Within Reason - #12 — David Benatar | Is It Immoral To Have Children?

Episode Date: April 26, 2020

Professor David Benatar is a South African philosopher, academic and author, and head of the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He is best known for his defence of antinatalism, the view that it is immoral to have children (though more specifically, to bring new sentient beings into existence). Professor Benatar speaks to Alex about the asymmetry of pleasure and pain, and the two debate whether being anti-birth commits one to being pro-death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of the Cosmic Skeptic podcast is brought to you by you. To support the podcast, please visit patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic. So welcome back to the Cosmic Skeptic podcast, everybody. Today I am thrilled to be joined by Professor David Benatar of the University of Cape Town. He is, of course, the world's probably most well-known proponent of anti-natalism, which is the view that it is immoral to bring new sentient creatures into existence. That is, it's immoral to have children. His views have stood up quite some controversy for being so seemingly outlanding.

but he's also got a sizable minority of people who are supporting him and who've decided that what he's saying actually has quite a lot of weight to it. I think the view is absolutely fascinating and it's most comprehensively spelled out in his 2006 book, Better Never to Have Been, a link for which is available in the description. And I'd recommend reading it because it's a fantastically interesting book and covers a wide range of different areas in philosophy, and you might be surprised at some of the places that it takes you to, such as discussing the ethics of disability and things like this. Now, given the current pandemic, I'm going to be filming this episode remotely. Professor Ben-in-sur is very protective of his privacy, and so in a first for the podcast, you won't be seeing his face.

So for the entire podcast, if you're watching this as a video, you'll only be seeing my face. But remember that if you prefer to listen to this, you can also find the podcast on iTunes and Spotify and other streaming platforms as well. And if you are listening on those platforms, do be sure to give us a rating because it does help the podcast to grow. Now, it has been quite a while since the last episode of the Cosmic Skeptic podcast. I was hoping to film a new batch of episodes, a new series, as it were, over the coming weeks, but unfortunately the quarantine has stopped me from doing so.

I tried to do the interviews in person rather than remotely, but if you like this kind of thing, then do let me know if you'd like to see a season of remotely filmed podcast episodes, or whether you think I should hold off and wait until like an interview more people in person. If you like this as an episode, then perhaps we'll do more of them in the coming weeks. Now, I think it will help in listening to this conversation if you have some, familiarity with the anti-natalist argument, but don't worry if you don't, because we do spell out the argument in the discussion, but then we start discussing some of its objections and some of its sticking points, so we don't go in as much detail as someone as a new listener might like

if they've never heard of anti-natalism before. It might be worth either looking it up online and researching it a little bit that way, or maybe even reading Professor Bennett's book before listening to the conversation. But you can also listen to this conversation straight off the bat if you feel like it. But regardless of when you do it, I would recommend reading the book at some point no matter what, because it is just so fascinating and interesting and challenging as well. So without saying anything more, I now present to you, Professor David Benatar. So I'm joined now by Professor David Benatar. Professor Benatar, thank you for being here. My pleasure. Nice to be with you. It's great to have you. You've been one of the most

requested guests that I've had. And I think part of the reasons for that is because about a year ago, I went vegan and since then I've become something of a vegan advocate on my channel. And for some reason, once I started talking about veganism, all of a sudden I was getting all of these requests to talk about antinatalism. Now, I've spoken a lot about suffering and pleasure-based morality before, but for some reason, specifically talking about veganism brought up the question of antinatalism. I don't know if you have any opinion on why that might be, why the two are seen is connected. I think there are lots of interesting connections. Some people think there's an entailment between the two, and I'm not convinced

to that. I think there are additional assumptions when we need to make, and the assumptions may be perfectly reasonable ones, but I don't think that the one view entails the other, and nonetheless, I do think they're connections. So here's just one example. Sometimes people argue that we actually do animals of favor by bringing them into existence, and that if we didn't have this whole enterprise of eating animals, there'd be many animals that are not brought into existence. So we're actually doing them a favor by bringing them into existence and then a while later killing them and eating them. Now, of course, an argument of that kind must assume at least that the quality of the life of the animals is of a reasonable standard. And that's not going to be true of most animals that are brought into existence for eating.

But there's nonetheless an interesting argument in the background there, and that is whether we are in fact benefiting animals if they have a reasonable quality of life before they killed. and an anti-natalist, for example, has an excellent argument for why you're not benefiting the animal there by doing that. This is just one of, I think, numerous connections between these ideas. I see. I mean, I would be tempted to argue that if what you're doing is actually minimizing suffering for an animal and producing more pleasure, that by the definition of veganism that philosophical, ethical vegans use about minimizing suffering to animals, that perhaps that would actually be a vegan thing to do. But it's just interesting to think about why the two might be connected,

whereas my audience didn't seem to connect antinatalism to just my general talking about pleasure and pain in general. But this is one of the places I wanted to begin if we could, because of course we can jump into the philosophy of antinatalism, but I think a lot of people would be interested to know what your metarethical foundation for all of this is, because it seems in better never to have been that you kind of take for granted almost a utilitarian.

approach. And I don't know if you see it as a utilitarian approach or as something slightly different. A lot of people have assumed that I'm offering a utilitarian argument, but I don't think I'm doing that. I've attempted to offer, for the most part, a theory neutral argument for antinatalism. In other words, I don't think it presupposes utilitarian or deontological or a virtue theory approach. So I think the arguments are quite, um, quite, um, quite independent of any commitment to one or other of those theoretical, ethical positions. So you think somebody could still be an antinatialist, become convinced of anti-natalism, without having to accept the premise, for instance, that suffering is intrinsically bad?

Well, I don't think you have to be utilitarian to think that suffering is intrinsically bad. The way that I'm thinking about it is that some people might see certain forms of suffering as a good thing, intrinsically, if they're of a certain kind. I'm thinking specifically maybe of religious morality. Of course, the utilitarian would say something like, a suffering is only good insofar as it also procures some kind of pleasure as a side effect or something like that, like the pain of going to the gym for the pleasure of being healthy. But I think that to see suffering on its own as always bad, no matter what, seems to be a utilitarian principle to me. I don't know if you disagree with that.

