Making Sense with Sam Harris - #107 — Is Life Actually Worth Living?

Episode Date: December 6, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with David Benatar about his philosophy of “anti-natalism." They discuss the asymmetry between the good and bad things in life, the ethics of existential risk, the moral landscape, the limits and paradoxes of introspection, the “experience machine” thought experiment, population ethics, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm speaking with David Benatar. David is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He's the author of a few books, Better Never to Have Been, The Harm of Coming into Existence, and most recently, The Human Predicament, A Candid Guide to life's biggest questions.

And he's a philosopher who many of you have wanted me to speak with. I've been getting emails and tweets about him for quite some time. He is perhaps the most prominent exponent of a philosophy called antinatalism. And you will hear much more about that in today's episode. natalism. And you will hear much more about that in today's episode. The question for David really is whether or not existence is worth the trouble. And he answers that question with an emphatic no. And this makes for an interesting conversation. As you'll hear, there are a couple of places where intuitions diverge, and I think you just have to pick which intuition you find most compelling there. But we talk about many interesting things.

We talk about the asymmetry between the good and bad things in life, the ethics of existential risk, the difference between starting and continuing a life. He sees those as very different. Our built-in bias towards existence and how that may confuse us. The relationship between antinatalism and another position called pro-mortalism, the idea that it would be a good thing if we all died in our sleep tonight. I talk for a few minutes about my notion of the

moral landscape, and we also talk about the limits and paradoxes of introspection, how viewing your life in a certain way can actually change what there is to notice about your life. And there are many other topics here. Population ethics is a very rich conversation for those of you who like moral philosophy. And it got me to realize at least one thing that resolves for me at least one of the troubling paradoxes in Derek Parfit's philosophy. So I found it a very valuable conversation, and I hope you do as well. And now I bring you David Benatar. I'm here with David Benatar. David, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Nice to be with you.

So I've been hearing about you for at least a year. I plead unfamiliarity with your books, but people have been emailing me about you. I think they have read some of your articles and some undoubtedly have read your books. but you have been laying out a philosophy that is quite novel and quite pessimistic and quite interesting. It really strikes to the very core of the question, is life worth living? And your answer to that is a resounding no, at least for those who don't yet exist. And no doubt, most of what is interesting in moral philosophy can be brought to bear on this question. Before we dive into your philosophy, give us just a kind of a potted history of what you've been doing intellectually

and the kinds of questions you've focused on. Well, this is one question that I've sort of revisited on multiple occasions and also examined issues related to it. I suppose my broad interests are in moral philosophy, more specifically in practical ethical questions. But often when I look at the practical ethical questions, I'm interested in the theoretical issues that lie behind them. And I suppose in this area of procreative ethics, those two come together quite well. But I have written about other topics as well.

Another book that I wrote is called The Second Sexism, which is about discrimination against men and boys. And then I've written on a range of practical ethical questions. And you're currently a professor of philosophy. That's correct, in Cape Town. So let's just jump in because this really is fascinating. You describe your view as antinatalism. Is that a coinage from you or did that view exist before you started working in this area?

I've been asked that question and quite frankly, I don't know the answer, whether I coined the term or whether I heard it somewhere. I've tried to do some sort of intellectual archaeology to find out whether I did hear it from somewhere else, and I've been unsuccessful. But the idea itself, I think, dates back to much earlier times. One hears it even in ancient times, the idea that it would have been better never to have been born. And a more recent exponent, of course, was Arthur Schopenhauer. So these ideas have been around for a long time, and that doesn't surprise me. Yeah, it's interesting.

There's quite a convergence between your view and Buddhism. I'm sure someone must have pointed that out to you at some point. Yes, exactly. They have. Perhaps we'll touch on that, because I have a longstanding interest in Buddhism and related practices like meditation. So just lay out the argument for antinatalism. Make the case for us at the outset here. Well, perhaps I should clarify what the view is first. So it's the view that we ought not to bring new people into existence, but I think the view is broader that we ought not to bring new sentient beings into existence.

