Abstract

Benatar has argued that because the absence of pain is good even if not experienced, but the absence of pleasure is only bad if experienced as such, non-existence is always preferable to existence no matter how good that existence is, and we therefore have a moral duty to prevent new people from coming into existence. The fact that most people are unwilling to accept this, remaining “cheery optimists”, is explained as the result of primal psychological biases and mass deception. While I accept Benatar’s asymmetry claim (that not causing the existence of happy people is not wrong, but causing the existence of unhappy people is) and I also agree that we would not be worse off if we had never existed, I argue that we would not have been better off if we had never existed, or in other words that non-existence is not always preferable to existence. Accordingly, we do not have a moral duty to stop reproducing. The reason for this is that we do not have obligations to merely possible people, but only to existing people and ones that will exist. Procreation is therefore neither morally prohibited not morally required, but simply morally permissible. This explains and justifies the apparent asymmetry in our moral obligations regarding possible children. Finally, Benatar’s claim that cheery optimists like me vastly overestimate the quality of our lives is shown to rely on the unjustified assumption that even when we feel that our lives are worth living, they may actually not be.