I don't disagree that utilitarians will hold that view, but I don't think you have to be utilitarian to hold that view. I see. I think the crucial distinction is between whether pain, let's say, is intrinsically bad and whether it is instrumentally bad. And I think it's always going to be intrinsically bad. If you know what pain is, then you're committed to the idea that it is intrinsically bad. That's not to say that it could not be instrumental value arising from pain. if you've got a sore tooth you want a pain in your tooth and that leads you to go to the dentist and by getting the dental treatment you avoid something still worse well then the pain has had

some instrumental value i don't deny that at all but i just don't think that is anything about the intrinsic disvalue of pain and nor do i think that you have to be utilitarian in order to think that pain is intrinsically disval right so the pain would still be bad in itself it's not as like because the pain of the toothache leads to a good thing, that the pain becomes a good thing, because I've heard some people argue that way, but rather the pain is still a bad thing intrinsically, but just leads to something which is pleasurable. That's perhaps how I'm interpreting you there. So yes, I think there's no contradiction between thinking that pain is intrinsically bad

and sometimes instrumentally good. Okay, so this is the first point of contention that I think we can arise. is, well, it follows from a consideration about when you say that suffering is bad, for instance, I understand that you mean suffering is bad for the person in question rather than being bad impersonally. I know you wrote about this in Still Better Never to have been a response to some of your critics, but just to clarify, this is what we're talking about, right? In the argument for anti-natalism, when you talk about suffering being bad, you mean that it's bad for the person involved, not just bad, kind of objectively, neutrally, if you know what I mean?

Well, I do think that it's bad for the person, but we have to be clear about what we mean when we say bad for the person, because obviously in the scenario where somebody doesn't exist, you'd very soon run into trouble if you were saying that the absence of suffering for that person is good for that person, if you meant that in a literal way, because obviously they aren't literally there. So when I say that the presence of pain is bad for the person or the absence of pain is good for the person even if they don't exist, the phrase for the person has to be clarified and qualified in a certain way. And what I mean by that is it's bad when I judge from the perspective, the interests of that personal potential person. Okay, I see. So with that in mind,

why don't we talk through why it is immoral in your view to have children or to, let's say, to bring new sentient creatures into existence? And we'll see if this might, because I want to clarify that at the beginning, because I feel like this will help inform the discussion about the nature of suffering and pleasure for beings that do not exist. So perhaps you can help me by just walking through the argument in the kind of most base level way that you can. So I think that there are two questions. The one, question is whether coming into existence is good or bad or neutral for the being that's brought into existence. And then there's a separate question whether it's wrong to bring somebody

into existence. Now, I'm of the view that it's never in somebody's interests to bring them into existence. There's never a benefit to them. It's always given the way the world is going to be a net harm because there's nothing to be gained by being brought into existence. And And the argument for that is this axial asymmetry that I've noted between pain and pleasure or harms and benefits more generally and the presence or the absence of those. So what I maintain is that the presence of pain is bad, the presence of pleasure is good, the absence of pain is good, but the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody who is thereby deprived. And the implication of that is that bringing somebody into existence is never going to be in their interest. It's never going to be to their advantage. But there's a separate question about whether we do something wrong in bringing them into existence.

Because if it were the case that the amount of harm in somebody's life were minuscule, and I don't believe that this is ever true. I think all lives are characterized by a large amount of bad. But if it were the case, they would do just a small amount of bad in life. And there were a large amount of pleasure to be derived, let's say, for that person or for other people, then it might be that when you weigh out those interests, it would be permissible to bring somebody into existence. All the time, we are weighing up interests of different people. And this would be another scenario when we'd be doing that.

And you might reach the conclusion, depending on what view you have. You might reach the conclusion then that it's not wrong. to bring this person into existence or this being into existence. So I think what really what seals the matter for me, the anti-Napist conclusion, is just how bad the quality of all lives are. And given how bad they are, I don't think that this can be compensated for by the interests of other people. I think there's a real serious harm done to the being who's brought into existence.

So to be clear, would you say that if the asymmetry argument were to, to fail, or if people weren't convinced by it, let's say, perhaps rather, that antinatalism can still make sense just based on the amount of suffering that each life entails? Yes. Now, I think they're two different kinds of asymmetry arguments. So the one is the axiological asymmetry, and I think that's what you're referring to when you refer to the asymmetry argument. Yes. That's certainly what I call the asymmetry argument in better never to have been. But there are other asymmetries. These are what I call empirical asymmetry. between goods and bads, and I think those asymmetries explain in part why there's just so much

bad in lives. And I think that those empirical asymmetries play an important role in telling us just how bad it is to be brought into existence. Yes. Now, do you think that a lot of this rests on nothing more than intuition? The reason I ask that is because with some of the examples that you give of different kinds of asymmetry, and I recognize this is the important sticking point, anti-natalism, as far as I understand, is that in some way, at least sometimes, suffering counts for more than pleasure in some way, shape or form. Maybe you've got a contention with the way I've stated that, but you might give an example. I've heard you give the example, for instance, of Mars, and how it's not a bad thing that there's no pleasure on Mars, because there's

nobody up there on Mars, and we don't think that it's a bad thing, that there isn't any pleasure up there. And yet we do think it's a good thing that there's no suffering. To me, that seems maybe intuitively true, at least the first time I heard it, it seemed intuitively true. However, my problem was that thinking about it more clearly, I realized that maybe that is nothing more than just me thinking about it from my perspective and realizing that actually for the Martians that don't exist, it's neither good nor bad their state of non-existence. Well, I mean, there are serious questions here about what a role intuitions play in ethics and in philosophy more generally. I don't think that we can entirely detach ourselves from our raw judgments, from the intuitions that we make.

Obviously, we've got to subject those judgments to critical scrutiny, but there are data points in our evaluation of views. I mean, let's imagine that I propounded a view that was, it's something opposite to utilitarianism, we might call it sufferism, and with a view that we ought to produce the greatest amount of misery possible, greatest amount of death and misery possible. And let's imagine somebody wanting to refute this view said, but look, this contradicts all our intuitions. And I said, well, you know, what do intuitions mean? They don't mean anything. I've got this theoretical view that we ought to produce the greatest amount of misery possible. and I'm not interested in your intuitions. Well, that would be a terrible argument on my part.

It's not that we need to treat our intuitions as decisive, but there's certainly important data points. And if somebody comes up with some theoretical view that contradicts all of our intuitions, including the ones that we've got most reason to hang on to, well, then I think there's something wrong with that theoretical position. So would you take issue with anti-natalists who would perhaps put forward a similar response when somebody says,

but I have a really strong intuition about children, about childbearing. I have a really strong intuition that it's a good thing to have children, and that might be a result of my evolutionary heritage. I might recognize that perhaps it's philosophically unjustified in some ways, but I could just say that it's undoubtable that some people have this really strong intuition that having children is not just permissible, but a positively good thing to do. and if you come along and present this theory of anti-natalism, do you see a kind of reflection of what you've just said

in this kind of line of thought? Somebody saying... No, not at all. Not at all, because I've just made the claim that we can't dismiss intuitions per se, or entirely. What I'm saying is we need to subject intuitions to critical scrutiny. And sometimes we need to weigh up different intuitions and see what we need to give up on this theoretical account and what we need to give up on that theoretical account. we want to establish some sort of reflective equilibrium.