Right. So it's not just the view that it's harmful to come into existence, but a further view that it's also wrong to bring beings into existence. And I think there are a range of arguments for this position. Some of them I characterize as philanthropic arguments, and others I think are misanthropic arguments. And here, of course, I'm restricting the scope to bringing human beings into existence, although I think that parallel points might be able to be made about other sentient beings. The original arguments that are advanced are the philanthropic ones, and those really are concerned about the being that you'll bring into existence.

And my view is not only that it's always a harm for that being, but that it's also a very serious harm. And given the seriousness of that harm, I think that it's always going to be wrong to create a new being. More recently, I've developed some misanthropic arguments. And those have to do with the harm that the being you're bringing to existence will do to others. By others, I mean other human beings, but also other sentient beings on the planet. Those are two broad kinds of arguments. Although one's philanthropic and the other is misanthropic, I don't think that these two are incompatible with one another. So just to revisit a few of those utterances, lest they blow by and their significance be lost on some of the audience here. So, one of the consequences of your view is that it thought about these issues clearly enough. And it's kind of analogous, on your view, to ushering souls into hell,

because existence is either that bad, or there's a high enough probability that it will be that bad that it's just irresponsible to consign people to the fate of existing. That's correct. Of course, hell comes in degrees. So as bad as it is, it can always be worse. And so we need to be careful about that analogy of ushering somebody into hell. But it's a kind of hell.

I love this topic. And I think this will be fun to get into the details here and hear some more of your specific arguments. But what has been your experience promulgating this idea or set of ideas? I can imagine the thesis provokes anger in some people. That's for sure. A lot of angry people. Fortunately, not too many of those have made direct contact with me. But one does see a lot of hate mail of a certain kind and a lot of hate comments on the web. But the people who've contacted me tend to be those who have been more sympathetic to my views.

And one very common kind of response I've received is from people who've had these sorts of thoughts and felt that they were entirely alone in the world. They thought that they were the only people who thought this, and they've drawn a measure of comfort from knowing that there are others who share that idea. One distinction to make here is between pessimism of the sort that you're expressing and nihilism. Your view really isn't nihilistic. Do you want to tease those apart? Yeah, you're absolutely right. Many people, I think, mischaracterize the position as a nihilistic position. And I'm not a nihilist. I think that suffering, for example, is bad. And that's one of the reasons why I think it's wrong to bring new beings into existence,

because they're going to suffer, and they're going to suffer pretty unspeakably. Nihilism here would be that basically nothing matters, right? In the scheme of things, good and bad are just things we make up and the universe doesn't care about us. And therefore, it doesn't really matter if conscious minds get ground up in some inferno interminably. That's not your view at all. You want to avoid the inferno and you want to avoid committing the moral wrong of consigning people to it. That's exactly right. Look, I am a nihilist of some kind,

so if you ask me about whether our lives have cosmic meaning, I'm a nihilist about that. I don't think that they do. But I just don't think that it follows from that that it's okay to inflict suffering on others. I can imagine that people also try to psychologize you. They must think that this view is really not so much the product of a valid chain of reasoning, it's the product of a likely mood disorder. Are you depressed? Is that

a diagnosis you must get hurled at you? Yeah, there are lots of people who do exactly that. They try to psychologize it. And I think that's exactly the wrong attitude to have. I think one should look at the arguments, examine them on their merits, and see whether they stand or fall. But I guess that both things could be true. I mean, I find the arguments very interesting, and we will definitely get into those. But when I heard about you and your emphasis on this position, I did think that your just experience of the world moment to moment, and that would include your mood and everything else about you that can be brought to bear on experience, must be coloring the arguments, or could be coloring your sense of their veracity or moral import. And I guess I'll tell you about an experience I had,

and I'm just wondering if there's anything about it that could be relevant to your case. So I had a friend, not a close friend, but someone who I had met many, many times. And this was a person who would email me periodically who was suicidal. And he had been suicidal for quite some time. At one point, he sent an email to everyone in his life saying, I'm going to commit suicide. And here's your last chance to talk me out of it. and here's your last chance to talk me out of it. Put that way, it sounds like a kind of macabre and gratuitous appeal for attention, but it was more, he was actually just being scrupulous to not kill himself so impulsively that he would leave everyone in his life feeling like,

