ball to explain how the absence of the red ball in O might relate to there being more red overall in that world. However, to the extent that this is true, the red ball is a weaker analogy for procreative ethics.
It is not entirely clear whether he here means impersonal in the first or the second sense. However, his conclusion seems to refer to impersonal in the second sense.
He initially seems to attribute to me the view that subjective assessments make no difference but then he says that “in a recent reply to Christine Overall, Benatar grudgingly concedes” that subjective assessments can make some difference. However, there was nothing grudging about it. Nor was it a “concession” to Christine Overall. I have repeatedly made the point about a “feedback loop”, including not only the source he cites (which was not a response to Christine Overall), but also Debating Procreation, opus cit., pp. 44, 73n8, and The Human Predicament, opus cit., p. 70).
However, it should be noted that the misanthropic argument does not have to take an impersonal form. While some of the harm that humans do is the result of aggregation, there is plenty of harm that each individual who we bring into existence is likely to cause. Many of those who reject impersonal views about right action can recognize a moral presumption against creating a harm-causing being. (My chapter on the misanthropic argument also included some specifically non-utilitarian considerations for weighing up the benefits and harms that one’s prospective child would produce. See Debating Procreation, opus cit., pp. 107–108.)
The Human Predicament, opus cit., p. 26. Here I quote only the conclusion, which is supported by some further comments, which I encourage critical readers to review.
Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid., p. 25
Perhaps an afternoon of watching soap operas would add meaning if the watching were a way of bonding with a parent, child, spouse or friend.
Thomas Nagel, whom Nicholas Smyth cites approvingly, refers to “’objective’ and ‘subjective’ perspectives in philosophy” and authored a book entitled The View from Nowhere. If all perspectives are necessarily subjective, what is an objective perspective? And what exactly is a view from nowhere?
Strictly speaking, it is not the asymmetry but rather anti-natalism that, if combined with the Epicurean view, leads to pro-mortalism.
For example, The Human Predicament, opus cit., p. 126.
Ibid., pp. 92–141.
Ibid., p. 123. I acknowledge that what I say elsewhere might have been insufficiently clear to ward off the misinterpretation. (See “Every conceivable harm: A reply to (more of) my critics”, South African Journal of Philosophy 31/1 (2012), p. 158.) However, the fact that the Epicurean view is embraced by a minority does have some relevance. If you are among the vast majority of people, you do not accept the view that Dr Sullivan-Bissett acknowledges needs to be combined with anti-natalism to lead to pro-mortalism. You are then hardly in a position to tell me that if anti-natalism were combined with a view that neither you nor I hold, then anti-natalism would lead to pro-mortalism. That would be of merely theoretical interest.
Indeed, Simon Cushing has a reply to such an objection (even though it was not worded in this way). See Simon Cushing, “Don’t Fear the Reaper: An Epicurean Answer to Puzzles about Death and Injustice,” in Kate Woodthorpe (Ed.), Layers of Dying and Death (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press 2007), pp. 136–7.
She seems to recognise this, because she says a view like Simon Cushing’s “might have the resources to retain the badness of murder” (my emphasis).
Dr Sullivan-Bissett recognizes that there might be other-regarding reasons to desist from suicide.
Moreover, given the difference between “never coming into existence” and “ceasing to exist”, it is not strictly accurate to say that death is “a return whence we came”.
He also drops the clause “when there is a high probability of occurrence”. I shall discuss that unnecessary change when I respond below to his rejection of the second premise in my argument.
Dr Magnusson does consider this possibility later in his paper, when he considers possible objections to his preferred version of the risk argument.
To clarify, the term “catastrophic harm” was not one that I used, but if understood in its plain sense, it is a fair representation of the harms about which I was speaking. (Dr Magnusson, as I shall now show, does not understand the term in the correct way.)
This is one of a few reasons why his thought experiment about the cancer patient fails.
In Debating Procreation, opus cit., p. 68, I noted that in the UK, forty percent of men and thirty-seven percent of women develop cancer.
Better Never to Have Been, opus cit., pp. 182–193.
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Benatar, D. Misconceived: Why These Further Criticisms of Anti-natalism Fail. J Value Inquiry 56, 119–151 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-022-09890-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-022-09890-w