We need to establish some conclusion that's well reasoned through. And so, you know, I'm open to evaluating intuitions. If somebody's got a good reason why I should reject an intuition, then I'm open to considering that. All I'm arguing is that we shouldn't just reject all intuitions out of hand immediately. I see. Okay, well, so let's talk about it then. Let's get to the grid of this.

You say that for someone who doesn't exist, the fact that they are not experiencing pleasure is not a bad thing because they're not being deprived of anything. And yet the fact that they're not suffering is a good thing, a lot of people would want to ask, how can you say that, given that earlier we clarified that when you say something is good or bad, what you really mean is good or bad for the person.

For a person who doesn't exist, this seems to make sense in the case of pleasure what you're saying to say that, well, it doesn't make sense to say that this person is deprived of pleasure because there's no one to be deprived. But how then can you say that somebody's being deprived of suffering in a good way? Well, I mean, obviously you want to try to avoid misunderstanding about what it means of good for somebody. This is the point that I was making earlier. So I'm obviously not claiming that there is somebody there who has no pain. So when I say that Sming is better for somebody or worse for somebody, I'm having to make a comparison between two scenarios, one in which they do exist and one in which they don't exist. The first thing to realize here is that this is a very unusual kind of scenario. Most times when we're thinking about whether something harms somebody or benefit somebody, they exist in both of the scenarios.

So that's the situation which we used to thinking about matters. Now we face with an unusual scenario where the person doesn't exist in both options, in both alternatives. So one thing we can do is we can adopt a kind of procrastian view and assume that our usual concepts must apply unwaveringly in this unusual kind of case. All that we can do is we can recognize that there's something unusual about this case and recognize that our usual concepts might need to be adapted somewhat in order to cater for it. And I believe that that second way is the wiser way to attend to this problem.

There are a lot of people, I think, in philosophy who want to sort of offer a very clever solution. They say, well, our ordinary concepts just don't apply here, and we've got to stick with these ordinary concepts, and therefore there's nothing wrong by bringing a suffering child into existence. And I want to say, well, that may be clever in a kind of technical sense, but it's not wise to treat the unusual case like the usual case. Much wiser to recognize there's something distinctive about this unusual case, which might require an adaptation of our ordinary concepts. So I would totally agree with this. My reaction is, however, that the way that I would treat the situation of non-existence differently is to say that for someone who's alive, potentially, if, If they're deprived of pleasure, that's bad, and if they're deprived of suffering, that's good.

Whereas for the person who doesn't exist, because they don't exist, the deprivation of their pleasure is not bad, but neither is the deprivation of their suffering good. This is kind of the heart of the asymmetry is how we can justify the idea that there needs to be a person to be benefited in order for pleasure to be good. But there doesn't need to be a person to suffer in order for the absence of suffering to be good. well you can go down your route if you like and it is a route that I considered but that has all kinds of other implications and the question is whether you're willing to accept all of those other implications perhaps we could go through some of them well for example somebody could conceive a child that they know would suffer horribly this is this is not just the ordinary suffering of an ordinary life this is unusual suffering let's say and then the child would die at age five or six or ten as the case may be most of people think that if you knew that in advance and you could avoid bringing that child in existence, that that's exactly what you should do. And if you willingly went into that, ignoring the sufferings of this potential child, you would be doing something wrong. Now, the question is, how do you explain that if you don't accept something like this basic axiological asymmetry?

Is the essence of your question, because if I did accept that there was an obligation not to bring that child into existence, I would then simultaneously be committed to saying, that there was an obligation to bring beings into existence that did experience more pleasure? Well, that's one route you can go. What I'm saying is you've said that we ought to treat the absence of pleasure and the absence of pain in the non-existent equivalently, so that it's not good to avoid pain by avoiding a person. Now, it seems to me that that's going to lead you to have to make a judgment about the case of described that seems intolerable well now it's possible that there might be some

other explanation that you could give and I have explored a range of other explanations that people might give for a wife be bad or wrong to bring the miserable child into existence but the point I'm making is that to to support the asymmetry that I'm advancing there are multiple factors we need to consider to see what the best explanation is and I think that this basic asymmetry has lots of explanatory value. It explains the case that I've just mentioned, explains the range of other cases,

it solves certain problems in population ethics. It has all of these theoretical benefits, which means I don't think we ought to give it up that quickly. So what's the problem with me saying that for this potential child, let's say for my child, since I don't have any children, the fact that my child is currently not suffering is neutral, and yet the moment that that child becomes born, any suffering it experiences become bad.

What's the problem with that for you? Well, what reason would you have not to bring it into existence? Because once it's been brought into existence, that would become a bad thing. And then what about why aren't you creating babies at the moment that on ordinary views would have lots of pleasure and benefits? Well, for instance, let's say that I agreed with you on your second point about that most human lives do contain more suffering. pleasure that there are a lot worse than people think that they are that they are and here I was I was to agree with you that we therefore shouldn't bring new beings into existence but that the asymmetry still fails if you see what I'm saying um yes so you so you're saying if you accepted

my other arguments for antinatalism then you wouldn't be bound to accept the uh the axiological asymmetry I'm saying that if I accepted the argument about life being really bad I could say that for that reason, I don't have an obligation to bring new beings into existence who will experience pleasure, but I can still say that, what I said earlier, that the suffering for my child is neutral until it comes into existence. Because your response to that was to say, well, why don't you then have an obligation to bring children into existence who do experience pleasure? And I could respond by saying that I don't think any child ever would.

Right. Well, then you just accepted the anti-natalist conclusion by a, by a, by, another route. That's right, yeah. I mean, so I'm not accepting it personally, at least not at this stage, let's say, but what I'm trying to get to the heart of is right now I'm trying to discuss the philosophy of the asymmetry. So with the conclusion of anti-natalism can stand as a separate question, but I'm trying to see if this is a functional objection to at least the asymmetry that you're presenting. Well, I mean, I think there's a there's a sort of methodological point here because most people are not going to accept the second point that you accept it.