you know, if only they had known, they might have been able to do something. So he just, he was going to give everyone in his life a chance to reason with him. And it was kind of of a piece with the reasons why he thought he was killing himself. He really thought he had reasoned himself to a position where suicide was not only acceptable, but was really his best decision. And, you know, he had a very philosophical, he wasn't a professional philosopher, but he had a very philosophical cast of mind, and he was quite smart. And, you know, I went back and forth with him a little bit over email, mostly. And the experience was one of seeing someone, in my view, mistake his anhedonia, his lack of joy in living moment to moment, for a kind of philosophical epiphany. Which is to say, if he felt better, if he was

feeling more joy, if he was feeling more of a connection to other people, he would have felt that the results of his reasoning on each of those points were less compelling. And I know your argument is not an argument for suicide. I mean, we'll differentiate antinatalism from that. But I'm just wondering if you feel that if the character of your experience were significantly better moment to moment if you feel like this philosophical conviction would just kind of evaporate or become so uninteresting to you that it would sort of evaporate? Well, I don't like to talk about myself, so I'm probably just not going to answer that question.

But I'll make a few observations. And one is that one ought not to make the assumption that somebody who holds the sort of view that I do is thinking about themselves. They may be thinking about themselves as well, but they might be just thinking about everything they see around them in the world. So just if you think about the amount of suffering that's going on in the world at any moment, you have to be pretty coarse and callous to not take that seriously. So it needn't be about one's own. So it needn't be about one's own experiences. It needn't be about one's own attitudes. It might be sort of sensitivity or an expression of what's going on in the world. So you sort of gave an example that's very

self-oriented. And what I'm suggesting is that's not the only possible way of looking at things. It's also possible to arrive at these sorts of views by looking outward and looking and seeing what you see around you. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. And then, of course, the other point is that you spoke about him being anodonic, but there are plenty of manic people out there, and their views might be colored by their mania. They may be deriving too much pleasure to actually see the world for what it is. Yeah. It's hard to know what is normal here, or what is an uncolored lens through

which to look at these questions. There may in fact be no uncolored lens. It may just be lenses all the way in. Let's get into the details of your argument. Run through the asymmetry argument for me. So there's actually more than one asymmetry argument, but there is a kind of axiological asymmetry, I think, between benefits and harms, between the good things and the bad things. And obviously, if we're speaking with inner life, the pains that you have, the other harms that you have, these are bad. And the good things that you have, those are good. But if we're considering the scenario in which somebody is going to be brought into existence,

we have to compare the outcome in which they do from the outcome in which they don't exist. And in the outcome in which they don't exist, we have to consider the absent harms and the absent benefits. And I think that the absence of the harms is good, even though that person won't exist. Whereas the absence of the good things in that life is not going to be bad. And that's because there's going to be nobody who's going to be deprived of those good things. And so the asymmetry is really between the bad and the good in the scenario in which somebody doesn't exist. Okay, so it strikes me, I kind of want to run through

each piece of that again, so that to make sure that I'm not making a mistake here in reasoning, but it strikes me that there's kind of an imbalance here in how you're presenting that, There's kind of an imbalance here in how you're presenting that, and you could be conjuring the asymmetry in a way. So you're saying, and just point out where I go wrong here, you're saying that the absence of a good life can't be a harm because there's no one who is harmed. There's no person who is deprived of this life. So the absence of goods is not a bad thing. But the absence of a bad life is a good. Here, in my view, you're kind of smuggling the absence of existence in as part of the good. You're saying that the prevention of harm is a positive good,

even though there is no one who enjoys this absence of harm. Is that where you're kind of putting the rabbit in the hat? Well, a lot of people have suggested that I'm doing that. But the point I'm making here is not so much a metaphysical one as an axiological one. It's about an asymmetry of values between the good things and the bad things in life. And one of the reasons why I think, first of all, I think this asymmetry is actually pretty intuitive. And I think large numbers of people would accept it until they see where it leads. But this basic asymmetry, I think, explains some other asymmetries that many people would endorse.

