What’s So Good About Non-Existence?: An Alternative Explanation of Four Asymmetrical Value Judgments

Journal of Value Inquiry 49 (1-2):81-94 (2015)
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Abstract

There are cases where many think it would have been better for some child never to have been born. We can imagine a life characterized exclusively by suffering, never containing even the briefest moment of pleasure. The life goes exceedingly poorly – so poorly, we think, that it would have been better for the child never to have been. However, most of us think that many lives are not of this sort. Many lives are at least all right: the good moments outweigh the bad, and so it’s not better for those people never to have been born.David Benatar offers a compelling and challenging argument against this common view.See David Benatar [1]. He endorses anti-natalism, which is the view that there’s always a pro tanto moral reason, grounded in the interests of a potential child, against creating the child because it’s always better for the child never to have been born.As will be mentioned in note 13, there is strictly speaking a qualification: if one’s life contains no pains at all, then it’s ..

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Brian McLean
Ohio State University

Citations of this work

Heavenly Procreation.Blake Hereth - 2022 - Faith and Philosophy 39 (1):100-123.

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References found in this work

Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Ethics without principles.Jonathan Dancy - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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