Sure. And so the first port of call, as it were, is to evaluate that asymmetry. And then there's the further point about how bad life is. Now, if you think that all lives are so miserable that we ought not to bring anybody into existence, well, then maybe you don't need the axiological asymmetry. No, I'm sure you don't. So the reason that I'm pressing this is because certainly my audience are often interested in philosophical and ethical concepts in the abstract, kind of at a meta-ethical level. We're interested in the

idea, and the conclusion that it leads to is also interesting, but that becomes more of a practical consideration. I just wanted to question this and see, because I totally agree with you that you can come to an anti-nacious conclusion without the asymmetry, which is something that you agree with, but nonetheless, you do think that the asymmetry holds. And I'm trying to present an argument here that would rebut the asymmetry argument, but not rebut antinatalism, if you see what I mean? And I wondered if you think that this is a good argument against the asymmetry. I'm not sure it's a good argument against the asymmetry. It may be an argument for why the asymmetry isn't necessary in order to reach the conclusion. Okay. So,

in other words, I just want to kind of recap here to make sure I'm not missing anything. My argument was something like, I'm going to say that my child, who currently doesn't exist, is in a state of neutrality. The fact that he's not experiencing suffering is not a good thing. It's neutral. The fact that he's not experiencing pleasure is neutral because he doesn't exist. The moment he begins to exist, he will experience more suffering than pleasure. And for that reason, once he begins to exist, it would be a bad thing that he exists. but before he exists, as far as the being is concerned, like it's neutral.

Well, but there's a distinction to be drawn here. Obviously, this non-existent being is in a state of neutrality. That's obviously true. Obviously, there's no experiences in a non-existing being. So that's obviously true. But you can't use that to leverage a point against the axiological asymmetry, which is trying to compare two scenarios, One in which the being does exist and one in which the being doesn't exist and he's trying to work out which of those is better in terms of the interest of the being who exists in only one of those scenarios.

Okay, so when I say that the being's in a state of neutrality, I mean a state of moral neutrality. I know this is perhaps something you wouldn't agree with. That is to say, it's not a bad thing or a good thing. Like, it's not a bad thing that there's no pleasure. It's not a good thing that there's no suffering. it's a state of moral neutrality. What I would then say is that if you compare the existence of this child versus the non-existence of this child, the two scenarios, that is.

The scenario in which it exists, I've granted that it will experience more suffering. And yet the state before it exists is neutral. And therefore, existing is still worse than non-existing when you compare the two scenarios because you've got excess suffering versus neutrality. What I'm denying is the ability to say of the being that doesn't exist that the fact that it's not suffering is good, is a positively good thing. I feel at the moment, in my considerations, the furthest I can go is to say that it's in a state of neutrality, and potentially everyone who is alive is in a state of net suffering, and therefore

it's not worth bringing them into existence, but not because the lack of suffering for someone who doesn't exist is good, but rather because the lack of suffering for someone who doesn't exist is neutral compared to the suffering of existence. But you're trying to compare the two scenarios, whether the person comes into existence or doesn't come into existence. And you know that if you bring that being into existence, it's going to suffer. Don't you think that you can make the comparison that the alternative scenario is better than that?

Yes. And better when judged in terms of the interests of the being that exists in the alternative scenario. Yes, I certainly agree. And I think that that's what I'm able to do. without granting that the lack of suffering is good. What I mean to say is that if I kind of see it as a scale with neutrality in the middle, suffering on one side and pleasure on the other side,

I can say that the state of non-existence is morally neutral, and the state of existence for my child is suffering. So when you compare the two situations, it is better for the person that they don't exist. Yes, that's exactly what I mean when I'm. I say that the absence of that pain is good and good in terms of the interest of the person that you would otherwise have brought into existence. But do you not see a problem with framing the absence of that pain as a positive good

rather than just a neutrality to be compared against the positive suffering of existence? No, I don't think so. I think there's going to be a problem if you insist on using the ordinary concepts in the unusual case. But if you recognize that there's something unusual about this case, and so you need to adapt the concepts, then I don't think there's anything mysterious or strange about saying that when you make this comparison between the two scenarios, it is better in terms of the interests of the being who would exist in one that they don't exist. Okay, well, the reason why I think that this can lead to antinatalism but does not actually, but does count as an argument against the asymmetry, is because it relies on the fact that the person who exists,

is going to experience more suffering. So perhaps this will help explain my position. If we switch the, if we switch the situation around, and I know you don't think this is true for any human being that lives, but we can hypothesize a human being for whom there is a majority of pleasure, you know, 80, 20, something like that. Now, you would say that it's still not worth bringing that being into existence, because before they exist, the lack of that suffering is a good thing, but the lack of the pleasure isn't a bad thing. What I'm saying here is that if we consider the person who doesn't exist to be in a state of neutrality, as we did a moment ago, then we can compare the two situations and see that for the person who doesn't exist,

they're in a state of neutrality, and for the person who does exist, they're in a state of positive pleasure, or net pleasure, let's say. Therefore, when you compare the situations, you have more pleasure in the existence than the non-existence. Now, of course, this, you would reject, but you would reject this on the grounds of an asymmetry between pleasure and pain. But what I'm saying is that a moment ago we reversed the situation and I said that perhaps we have, we can ascribe neutrality to the being that doesn't exist and net suffering to the person who does exist and therefore conclude that it's not worth living. But do you see why I don't think that needs the asymmetry or why I think that that kind of counts against the asymmetry? Because if you just change the reality of the situation of the person who does exist so that they are experiencing more pleasure, then without the asymmetry, the argument is. would run to say that they should be brought into existence.

But there are two questions here. The one is whether you need the asymmetry in order to generate antinatalist conclusions, and the other is whether you ought to reject the asymmetry. And I don't think you need the axial asymmetry in order to generate antinatalous conclusions. You could get that via another route, one which recognizes the predominance of bad over good in her life. But that doesn't mean to say that we ought to reject the axiologic asymmetry. Just because you don't need it with some other set of assumptions doesn't mean to say you ought to reject it. Okay. Well, on that count then, I suppose I hope that, because this is a fascinating port of contention, I hope that my listeners can try and work this out for themselves. But maybe one

way to discuss this further, because you say that you've said a few times now that we have to take special consideration about how this is a, this is a unique case not existing and we may need to treat it differently. So let's talk about, if we can, why it is that these arguments that apply to people who don't exist do not apply to people who do exist. For instance, a lot of people misunderstand anti-natalism upon first hearing it, thinking that it's an argument towards suicidality or something like that, because it seems like you might be suggesting life is not worth living and so we should end our lives. Perhaps you can briefly just explain why that's not the case in your view.