So here's an example. The large parts of the universe that are uninhabited, there aren't beings there, certainly not sentient beings. And if we think about those uninhabited parts of the universe, we're not filled with, and nor do I think we should be filled with, remorse for the absent goods that are there. So if we think about Mars, for example, where they could be Martians, but they aren't, we don't think, gee, think about all that pleasure that those absent Martians could have. Isn't that a terrible thing? We don't think that at all. Whereas,

I think if we think about the absence of, let's say, Martian wars, just like we have wars on Earth, and we think about the absence of all the suffering there, I think we'd say that's a pretty good thing. It's pretty good that they don't have that there, that there's nothing like that on Mars. That's an advantage that Mars has over Earth. But there's no one who doesn't have those harms. Exactly, exactly. But I still think that it's a good thing that there's the absence of that suffering on Mars. Now, I'll grant you that there are many other possible asymmetries here that we should be concerned about. So for instance, one thing you claim, or at least I think it's implicit in some of your claims, is that there's much more suffering or possible suffering than there is possible happiness, or the depth of it is far

greater. And so there's an asymmetry between suffering and happiness that also just swings the balance here. So we'll talk about that. But here, I feel like you're running afoul of my intuitions here. And what you just said about the moral significance of canceling possible goods definitely stands in opposition to the work of every philosopher who is working on what is called existential risk now. So you can have philosophers like, you know, Will McCaskill, who will say that the greatest possible wrong would be to do something which put our species on track for self-annihilation. And that would be, in large measure, not because of all the suffering that would be caused, because if we're annihilated in the right way, it could be completely painless.

It would be wrong because it would close the door to all of the untold goods that could come from a billion years of creative involvement with the cosmos. If you knew that there was some decision you took today that not only deprived your grandchildren from living the most glorious possible life, they just have a sort of glorious life, but you deprived all of their descendants from even existing and discovering greater depths of beauty, people are persuaded, and I'm one of them, that those hypothetical losses are as real as the hypothetical gain of not suffering if you don't exist? So I think that when we think about human extinction, there's something that clouds people's thinking. And that's why the moment you think about the application of this asymmetry to

human extinction, all these other intuitions of the kind of bribing come up. That's why the example I gave wasn't about human extinction. It was a piece of some other species, let's say, on another planet that could have been there and isn't there. And we don't spend any time worrying about that, nor do I think we should spend any time worrying about the absent pleasures over there. When we think about human extinction, there are some confounding variables. The one is the mechanism whereby the extinction takes place. So there's a distinction between whether people

sort of die out or whether they're killed off. And so one way in which we could go extinct is through people meeting an untimely end and being killed. But another way is for everybody to die peacefully in their beds and for the human species to have come to an end because there was no more reproduction. And I think a lot of what's going on with people's intuitions is a mixing up of those things. And then I think there's a lot of sentimentality about the human species. There's this idea that it's a wonderful species and we'd like it to be around for a long time. And haven't we discovered and done all sorts of wonderful things and wouldn't be good if that whole trajectory of scientific discovery went on. And there's a kind of sentimentality

about having humans around. And so I think that those sorts of factors confound our thinking about cases of human extinction. So I would like to move away from those to think of the application of the asymmetry to other cases and see how it works. Granted, some people might be confounded. I don't think I am here. In fact, I think there are a few more things to say about just canceling the human career that are relevant here. But before we do, I just want to linger on this, what strikes me as a kind of an asymmetry that has given you your first asymmetry here, which is you're accruing a good to non-existent beings on one side of your equation where you're not on the other. Do you not see it that way,

or you just think it's justified? No, I do see it that way, but I think it's justified. There is this axiological asymmetry, and I think when you do the calculation that follows from that, the cards are stacked against bringing somebody into existence. But it's not an artificial stacking. It's one that makes eminent sense. have a person who could have existed but doesn't. And undoubtedly, there are philosophical problems with thinking about possibility as well. I mean, are there these possible things, or are there simply actual things? And we're actually just misled by our notion of possibility. But leaving that aside, I might have had a, I have two children, which already convicts me of a monstrous ethical lapse on your account, but we'll leave that aside. But I have decided not to have a third child, you'll be happy to know. So this third child will not experience anything good or anything bad. And on your account, there's no deprivation to him or her for not being brought

