Better Never to Have Been

Many philosophers tend to think that a good philosophy book should give a balanced account of the relevant issues, and elucidate and explicate people's intuitions on the topic with which it deals. But many significant philosophical contributions have not been anything like that: on the contrary, they have gone to extremes in a single direction, showing us how far a philosophical imagination can advance into the unknown, and unveiling the unexpected things we find once we get there. David Benatar's challenging book is of the second type. Readers who let go of their scepticism and are willing to come along for the ride will, at the very least, enjoy a fascinating and unusual philosophical journey. The structure of the book is straightforward and clear. In ch. 2 Benatar argues on conceptual grounds that coming into existence is always a harm. In ch. 3 he argues that every life, even the best, is very bad. Given those conclusions, the rest of the book is a systematic and often ingenious spelling out of the implications. In ch. 4 he argues for a moral duty of ‘anti‐natalism’, namely, the duty not to have children. In ch. 5 he urges that we should take a ‘pro‐death’ view of abortion, so that (given plausible assumptions about when persons come to exist in a morally significant way), whenever a woman becomes pregnant, abortion in the early months of pregnancy should be the default position. Ch. 6 makes the case for the claim that the ideal human population is zero, and that human extinction is to be welcomed (if, perhaps, gradually rather than all at once). The concluding chapter tries to counter the anticipated intuition that such views must be wrong, and to show how, once one already exists, death can be bad (and suicide not inevitable), even though it is always bad to have come into existence

Abortion · Duty · Epistemology · Harm · Philosophical methodology · Population · Pregnancy · Skepticism · Sociology · Theology · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Theology and Philosophy of Evil

• Better Never to Have Been

  Open Access•Joseph Packer•philoSOPHIA•2010

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• Wailing from the heights of velleity

  Jeroen Robbert Zandbergen•South African Journal of Philosophy•2021

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