Right. Well, although I think there's no interest in coming into existence, my sense is once we do exist, we have an interest in continuing to exist. Now, that's not to say that that interest could not be defeated. I do think that the quality of life can become so terrible that although you've got an interest in continuing to exist, your interest in avoiding all these horrors outweighs your interest in continuing to exist. But it is the case, nonetheless, that once you start existing, you've got an interest in continuing to exist. to exist. And so I think different standards apply to the question whether life is worth starting and whether life is worth continuing. There's a higher bar as it were to be met for the question about whether life is worth continuing or worth ending. So do you think that interests have moral worth intrinsically kind of of their own accord, regardless of the amount of suffering or pleasure that they may bring? Well, that's a complicated.

question because some of the interests are going to be interests connected with the goods or bads of future life. So part of an interest in continuing to live might be an interest in the goods that you will derive if you continue to live and the goods that you'll be deprived of if you don't continue to live. But I think that there's another interest and that is the interest in just being propelled forward in continuing to exist independent of the or pains. It's not that this interest can't be compared against and perhaps sometimes outweighed by some of those other interests, but I have a sense that is this interest in continuing to exist. Yes, sorry. Oh, no, if you're not finished.

No, that's fine. Well, I was just going to say that the reason I asked this is because reading your work, one of the questions that came up the most for me was this question about interest, especially as pertains to the question of abortion and perhaps the taking of the taking of lives without people being aware that their lives are being taken. For instance, perhaps I could just get your view on this question. It's an analogy I'm sure you've heard. I can't remember who it comes from,

but suppose you're on a train and you meet a stranger who has a terminal illness or something like this and you wish them well. You know, you want them to, it becomes in your interest for that person to be healthy because you care about them because you're an empathetic person. But once they get off the train, you never see them

again and you never have contact with him again. Now, if that person does get well again, which is in your interest, but you never find out, is that good for you? Well, it depends on what view you have about interests here. I'm just not sure that this is the relevant debate to be having about the question of abortion. Because in the case of abortion, we're dealing with, at least if it's in the earlier stages of gestation, we're dealing with a being that may not have interests. of a morally relevant kind at all. So I'm not sure that the question you've just posed is what's going to get us to the heart of the matter about abortion.

Well, for the moment, I'm just trying to talk still about the difference between beings that don't exist and do exist. And I hope you'll see why this becomes relevant in a moment. But to me, intuitively, it seems that it's not good for the person on the train if that person, if the terminally old person becomes healthy, of the fact that they never become aware of it. Even though you might say they have an interest in the person's becoming well, what you're really saying is that they have an interest in kind of knowing that the person gets better and being able to benefit it from it in that way. I don't think, in other words, that their interest in the person getting well is in itself of moral worth such that if that person does get well, but the person on the train never

finds out about it, they are therefore benefited. Well, I think there's a confounding variable in the case that you've provided, and that is you've stipulated that this is a complete stranger. So let's take another case which would test your hypothesis about what you don't know can't harm you. So let's imagine that you have spent your entire work producing some magnum opus, and you leave it to be sent off to the publisher, and you die. And it gets burnt in some conflagration, and it never sees the light of day. And the question now is, well, have your interests been set back by this work having been destroyed? You'll never know about it because you're dead. You'll never know one way or the other.

But have your interests been set back by it being burnt? Yeah, it's an interesting consideration. My response would be to say that it might make sense to say that your interests have been negated, but that it's not bad for you that that happens because you're dead. so why do you draw that inference that from it being in your interest that it be published to it not harming you but i suppose this is going to depend on what your conception of harm is so how do you understand harm uh so i understand harm uh in essentially utilitarian measure to to be judged by suffering so in other words there needs to be somebody to be to be to be

be doing the suffering for it to be bad for them. Well, let's be careful here. So let's imagine somebody poisons you and you die painlessly. Have they harmed you? Well, this is exactly the question that I was going to pose to you, which is essentially this, that I see my future self as as much a potential person as my child, for instance. I see it as a person that does not exist yet but could or could not. And my contention is that I feel like the asymmetry argument that you present, if it holds, would also hold for living beings because of the fact that if I die painlessly, I feel like that can't be bad for me because I'm not aware of it happening and I don't suffer from it. And yet you would thereby be preventing my future self,

who doesn't exist yet, you'd be preventing my future self from experiencing any suffering. And yes, you'd be preventing them from experiencing pleasures as well, but because I don't have any interest anymore, because I'm dead, and because that person now doesn't exist, and as you say, the deprivation of their pleasure is not a bad thing, I don't see why the same argument wouldn't apply to say that we have a preference to being painlessly killed. Now, of course, in practice, this wouldn't work, because you would need to be unaware that you're being killed. So it's not something we could kind of implement universally, but in the individual case of somebody being killed without their knowledge, it seems like the antinatalist argument. In this specific case, Lisa is saying that this is a good thing. Well, I'm worried that you're layering one assumption upon another here to produce this hypothesis. So let's, we have to, we have to look at value at one assumption at the time. So you're saying that somebody poisons you and you die painlessly, you're not harmed. Yes, I believe so. Now, we have to, we have to decide whether we want to accept that, that hypothesis or not. Think about what the theoretical implications would be, let's say for painless murder.

Yeah. Now, there would be secondary effects on other people. There may be secondary effects on other people, but let's imagine some scenario where they're not the secondary effects on other people. And somebody could painlessly kill you, presumably you would think then that that ought not to be criminalized. Well, it gets complicated because, of course, the very act of decriminalizing something like that would probably lead to more suffering because people would need to become aware that

that's something that's legal to do and it would probably cause some kind of panic. I do think Well I've stipulate I've recognized those scenarios If you imagine you could control for those scenarios Well so morally And if you don't want to frame it in terms of criminalization Yeah

The suggestion that you've not harmed somebody by killing them Well of course you can accept that view if you If you're an epicurean But then we're having a whole other debate About the about the badness of death This is If we're talking about minority views here this is a minority view. Now, it may be the correct one, but we need to evaluate that view. I

don't think there's much going for that view. Absolutely. Sorry, go ahead. Well, I just wanted to clarify that what I do think here is that for the person who is being killed, if they're killed without their knowledge and don't experience any pain, then it makes no sense to say that it's bad for them. Now, that's not to say that it's not bad for other people. You could even say that because somebody has to do the killing, the kind of character that that would instill in a person, or cultivate in the person itself would be bad, and if it's genuinely neutral, whether the person dies or not, then the small kind of character effect it has on the person doing the killing, for instance, might be enough to tip the balance.

But what I'm saying is for the person who dies, I don't think it makes sense to say that it's bad for them. So this is a well-known argument. It's an old argument. It goes back to the Epicureans. It's a very resilient argument. I don't think that there is a knock-down response. I don't think that we can definitively disprove the Epicurean view, which is exactly why it's been resilient over millennia. But if we're wanting to know whether we ought to accept this view, we need to balance out different considerations.