into existence on account of not getting to do all the good things there are to do. But there is a benefit to not suffering all of the inevitable pains of existence, but that benefit doesn't accrue to anyone because no one by this description exists. That's correct. And it's impossible, of course, if the person doesn't exist for them to enjoy the benefit. But when we're looking at scenarios of bringing somebody into existence or not, we're having to compare those two cases, one scenario in which they do exist and one in which they don't. And if we want to know what's better for that potential person, we need to compare

the situation in which they do and the situation in which they don't. And we have to compare, obviously, the scenario in which they don't exist to the one in which they do and make the interest judgments relative to the world in which the person does exist. How would this calculation run for you if existence was on balance more pleasant and wonderful and creative and beautiful, so that every person who comes into existence runs a better than even chance of having a life worth living. But still, there are many lives that are not worth living, and they come up quite frequently. They just don't overwhelm the lives that are worth living. Then how would you think about it? Well, that very phrase, a life worth living, I think is ambiguous. And I think it's ambiguous between a life worth starting

and a life worth continuing. And I think one mistake people make a life worth starting and a life worth continuing. And I think one mistake people make is to not see that ambiguity, because I think different standards ought to apply to those two cases. So if at a given time there's more good in your life than bad, then your life may indeed be worth continuing. I say may indeed, because there's some complexities there that we could revisit later. But I think the bar for starting a life is going to be much higher. Let's stick with the starting of life, because we'll get on to whether life is worth continuing. Let's just say that we lived in a world where, at birth, every human being could expect to have a slightly better than even chance.

I mean, basically, they're like the house in a casino playing blackjack, right? They have whatever it is, a 52% chance of winning. And winning, in this case, really is winning, right? There's no downside to winning. It's just the 52% of people who have good lives on balance really do have good lives on balance any way you look at them. And then, you know, the 48% of people who don't have negative lives on balance any way you look at them, and then the 48% of people who don't have negative lives to one or another degree, then how would you think about it? Well, I think even the lives that are good on balance is going to be plenty of bad. But let's just stipulate that we live in a world that's kind of like a coin toss,

and if the right side of the coin comes up, that is a life on balance, however you want to aggregate benefits and injuries. So I'm not quite understanding the question here, because if the analogy is sort of winning at blackjack, well, when you win, you win. There's no downside to the winning. Whereas when you win in this life lottery that you're speaking about, what I want to get clarity on is, is there no downside? Is this a life of unmitigated good, or is there some negative as well? And from what you said, I was understanding you ought to be saying that there is some bad as well. It's just that on balance, it's good. I guess there could be some bad, but it is, in the case of the lucky life, it is outweighed by the good, so that each of your pains are manageable enough that when your pleasure

comes around, you always feel that it was worth it. And let's just say that you're right to feel that. We've tuned the luck of lucky minds in such a way that life is really good and pain does not overwhelm pleasure. Okay, you see, when you say that you think it's worth it, are you saying it's worth it to have come into existence or that it's worth it to continue existing? I am without granting you that distinction because I'm not sure I agree that exists, but we'll get there.

For the purposes of this point in the conversation, I'm talking about coming into existence. So you don't exist, and I give you the opportunity to exist. And if you were one of the lucky ones, you would find yourself in a circumstance that was well worth your time. Well, that, I think, is a confusion. I grant you that there are many people who say, I'm glad I was brought into existence because I think on balance, it's better that I'm around. I think I'm getting more good than I am getting bad. But I just think that people who hold that view have not thought

carefully enough about what the question is. I think that because they already exist, they're biased towards the condition in which they already exist. And so what they're actually asking themselves without realizing it is, is my life worth continuing? But I don't think there's any life that's worth starting. And I think there's no life that's worth starting because of this asymmetry. Surely you would grant that if existence were much, much better than it is, in fact, you could imagine a life worth living, right? I mean, what if existence just had no suffering at all in it, right? It was just one leap from creative height to another, and every moment was more interesting than the last.

