David Benatar is an individual with strong convictions in the realm of procreation. Benatar strongly upholds his controversial belief that procreation is in of itself morally wrong, and by every conceivable measure causes more harm than good.
A deeply unique view of a basic facet of human existence, and a view that despite its controversial nature presents some fascinating questions to ponder regarding something that the vast majority of us view as a beautiful act.
While the call to eradicate all procreation, which would inevitably lead to the extinction of humanity, may be too extremist in nature, the ideologies that were the foundation for this belief system and in turn inspired these calls are not inherently wrong.
To better understand how Benatar could fully stand behind the belief of Anti-Natalism, one must first delve into the exploration of morality and the nature of childbirth as he states as the basis for his view. On a base level, Benatar views the act of bringing a child into a paradoxical, contradictory, and morally grey world as an inherently wrong practice.
In his view, “Procreation may seem like an innocuous activity, but it is in fact deeply harmful. In creating a child, one creates the basic condition for all the terrible things that will or could befall it … The surest way to prevent the awful things that will happen to one’s child is not to have that child.”
To bring a child into this world is to ensure they will experience pain and suffering; this is a certainty of human existence, an aspect that can only be wholly avoided via nonexistence. Further, Benatar recognizes the existence of good and happiness in life but argues that it is undeniably outweighed by the bad.
The bad that an individual brought into existence experiences are “not justified by the benefits of goods of existence”, and inherently the action of causing individual harm that cannot be justified by any metric is wrong, so their creation is morally wrong.
An oft-recognized argument against this is that the good to be found in human existence can outweigh the bad and leads to a justification for bringing an individual into existence. Benatar strongly argues that this is never the case, and despite personal bias, the overall objective opinion is that the overall quality of life of a human being is very poor.
Upon this statement, many would look to their own lives and prop up their own overall “positive” experiences as deflections of Benatar’s argument, as they believe that the good that has come from existence outweighs the bad.
It is easy to possess a clouded perspective of one’s experiences, as it is human nature to find existence a subjective thing. Overall, human beings tend to latch onto the good and push out the bad, both out of the need for personal comfort in the face of adversity and otherwise.
In the words of Benatar, “Both overestimation and underestimation of life’s quality are possible, but empirical evidence of various cognitive biases, most importantly an optimism bias, suggests that overestimation is the more common error”.
There are three specific biases that are inherently linked to the human ability to misconceive the quality of their own lives, each heavily impacting the way in which individuals perceive and judge the good to the bad. The first is the optimism bias or the way in which most individuals judge the quality of their lives to be much better than others.
Most people view their lives as superior, but this is a self-defeating concept as “most people cannot be better than most.” Most contemporary experts have drawn the conclusion that individuals tend to view their lives through an overly positive lens, having a distorted sense of how good they have it.
When the vast majority of people reflect on their past, they mainly think of the positive experiences rather than the negative, and when they reflect on the future that lies ahead of them, they tend to predict only the good that has yet to happen to them.
The second form of bias is called the accommodation bias and is centered around the concept that people tend to acclimate to negative experiences and aspects of their life over time and tend to not recognize the severity of the bad and only factor in the good.
When people are asked to judge the present quality of their lives over time, they often stick to a baseline regardless of the introduction of “bad” into their lives. They may briefly change the judgment of their quality of life to a lower level upon first being exposed to this bad, but they quickly return to viewing their lives as overall positive.
This is believed to be caused by the “accommodation” aspect of the human psyche, as people quickly accommodate the bad and believe their lives to be just as good as before despite the presence of the bad.
Because of this, individuals tend to ignore and underestimate the negative aspects of their lives and only properly recognize the good aspects, leading to a distorted view of the quality of life. The third and final bias is called the comparison bias and is based upon the idea that we implicitly judge the quality of our own lives through direct comparison with other people’s lives.
In theory, this should lead to us having a less distorted view of the overall quality of our lives, as there are countless individuals who are both better off than us and worse off than us. However, it is human nature to tend to only compare our lives with those who have it worse than us, inherently making our own lives look more positive in comparison.
Also, humans tend to ignore the “bad features shared across all human lives” as these shared experiences do not highlight differences, and instead lead to introspection that we do not have it any better off than our peers.
This willful ignorance of certain aspects and recognition of only differences we have from those who have objectively “worse” lives lead to a large bias of how good the quality of our lives is. It can be recognized from this existence of human bias regarding our perception of our own lives that we are not good judges of the quality of our own lives.
This is undeniable and makes the argument against Benatar about the quality of human existence with our own examples of existence a moot point, as our lives do not represent an example by which to judge the quality of all human existence.
Overall, Benatar uses this misconception of how good life is as support for his own argument for why procreation is a sin in of itself, as it inherently promises an individual, they will experience pain and suffering, whereas their continued nonexistence would ensure their avoidance of such horror.
Benatar goes into further depth about the ways in which the bad of life outweighs the good, which strengthens his argument against the bringing of a human into this morally grey world. While a very pessimistic view of human existence, it does bring to light some questions of human existence that we rarely bring into the light in day-to-day life.