So there are arguments in the reverse. There are arguments which suggest that you can harm somebody by depriving them of goods that they would otherwise have had. You can harm somebody by annihilating them. These are all alternative views that attempt to address the Epicurean argument. And each of these positions would have some shortcomings and some strengths. And again, what I would suggest is that the wise approach here is one that weighs these up and tries to reach the conclusion that is most reasonable on a balance of considerations to reach. When I do that, I reach the conclusion that death is,

bad for the person who dies. I can't give you a mathematical proof for that. I can't give you a knock-down argument for that. But I do think that the weight of considerations support that view rather than the Epicurean view. Yeah, I suppose what I'm trying to do is express what I feel and what I know a lot of my audience have felt when encountering anti-natalism, which is that it seems on the surface level to be an unintuitive view. But once you become convinced of the asymmetry or something like that, it leads me, and the nature of pleasure and pain and its effect on a person, it leads me to the unintuitive conclusion that death is not

bad for the person dying. And as you say, maybe this is just kind of a clash of intuitions here, but the way that I see it is that it makes just as much sense to see my future self as a potential person as to see my son as a potential person. And let's say that harming, that killing somebody, killing me does harm me, it would of course harm me in a in a finite way to a finite amount and are you would would you say or would you argue that the amount that somebody is harmed in your view by being killed is not outweighed by the amount of suffering that they'll experience in the rest of their life if life is as bad

as you say it is so now I think we've moved on to a different question and I'm I am worried here that we've got too many open issues perhaps so I'd either like to try to close down some of the issues that we know what assumptions we're working on, or I think we should shift focus on much what you want to do in the time available. Well, I wonder what you think has most kind of gapingly been left open here? Well, one question is the question about the badness of death for the person who dies. So when I made a point about that, then you brought me back to antinatalism, but I don't want to come back to antinatalism if your argument against antinatalism rests on the

Epicurean view. I want to then first settle the Epicurean view or at least recognize where the difference is between us. I see. So my argument about death here isn't an attempt to disprove anti-nationalism. It's an attempt to show that I think that the logic of not bringing someone into existence also applies to taking someone out of existence. That's not to say that anti-natalism is wrong. Rather, I think it's an argument to say that if anti-natalism is correct, then there's also an obligation or maybe not an obligation, but it can also be a good thing for a person to die? Well, it may be if the Epicurean is correct, but I don't think an anti-natalist is committed

to Epicureanism. So you're an anti-natalist, and now there's a separate question about whether you should be an Epicurean. And if you think that there's no harm to the person who dies in being dead or in being killed painlessly, then it may well be that ending your life sooner or later is exactly the right thing to do because you'll avoid all the result in mystery. But an antinatalist is not committed to the Epicurean view merely in virtue of being an anti-natalist. Sure. I'm not saying that's the case. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that if somebody takes that view of death, that it would

then follow from anti-natalism that it is also a good thing for people's lives to end. Would you say at least that much that if the Epicurean view of death is correct, then it would actually be a good thing because I think the Epicurean line would generally be that it's somewhat neutral if you die because, you know, it's got no effect on you. But it seems like if you take an Epicurean view and you mix it with the asymmetry argument, you actually land on the conclusion that it's good to die. Well, I mean, there's a sort of rough way in which I think that's true, but there's another way in which I think it's not true. This is not clear to me that the Epicurean can say, just as the Epicurean can't say that death is bad,

it's not getting you, the Epicurean can say that death is good for the person who dies. Yes, so I don't think the Epicurean would say, but see, this is my intuition, because in the same way that if an Epicurean isn't able to say that death is bad, then they shouldn't be able to say that death is good.

That's the same kind of problem of asymmetry that I see with anti-natalism intuitively, that if you can't say that it's, if you can't say that it is bad that someone isn't suffering, you can't say that it's good that they're not... Sorry, if you can't say that it's bad that they're not experiencing pleasure,

you can't say it's good that they're not suffering. To me, that's just as unintuitive as the Epicurean somehow saying that it's not bad if you die, but it is good that you die. Again, I'm worried that there are multiple issues that are open here. One of them, of course, is that

you're saying that your future self is like a new being. So you're drawing a comparison between you and your future self and the non-existent person becoming an existing person. And I'm worried about that assumption. I think that once you just, there may be differences between you and the person that you will evolve into in 20, 30, 40 years time. I don't deny that.

but I don't think we're dealing with the same kind of case as we are when a person has not been brought into existence and then they brought into existence. It's not that you're continuing to live is coming into existence. That's different. That's continuing to exist.

Sure. Maybe let me think of another way to I know, I suppose that would be a different question. I think it gets complicated here because of course there's always going to be a transgression of one person into their future self. But perhaps, again, maybe this is something that we should perhaps leave to the audience, because I do want to get to some other considerations. Namely, there's another

question that I wanted to ask you, and I don't want to run over time here. So leaving these things open in the air, I hope people realize how many questions there are lying in the air. But I suppose one of my principal aims with this podcast episode is to bring considerations of anti-natalism to my audience rather than necessarily talk them into it or talk them out of it, if you see what I'm saying. The question that I want to ask is something like this. You've said in the past that you wouldn't be in favor, that there are good ways and bad ways of bringing about human extinction. For instance, you wouldn't be in favor of a method of bringing about human extinction that's painful because, of course, for the people who do exist, the suffering that they'll

experience during the extinction will matter. Is that about right that you wouldn't be in favor of creating a mass extinction in a way that would be painful for people who do exist? Correct. So the question I want to ask is this. You've pointed out in bed and never to have been that when you don't have children, you're not just preventing the suffering of your child. You're also preventing the suffering of your child's child and your child's child's and innumerable generations that stretch on into the future.

Now, if, again, hypothetically, because in practice this wouldn't be the case, but if hypothetically some government developed some kind of, nuclear weapon or had some kind of big red button, you know, that they could press, that would wipe out all sentient life on Earth. But it would do so quite painfully. It would do so by nuclear radiation or by fires or something like this. My problem is this. Like, obviously there would be a lot of suffering that would be caused by that, by that process of extermination over the course of a, you know, a week or so. But given the sheer number of beings that on your view, you'd be saved from suffering because there would be no progeny. Do you not think that the suffering that you

would say, that that government would say by pressing that button over the multiple generations that are now not going to exist would be worth the suffering that they cause by causing the planet to go extinct? Yeah, I think it does depend on what background moral theoretical view you have. So it may well be that utilitarians would think that that's the right thing to do if all these conditions are met. And as you rightly pointed out, you'd almost never know that those conditions are met. But it may be that a deontologist, for example, would say, although I'd be preventing a great deal of misery, it would be wrong for me to violate the rights of all these people by terminating them. That's not within my entitlement. And is this something that you as a philosopher would