So I've considered that possibility, and I think in that scenario, we should be indifferent between coming into existence and not. But I've got to say that that scenario you've imagined is actually pretty hard to imagine in practice. Hard to imagine any real such life. But yes, if we imagine, if you're thinking about hypothetically, a hypothetical life where you come into existence and there's nothing bad about that, then I would say we are being different between that. And I think we should be indifferent between coming into existence in that condition and not coming into existence at all. That is a novel view that I have never considered. I'm wondering whether to focus there for a moment before going on to capture some of these loose threads. Let's spend a moment on that. If I posit a kind of godlike paradise for all conscious beings. So there really is just, there's nothing

wrong in the universe by any anything that you can say is wrong, you know, like there's a little ache and pain over here, there's a little dissatisfaction over here, I will just cancel that by saying no no, these those are moments where there's more pleasure flooding in there and more, even deeper sense of meaning, even deeper gratification of one's intellectual life. And these are beings who are far more competent than you and I are to judge the character of their experience. They've had a billion years to consider the matter, and they're still happy to be here. Imagine minds constituted like that. Why should we be indifferent to that and the primordial

dial tone of non-existing? See, I think what's dividing us here is the asymmetry, because if you think there is the asymmetry that I'm defending, then you'll say, well, there's nothing bad in that Edenic life that you're speaking about, but there's also nothing bad in the situation of non-existence. So they're there equal. Now you'll say, but in Eden, there are all these pleasures. And I'll say, that's great, because if you're in Eden, it's good that you have those pleasures because your life would be worse without them.

But if you've never existed, the absence of those pleasures is going to mean nothing to you. You won't be there. You won't care about it. It doesn't matter that there's not a being that's having those pleasures. So if you think about, I don't know,

Adam and Eve and then some third character that could have been there. This is before the fall, obviously. And you say, well, is it a pity that there's not some additional being here that's not enjoying Eden? No, I don't think there's anything bad about that. And I think there's an indifference, and there should be an indifference. I can see that there's nothing bad about it because there's no one to suffer the absence of those pleasures and insights. But again, by the same token, I'm not convinced that you can make the other move you're making, which is to say that there's something good about not

having the suffering imposed on you if you don't exist. And if you don't exist, you can't feel the relief of not being tortured because you don't exist. So I feel like there's a symmetry there of just non-being. Let's come back to your third possible child. Let's imagine you were thinking about having a third child and you did some genetic tests and you found out that this child that you could have would lead a life that even by your standards is one of great suffering. And so you decide, well, we're not going to go ahead with this third child. We're not going to have this third child. Do you think that would be a good thing? Yes. And do you think you've got a reason to avoid bringing that child into existence?

But the reason is one which is predicated on the existence of the child and therefore the existence of his or her suffering. We're talking here about the absence of a wrong that I'm not committing by bringing this guaranteed to suffer person into existence. So you're imagining some scenario in which this child does exist and is leading a life of suffering. And you say, well, I've got a reason to avoid that. Right. suffering, and you say, well, I've got a reason to avoid that. Now, let's imagine that you're thinking of having this third child, and you do the tests, and everything's fine. And so it could turn out like your other children are. And I don't know your children. I hope they're doing well, as well as can be. But let's imagine they're doing well. And this third child, the probability is

that it'll be like that. Let's just say on their worst afternoons, they'll confirm everything you fear about the nature of existence. On your children's most obvious. Yes. They can complain about the most insubstantial things, and you'd be amazed at how much anguish can be provoked by having the television turned off prematurely. Right. But let's imagine that this third child would lead a happy life by your standards. Right. Do you have a reason to bring that child into existence? Well, let's leave aside all the other reasons that no doubt you've considered, just their effect on other people, their effect on me, all that. So just localizing the benefit to the person? Yes, I think so. I think that there's, I mean, this comes down to population ethics and topics that I hope we'll touch, but there is a kind of more is better principle here

when you're talking about good lives. These are all fascinating questions and they connect to more or less everything that's fascinating. So I'm just trying to resist the slide into philosophy here. But it seems to me that much of what you're saying about bringing people into existence does in fact apply to the continuing existence of existing people. I know you draw a clear line of demarcation there. I'm not so sure you can, and I think this is an additional problem for me here. So how is it not analogous for me to say, well, I have a child, and there was something very, very good that could have happened to her. I could have secured some benefit for her that she doesn't know about, but I declined to do that, right? So she has the life she has, but I could have given her the super enhanced life with really very little effort on my

part. You're talking about an existing child? An existing child, but I declined to do that. So now she has her life as it was and was going to be, but it could have been otherwise. And I, you know, for quite capricious reasons of my own, you know, because I didn't want to spend 10 seconds to sign a form or click a button on a website, she does not have this extraordinarily positive thing happen for her. And she doesn't know about it, right? So has she been wronged in any way? And I think most people's intuitions would be yes. And yet on your account, I'm wondering if I could say that.

