Abstract
Might it be morally wrong to procreate? David Benatar answers affirmatively in Better Never to Have Been, arguing that coming into existence is always a great harm. I counter this view in several ways. First, I argue against Benatar’s asserted asymmetry between harm and benefit—which would support the claim that any amount of harm in a human life would make it not worth starting—while questioning the significance of his distinction between a life worth starting and one worth continuing. I further contend that his understanding of hedonism and desire-fulfillment theories distorts their implications for the quality of human life; as for objective-list theories, I rebut his critique of their human-centered basis of evaluation. Notwithstanding this multi-tiered challenge to Benatar’s reasoning, I conclude with praise for his work and the intellectual virtues it embodies.
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Notes
This theme is developed and its implications for reproduction explored in Shiffrin [1].
All page references in parentheses in the text will refer to this work.
In Chapter 4, he argues that we have a moral duty not to procreate and that the value of procreative liberty is best understood as supporting at most a legal right to have children.
Numerical identity is the relation a thing has to itself over time in being one and the same thing despite change. Numerical difference, then, implies the existence of distinct individuals.
For a good discussion of these and other conceptions of harm, see Meyer [4, Sects. 3.1 and 3.2].
See, e.g., Harman [5].
See, e.g., Feinberg [6].
A variant of this claim that may be attractive to those who deny that being brought into existence can harm one is that one is wronged, without being harmed, in precisely those cases in which the life one begins is not worth living. The life, on this view, is thought to be noncomparatively bad, that is, inherently bad for the subject—because the good things in the life don’t compensate for the bad things—not bad by comparison to some other state one could have been in. See McMahan [7, p. 215]. I will neglect this view because I am granting the assumption that coming into being can harm one.
One complicating factor in the discussion is that Benatar regards abortions, or at least relatively early abortions, as instances of not bringing someone into existence rather than instances of terminating a life already begun (see, e.g., pp. 24–25). In my judgment, he tends to conflate the ontological issue of when we originate and the ethical question of when we have moral status. For my effort to address these questions, see DeGrazia [8, chaps. 2, 7]. See also Shoemaker [9, chap. 4].
Benatar states his thesis with reference to pain and pleasure, taking these to be uncontroversial exemplars of harm and benefit, respectively. Although I agree with his assumption, I have encountered many philosophers who express doubts that pain, as opposed to suffering, is necessarily bad and that pleasure, as opposed to enjoyment, is necessarily good. For this reason, and because the categories of harm and benefit are more comprehensive, I find it more felicitous to speak of harm and benefit.
One might question the plausibility of my claim on the grounds that future persons seem to have interests, providing the basis for our obligations to future generations not to be negligent with the environment and important resources. I disagree, however, that future persons now have interests. Rather, they will later have interests, and rights, a fact that can explain our obligations to particular individuals of the future. Doing so, however, will leave much to explain in connection with the non-identity regarding future generations. I make a preliminary effort to address both issues—obligations to particular future individuals and the non-identity problem in relation to future generations—in DeGrazia [10, pp. 1222–1235].
See McMahan [11, pp. 353–354].
Derek Parfit tentatively defends this thesis in [3, appendix G]. Naturally, if coming into existence can be a benefit, it can also be a harm, an assumption I earlier granted to Benatar.
This thesis is developed in Sumner [13], although he qualifies the account by equating well-being with autonomous life-satisfaction.
The list just presented bears the significant influence of Griffin [14]. Ironically, while Griffin classifies his view as a sophisticated desire-fulfillment theory (chap. 2), he is often taken as a leading representative of the objective-list approach. For a version of the objective-list approach that construes these values in terms of capabilities, see Nussbaum [15].
As a secondary argument for rejecting a human-centered objective-list approach, Benatar argues that a proper understanding of why modesty is a virtue supports a sub specie aeternitatis view of the good: “The best solution to the problem of modesty is to say that although the modest person has an accurate perception of his strengths, he also recognizes that there is a higher standard by which he falls short” (p. 86). I do not believe this vindicates super-human standards for construing human good. First, the standards a modest person falls short of may be difficult yet achievable by real human beings. Second, a plausible alternative account of the virtue of modesty is that its value is primarily social: interactions and relations among people go better when people refrain from being very assertive about their own strengths.
I do not suggest that all aspects of our human nature need to be fulfilled in order for human beings to flourish. Human nature, after all, includes such traits as a tendency towards laziness, a capacity for cruelty, and a propensity to discriminate against those perceived as social outsiders. I do not have a developed account explaining which aspects of human nature are significantly connected to human flourishing, but I suspect that an adequate account will embrace those aspects of human nature that tend to promote, or at least do not undermine, harmonious social living.
References
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to David Shoemaker and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful feedback on a draft.
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DeGrazia, D. Is it wrong to impose the harms of human life? A reply to Benatar. Theor Med Bioeth 31, 317–331 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-010-9152-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-010-9152-y