remain ambiguous on? Because you kind of, you don't think it matters? Well, no, I do point out in bed and never to have been where I think one's theoretical background makes a difference. And so at least I evaluate the question of phased extinction. And I think that different theoretical positions could yield different answers about the permissibility of phased extinction. And I think something similar would be true about this sort of scenario that you're imagining now. Right. So I can certainly grant that phased extinction, would be better than painful extermination,

but would you be willing to grant the painful extermination if it was 100%, if it caused 100% finality, would be better than allowing people to continue existing and producing? The practical question looms very large for me because I don't think that you could ever know that. And human history is littered with people who think they know when they don't know,

who have utopian vision. that cause immense amounts of misery. And so I think there's very good reason not to be that confident in yourself, always, especially when you're talking about the level of suffering that you'd be inflicting in a case like this. So it might be that practically even the consequentialists, even the utilitarians would be opposed to this. But the more foundational problem that I have, is really this idea of playing God. And I think there are just too many people who have arrogated to themselves this right to play God,

to decide for all humanity, for other competent beings, what ought to be done. It's a very, very dangerous view to hold. So I don't have the sort of God-like view of our powers or of our responsibilities. I've got limited responsibilities. It's not my job to prevent suffering for the rest of time. It's my job to prevent the suffering that I can reasonably confident I can do without causing more harm. Sure. So obviously, the example I give is a hypothetical one.

And in philosophy, we can just kind of assume in the hypothetical that you do have total knowledge. Your objection is something like the practicalities are really, important because we can never actually be sure that the conditions are as we say they are. The point that I would want to make is that this is the same earlier when I brought up the unintuitive conclusion that maybe it's not bad to kill a person painlessly. I'd make the same point. This is actually the exact argument that I give in response to people who like yourself say it seems troublesome to say that it's just okay to kill people painlessly.

And my response is that, well, the practicalities do loom large and we never know if they actually have no family, no one that will suffer from their disappearance, that we know that the person who kills them isn't going to develop kind of a liking for it, or that's going to affect them in some way, or have a negative psychological effect even on them, because they think they're doing a good thing. I would say, like, the practicalities of this matter make it such that we probably shouldn't normalize killing people painlessly.

But in the hypothetical situation, I'm willing to grant that if we did just happen to know all of this, then we could say that it was okay to do. And I'm wondering if you're at least willing to do the same thing in saying, I agree with you that the practicalities do loom large and are important. But if we just hypothetically grant that you could know that this painful extermination would bring about the end of life on Earth, do you think it would be a moral obligation to do so? No, I think it would depend on what view you have. So let's look at some scenarios. Let's imagine that I'm a utilitarian. Well, if I were utilitarian, I might think to myself that, in fact, this is the right thing to do.

But I might also think that if I would say that it's the right thing to do, then I would be emboldening people who believe they know things when they don't know things and who would start killing off people and animals in scenarios where, in fact, they're going to do more harm than good. And so from the utilitarian perspective, what I want to do is shut up about that advice, because I know that it's going to be missing. used by people who've got far too much confidence in themselves. So it's not obvious what a utilitarian would say to you, given that sort of dilemma. Then let's look at a deontologist. Well, a deontologist might say, well, I'm fully cognizant of all the misery that's going to result from my not pressing the button, but it's not within my rights to press that button.

Think about a much smaller scale case. Let's imagine you see somebody who's suffering from a terminal disease, and they want to continue existing. They believe it's worth their while to continue to live out the next few days or weeks, whatever it is they have left, whereas it is your very firm belief that all they're going to have is suffering that by killing them now, you will be relieving them of a net harm. Well, may you go and kill them if this is a competent person? I don't believe so. I don't think that would be appropriate for you to do. Now, the scenario you've presented me is a scenario writ large. We are not speaking about one person in this scenario. I'm speaking about

seven or eight billion people. A deontologist may, and quite plausibly say, this is not within my rights to do that. So isn't this somewhat similar? I'm thinking specifically of the case of somebody thinking that their life is worth continuing, you having this firm conviction that it's not. If we take a version of antinatalism that's not reliant on asymmetry, but just reliant on your view that life is actually really bad. And you make the point that people's lives are often and usually much worse than they themselves know or think that they are. Is this not a similar kind of judgment that you would make if somebody said, look, I mean, this person who exists, if I have a child, like, I can know with considerable certainty given the conditions that I'm

going to bring them up in or something. Again, we can just grant this hypothetically that they themselves are going to be of the opinion of being glad to have been born. Now, like, an anti-natalist could say, I know that they would be glad to, if you ask someone, they say that they'd rather been born, but they're actually just wrong in their own analysis of their own situation. I could just as well say to you, like, who are you to make that judgment for them,

in the same way that you could say, who am I to make that judgment for the person dying on the street? Well, there's a crucial difference. The one is you're dealing with a competent being, and the other is you're dealing with a non-existent being. So it may well be that I believe the competent being is wrong. I often believe competent beings are wrong. There are many competent beings I believe are wrong.

I don't believe I'm entitled to interfere with them because that's the whole point, is we're parceling out decision-making authority precisely because we are fallible, and they get to decide for themselves. If they're making a mistake, that's their business. Now, when you're thinking about bringing somebody into existence, this is an entirely different scenario. Not only is there no competent being there, there's no being at all. you can prevent everything that would happen to that person by not bringing them into existence without any cost to them whatsoever. That seems to be a no-brainer case about what you should do.

Yeah. Okay, so let's try and just reformulate this briefly in the last few minutes here. Let's get a bit more contrived to try and solve the kind of particulars of this situation. Let's say that a person is offered the chance by a time traveler to make it such that they themselves never existed. Do you think they'd have an obligation to do so? To what, to make sure they never existed? To make it such that they never existed. I want to resist the scenario, because I think there are lots of confounding factors in the scenario.

Once you engage in this time travel idea, you're asking people to imagine not that they didn't come into existence. At least this is the net effect, but rather that they go out of existence. So you'd think it would kind of be the same thing. Technically, that's not what you're asking them, but already we know people have problems considering the counterfactual case, the counterfactual scenario when they didn't exist, because what they keep thinking is, well, I wouldn't have been here, and I wouldn't have been able to do this, and I wouldn't be able to do this, and they sort of think about all the things that they would have missed out on. And that's exactly the wrong way to think about it. So given what we know about the unreliability of people's counterfactual judgments about the conditions of their own. existence, when you present them with a scenario that involves time travel back from some point where they do exist to some point when they didn't, we can't expect to get a reliable judgment in a scenario like that. That's going to be an unreasonable judgment. I suppose I just also think that you can't expect to get a reliable judgment from somebody who is going to die

and knows they're going to die and thinks that it's going to be bad for them. I guess that's the kind of comparison I'm trying to draw here because I'd agree with you that if you present someone with this time traveller, they would actually be thinking in their head about like stopping existing rather than having never existed because in practice that's what it would mean to them. But we could come along and say, look, you don't understand. I mean, I know the way that you're experiencing this is that if you say yes to the time traveler, that everything, you want to carry on living as you are now and that wouldn't happen. But you don't understand, like, philosophically, technically, you would never have existed. And the person you're

making the decision for is your past self. who is an incompetent being and you're making it on their behalf, it seems like you just wouldn't get a competent answer out of them. But I feel like the same would be true with the person who's dying on the street. But these are two scenarios we're thinking about. There's a real person there who's existing, and now we have to decide whether to terminate their life or not. And my view is you defer to them if they're competent.