Well, we're talking about a case of an existing child here. And I think there are all kinds of other complexities about this case. Whether she had some entitlement to your bestowing this benefit, all kinds of questions of that kind. But you are speaking about an existing child, and so I would say that this child is worse off without this benefit having been bestowed. So whether you've wronged her is another question, but she's worse off than she would have been

if you'd bestowed this benefit. But I don't think that a parallel claim can be made about a child that you don't bring into existence. Although if it had come into existence, it would have had certain benefits. I think the absence of those benefits, because it doesn't come into existence, is not bad. And it's not bad because it's not deprived. Whereas your existing child will be deprived of this benefit you could have given. Another point of confusion for me here is that you acknowledge a spectrum of experience ranging from the very, very positive to the very, very negative, but when you take the zero point of non-existence, you say that we should be indifferent between zero and the very, very positive, whereas we shouldn't be indifferent between zero and the very, very positive,

whereas we shouldn't be indifferent between zero and the very, very negative. The very, very negative is worse, obviously, and we should avoid it. And we should choose zero every time over the very, very negative. But we should be indifferent to zero over the very, very positive. But I'm not quite sure how that would work in practice. So imagine if we, you know, we're sliding down the ramp of a hedonic experience. We start at the very, very positive and life gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse until it gets truly neutral. And maybe there's other forms of neutral beyond the lights going out, but at least one form of neutral is not having any discernible experience. And then we just keep on sliding and things get a little bit

bad and a little bit worse, and all of a sudden we're in hell. It seems to me that if you're going to preserve the logical integrity of that spectrum, you'd have to acknowledge that better really is better than nothing. See, again, I don't think that it is. This assignment of zero that you're proposing is something that I've anticipated before. And I've got an analogy to deal with a case like that. Of course, it's only an analogy. It can't be like the case that we're speaking about in every respect. But I imagine these two people, the one is, we call him sick, and the other we call healthy. And sick gets sick, but he's also got some attribute whereby he recovers quickly from his sickness. Healthy never gets sick. I mean, never, never, ever get sick, but he lacks the attribute of

quick recovery. So if H were to get sick, he wouldn't quickly recover. It'd be a very slow, very slow recovery. Now, what I want to say about sick is that that capacity for quick recovery, that that's good and it's good for sick. But the absence of that capacity in the healthy person is not a net disadvantage over sick because he never has any need for that. Right. And so I think we should say a similar thing about these scenarios about existing and non-existing and that these absent pleasures are not bad relative to the other scenario. In other words, they're not a net disadvantage in comparison with the scenario in which the person exists. So I want to resist that sort of attribution of, let's say,

a zero to the absence of the pleasures or the absence of the good things in life, the absence of the pleasures or the absence of the good things in life, if they're the absent good things of a non-existent person. So not all of my intuitions are being conserved here. I will say here on this point, your view is especially Buddhist. And for people who might be surprised by that, and I don't know how familiar you are with Buddhist philosophy, but I'll just say that on the Buddhist account, existence is the problem. And they have this, obviously, this view of rebirth and karma and there's what's called a wheel of becoming, you know, life after life. You just can't get off this wheel unless you become fully enlightened. Enlightenment consists in no longer being subjected to this continuous cycle

of rebirth. There's obviously very good reason to doubt that picture of existence scientifically, but the core of the ethical view there and the soteriological view, the view of what it means to be free, is that existence has this intrinsically unsatisfying character. And, you know, this is for reasons that we really haven't gone into yet. It's just the fact that everything is impermanent. You know, your pleasures, no matter how good, always fall away and you're left with more of a search for pleasure. There's a kind of an intrinsic dissatisfaction even in satisfaction. It wouldn't be bad if no one existed, and the fact that people exist in a circumstance that is perfect to frustrate the search for happiness and well-being is the problem, and enlightenment is the act of canceling all of the mental properties that would cause one to continually be reborn into existence.

