Life is Good

Abstract

David Benatar has made a number of distinct claims leading to conclusion that giving birth to people harms them, that it is overall impermissible to do so from a moral point of view, and that hence, giving birth needs to be strongly discouraged (Benatar 2006). In response to his work, his exciting direct antinatalist arguments, primarily those concerning asymmetries (such as his claim that being born is always a but not being born is never a harm), have taken center stage. The issue whether is all that bad or is in fact good has been relatively neglected. I will take up this matter, and argue that there is a strong case to be made for of life, in a way that significantly affects plausibility of Benatar's views.Benatar himself sees goodness of life issue as a central component of his position. Even if one grants asymmetry arguments, how bad bringing people into existence would be depends on how bad would be. Even more importantly, badness of actual lives carries significant independent argumentative weight. According to Benatar, If people realized just how bad their lives were, they might grant that their coming into existence was a even if they deny that coming into existence would have been a had their lives contained but smallest amount of harm (Benatar 2006: 60). Moreover, since asymmetry arguments are controversial, and confront strong pronatalist arguments and intuitions, it matters a great deal for way we will evaluate Benatar's position whether indeed the best lives are very bad, and therefore that being brought into existence is always a considerable harm (Benatar 2006: 61).I will assume here familiarity with Benatar's position, and not take care to note places where I agree with him. I will also not go in detail into implications of my claims for Benatar's arguments, except for his claims against view that is good. Finally, I will consider badness and of as composing one topic, as I think Benatar views this as well.The (or badness) of is a matter of degree. I do not think that there is any one conclusive or decisive argument to be made either way on this topic of how good is, yet I do think that there is a strong case for rejecting Benatar's overwhelmingly negative view, a case which can be constructed cumulatively, based upon a number of diverse considerations. Sketching some of these will be my aim here.1. Happiness:One way in which we can try to understand whether is good is to ask living: this is frequently done, and there is a large research literature that reports and compares people's replies on these issues, primarily couched in terms of happiness (for a general survey of subjective well-being literature, see Diener 1999). In modern Western societies, consistently large numbers of people (over 80%) report fairly high to very high levels of happiness. One set of studies found that a full ninety-three percent of Americans report feeling very happy, pretty happy, or moderately happy (see Liszka 2005: 326). This means that all those people would be more or less perplexed by Benatar's views, not quite knowing what to make of them. For them, at least, is happy, well-being prevalent, satisfaction wide-spread; in short, is experienced as good, or at least quite good.This is supported by fact that nearly everyone views premature termination of lives, both their own and others', as a huge loss. Would this not imply, then, that they view continuation of as something at least quite good? That great majority of people would view painless cessation of their as a terrible disaster and loss seems to me to show that people almost universally view living as being good fortune.It is not easy to claim that nevertheless people are not really happy; indeed it may not be clear what this means. Happiness seems akin to pain here: genuine first-personal reports of pain have strong evidential weight, which are very difficult to dismiss, and analogous considerations seem to apply to happiness. …