by Tim Sommers
At one point in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (401 BCE), the chorus offers this bit of wisdom: “Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light, the next best is to go whence he came as soon as possible.”
This particular way of putting it is usually traced back to Silenus (700 BCE). However, the view was not an aberration among the Ancient Greeks. Three hundred years later, Aristotle mentions it as a well-known and popular enough view to be the jumping-off point from which to examine alternatives. Plutarch and Herodotus treat it, not as startling pessimistic, but as mainstream.
In the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer said that “Human life must be some kind of mistake.” And implied that “If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone” the human race would not continue to exist.
Contemporary South African philosopher David Benatar agrees. “Coming into existence,” he argues, “is always a serious harm.” And “It would be better to never have been.”
The view that it is morally wrong to bring new people into existence is called antinatalism. General pessimism about life, on the other hand, including ourselves and the lives of people who already exists, tends to be based on empirical claims about the proportion of pleasure to pain in a life. There is no in-principle reason to be sure ahead of time that a life won’t be worth living. Certainly, all the contemporary antinatalists I know of avoid extending the claim that it’s wrong to bring new life into existence to advocating suicide. To be clear, antinatilists do not encourage suicide or think that this view implies anyone should commit suicide.
Suicide may sometimes be justified; for example, to avoid death by torture or a terminal and excruciating illness. And surely there is some connection between the question ‘What if anything gives our lives enough meaning to be worth living?’ and ‘Should we bring new lives into existence?’
In any case, I want to talk about Benatar because he seems to have come up with a new argument to defend antinatalism. A new argument in a debate thousands of years old is worth looking at – even one as depressing as this.
Here is the asymmetry argument for antinatalism.
People either exist or they don’t.
If they exist, then pain is bad for them.
If they don’t exist, pain is not bad for them (because they don’t feel it).
If they exist, pleasure is good for them.
If they don’t exist, pleasure is not good for them, but it’s not bad either.
So, anyone who exists will experience a mix of pain and pleasure, but since lack of pleasure is not bad, nonexistence avoids pain with no symmetrical loss of pleasure.
It is, at the very least, not worse, and almost certainly better, not to be brought into existence at all, therefore.
You might think that it’s bad that someone is missing out on pleasure, hence that the absence of pleasure is actually bad and not neutral. But Benatar points out that you can’t “miss out” on something if you don’t exist. There is no existing being deprived of pleasure because there is no existing being.
Benatar says that there are a couple of quite common moral intuitions that also support this argument.
One is that we believe that it is morally wrong to create a child that we know will suffer terribly even if we think they will also experience some pleasures. But asymmetrically, we don’t feel that we have a duty to create a child whenever we could do so in a way that would likely lead to them having more pleasure than pain.
The other intuition is this. We don’t ordinarily treat the non-creation of a happy child as a tragedy. We don’t think that there is anyone who is deprived of pleasure by our not having a child – not even the nonexistent child.
Finally, Benatar says, the calculation might be different if there were some cosmic meaning to life: a God, a purpose, a plan, something. Instead, any meaning comes from within a life and so is local, temporary, and fragile. (I bet he is fun at parties.)
How can we push back against a view like this? The easiest way is to say there is more to life than pleasure and what makes life worth living is something else – or some other things.
The easiest way to do that would be to argue that there is a God and life does have a transcendent purpose. But what if we grant Benatar his cosmic nihilism. What can we do then?
What are some things that go beyond pleasure? Truth, beauty, goodness? Shear existential choice-making? Existential freedom? (But for what?) Relationships?
How much pain do we have to outweigh?
Kant would decidedly have given a God-based answer to this, but I have often wondered if there is a secular version of his view. The point of life, he wrote, is not to be happy, but to be worthy of happiness. What make us worthy of happiness is to treat others with dignity and respect and as a self-originating ends. Is it possible that human dignity, and the sense that there is more to life than pleasure and pain, is constructed by us collectively by acting as if we are all worthy of that dignity? I don’t know.