So your view is very Buddhist without offering the methodology of enlightenment, or unless you do that, and I don't know about it. Or the odd metaphysic of reincarnation. Exactly, yeah. The physic of reincarnation. Exactly, yeah. But there are a few other wrinkles here in Buddhism, and one is that it's possible through a really deep engagement in methods like meditation to come to a kind of equanimity that equalizes pain and pleasure to a remarkable degree

and to find a kind of intrinsic well-being in just the nature of consciousness. And that does make some of the Buddhist view that I just described somewhat paradoxical. I mean, the problem of existence can really go away to a remarkable degree on the Buddhist account. So that's all just a long way of saying that your view is in very good standing with certain trends in Eastern philosophy, and it just doesn't capture everything they say. But let's take this distinction between the possible lives and the existing lives and their interests, because I'm not so sure you're conserving my intuitions there. Why would it be a bad thing for everyone to die tonight painlessly in their sleep? Let's just picture what this entails. So everyone goes to sleep, none the wiser. They don't know this is their last day on earth. There's been no dread

in anticipation of the lights going out. But everyone, based on some bad luck or good luck, depending on your view, dies painlessly in his or her sleep. So there's no bereavement, there's no experience of this, there's just the lights going out in seven billion brains all at once. What could be wrong with that? Well, I think that those of us who do exist have an interest in continuing to exist. Well, I think that those of us who do exist have an interest in continuing to exist. We've got an interest in not being annihilated. And the scenario you are presenting is one in which we are annihilated. Why do we have an interest in being reborn tomorrow from the womb of sleep if existence is, as you say, such that bringing people into it is a terrible crime?

Well, I think the analogy is not correct. I don't think we are reborn. I mean, we're reborn in a metaphorical sense, but not literally. I think there are all kinds of things that are going on in our sleep. We continue to exist in a kind of dispositional state. Our interests in continuing to live are surviving through that period of sleep, as are many of our desires and our preferences. And I think if we die in our sleep, one of our interests, a very important interest, at least one, if not many, have been thwarted. I can't see how we have any more interest than a new being would. again, you have to imagine just canceling all of the usual problems with people dying, right? They don't know they're going to die, so there's no imposed suffering in advance, and there's no one around to suffer their loss. There's no grief. There's not even a

single neuron and a single brain disposed to grieve about what's happened because no one knows that it will happen and no one's around to know that it has happened. How is that not analogous to someone not coming into existence on the next day? Because somebody who doesn't exist, I think, has got no interest in coming into existence. But somebody who already exists has got an interest in not ceasing to exist. Now, one thing I should add here is that I think these two views are separable. In other words, the asymmetry argument that I've given before and the argument that I'm giving you now, these are two separate arguments. So it's possible for an antinatalist to also be a

pro-mortalist of the kind that you're suggesting. So if somebody thinks that a painless death, or let's say death itself, is not bad for the person who dies, and then we add all the stipulations that you've added, if somebody thinks that, then they'd say there's nothing wrong with the scenario. There's nothing bad about the scenario you've described. But that's a separate view from the asymmetry that I've been presenting. So you can have the asymmetry that I presented earlier, and then you can either couple that with the view I'm offering now about ceasing to exist, or you needn't couple it with that.

That's precisely the point. I don't see how you can keep them apart. If existence has the character that you say that it has, and I would grant you, you're on very firm ground thinking that pains are worse than pleasures and that there are more of them. And we can talk about that. But if it really is bad to be brought into the world, and not just a little bad, it's really, really bad, then I don't see how that doesn't extend to the moral character of waking up the next day. And if I can give you a situation where there are no ancillary harms accrued by somebody dying,

and implicit in everything you're saying about existence is the claim that all of these canceled goods of future people don't mean anything, right? I mean, there's no moral weight to place on all the good things that could have happened had humanity continued, because these are hypothetical goods that accrue to no one. How is it that having everyone die painlessly in their sleep wouldn't be, on your account, a good thing, and in fact, perhaps the best possible thing we could imagine having happened. Like if you could do it, if you could push that button, you would be a moral hero. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access

to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org