Q&A: Another continuation of the discussion on antinatalism
Another continuation of the discussion on antinatalism
Question
Following this discussion:
I think I didn’t explain myself properly. I’ll try again. The claim is that the absence of evil (suffering) is good, but the absence of good is not bad. I’ll give you an example. Suppose you’re considering whether to buy your daughter a candy without her knowing about it, and then decide not to. Is that a bad act? You denied her something good, but she doesn’t know about it and therefore doesn’t care either (this is of course analogous to not bringing a child into the world). If, on the other hand, she asks you for a candy and you refuse, that may cause her suffering and therefore it is bad. The same applies to bringing a child into the world. When you don’t bring him into the world (deny him good), there is nobody who cares about that. When you do bring him into the world, there is already someone who cares and who may not like existence. If it turns out that he really does prefer existence to non-existence (if you read Benatar you’ll see that this is something very hard to assess, and in short he says that it’s not that most people would prefer not to have been born, but rather that they simply don’t want to die, and those are different things; and one must also take optimism bias into account, and whether he feels what he thinks he feels, etc.), then in retrospect bringing him into the world was not immoral. But the question is not retrospectively; it is whether, before you bring him into the world, that gamble is really moral. I think that maybe the explanation I gave above could also answer your second paragraph?
Answer
You are presenting a dispute about reality: whether people would want to be born or not. Everything else is just repetitions of what has already been said. I don’t see what I have to add.
Discussion on Answer
It was uploaded now because only now did the editor have time to upload old correspondence from the email.
I hope he’ll manage to merge this with the beginning of the thread, and then it will already be clear that the topic has been exhausted.
It’s a bit strange to me that this only appeared on the site now, but since it already has, then so be it:
Do you not agree that there are people who would not want to have been born? Here’s a thought experiment: in front of you there is a button that, if pressed, would let you experience your entire life again (all the fun a second time!). Would you press it? Try to answer based on the pleasure you experienced versus the suffering you experienced.
But even if the answer is yes in your case, that still doesn’t justify forcing life on others and taking the risk that for them the answer will be different. It’s simply an unnecessary gamble whose downside could cause a great deal of suffering.