Abstract

This article is part of a special issue devoted to David Benatar’s anti-natalism. There are places in his oeuvre where he contends that, while our lives might be able to exhibit some terrestrial or human meaning, that is not enough to make them worth creating, which would require a cosmic meaning that is unavailable to us. There are those who maintain, in reply to Benatar, that some of our lives do have a cosmic meaning, but I argue that Benatar is correct that none of our lives does. I instead reply that a lack of cosmic meaning is insufficient to infer that our lives are all bad or, more carefully, bad enough to make procreation impermissible. In particular, I advance a principle by which to judge the absence of a good to be bad, roughly according to which the more unavailable a good is, the less reason there is to exhibit negative reactive attitudes toward its absence. It follows that there is no reason to regret or be sad about the lack of cosmic meaning, given that it is impossible for us.