You're now contrasting that with some hypothetical scenario, not a real scenario, a hypothetical scenario where you're asking what an actual person to travel back in time after having decided whether or not they should start existing. This is not a real decision. No, I agree it's not a real decision. It's a hypothetical question and perhaps one that, again, we can leave to the audience to consider because I realize we've just come up on time. So unless there's anything else pressing that you want to say or gaping holes that you'd like to clear up,

in a few brief moments. I'd suppose that's a good place to end the conversation. Well, thanks. Thanks for the interesting debate and discussion. I do think that we've left lots of issues open. I fear too many issues, but it's nonetheless been an interesting and engaging discussion. So thank you very much. Absolutely. And thank you for coming. And I hope that the people listening at the very least are aware that these questions exist now, if not quite, if we haven't quite been able to come to a firm answer on them. So to everyone listening, as always, thank you for listening. Don't forget to subscribe if you're watching on YouTube and leave a rating if you're listening on various podcasting devices and click the notification bell. Everything that I do is

supported by you on Patreon. So do find me on patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic if you want to see more of this kind of thing. But as always, thank you for, thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. And I have been Alex O'Connor and today I've been in conversation with Professor David Beneter. Well, hello everybody. Welcome back again. A few days ago, I recorded this discussion that you'll have just listened to with Professor David Benetar on anti-natalism. And afterwards, Professor Benetter listened back to the conversation and thought that there were some clarifications that needed to be made. We were kind of speaking in the time constraints of having about an hour. So we left a few topics in the air and some things weren't fully

explicated. So we wanted to take an opportunity to just sit and discuss some of the points of contention and some of the bits that Professor Benetta wanted to clarify as a little addendum to the conversation we had. Does that sound about right, Professor? That sounds great. Thank you very much, yes. Sure thing. Okay, so I suppose the best way to do this, let's just jump in and if you just want to let me know some of the points that you heard upon listening back to the conversation that you thought wanted some clarification and we'll see where it goes. Good. I think there are quite a few, but let me rather concentrate on what I take to be the more important ones. Sure thing. It seemed on a number of occasions we were speaking past one another about the question of the value of

pain and pleasure both in their presence and in their absence. And you were insisting that the absence of pain and the absence of pleasure and the non-existing person is neutral. And I was actually agreeing with you about that. But where I think we were speaking of cross purposes was that when I say that the absence of pain is good and the absence of pleasure is not bad, I'm not referring to the intrinsic value of the obviously neutral states in the non-existing person. What I'm speaking about is a comparative judgment. So when I compare the absence of the pain in the non-existing person with the presence of the pain in the person who would exist in the alternative scenario, I take the absence to be better than the presence. And so when I say it is good, I mean it is good

in a comparative sense, not in an intrinsic sense. And so I can fully accept your point about the intrinsic neutrality of the state. I agree about that. I'm simply making a comparative claim. When I make that comparative claim, I don't know whether you agree or disagree, but I just need to clarify that that's what I meant. But that's what you meant. I suppose the confusion for me there would have been that when you use terminology like good,

for instance, if I were comparing two negative states, if there were two instances of horrific suffering or something, but one was slightly less worse. I would hesitate to call it good, even comparatively speaking, to make an argument that kind of said that if forced to choose between two really bad options, that one is good. If there are two candidates in an election, both of whom you think are terrible, it would seem like a strange thing for me to say that it would be good to vote for one of them or something like that rather than kind of framing it as being less bad or something like that, if that makes sense. Well, I don't want to get bogged on in particular as an example,

because it may in fact be good to vote for the less bad of the candidates. Sure, actually, that makes sense, yes. But that's not an analogous case to the one I'm referring to. So I certainly can grant your point that there are bads of varying degrees and goods of varying degrees. But the point I'm making is that the absence of all the pain that there would be in the life of the existing verse, that is good in the sense that it is better than that alternative.

Sure. Now this may be due to a lack of full understanding still of exactly what you're saying, but what's the problem with saying, for purposes of clarification, what's the problem of saying that if a life, when it did come into existence, had a majority of pleasure that compared to the state of neutrality, because that would be better, there would be, let's say, let's say, more of a good thing, something like this. Why can we not say that existing in that instance is good compared to the neutrality of existence if there is a majority of pleasure? Well, this is where I think you're getting ahead of yourself, because you're reaching an

overall judgment about the net value of existence before you've compared the components, namely the presence or absence of the pains and the pleasures. So before I reach a judgment about whether coming into existence is a net harm, a net benefit, or neutral, I want to compare the presence and the absence of pain and the presence of absence of pleasure in the two options. And so I think the absence of the pain is good. And by that, I mean it is comparatively good with the alternative. But the absence of pleasure, I think, is not bad.

And what I mean by that is when you compare it with the alternative, it's not bad that it's absent and it's not bad because there's nobody who is the private of it right so it's not bad even in a comparative sense it's not worse that is to say exactly it's not worse i see that's exactly the point now once you've got those two comparisons in place now you're in a fit state to make the evaluation about the overall value of the life okay that makes sense sorry yeah this does lead us to the second uh concern so you uh you argued that one doesn't need the axiological asymmetry in order to generate the anti-naculous conclusion because if you think and you didn't actually commit to

this yourself that you believe this but you said if one thought that the good that the bad in the life outweighs the good or let's say the bad in all lives outweighs the good in all lives then you could reach the anti-nateless conclusion even without the axiological asymmetry and I agree that you can reach the anti-natal's conclusion without the axiological asymmetry But what I wanted to resist, and I did resist this in multiple points in our discussion, was the inference that therefore the axiological asymmetry is false. What I didn't do, I think, was to clarify why, in some detail, why I would want to adhere to the axial asymmetry. I gesture that there being a whole range of considerations, but I didn't sort of specify what some of those are.

Let me just cite a one for you. Almost everybody's going to deny that most lives contain more bad than good. Yet most people accept that, for example, there is no duty to bring a happy person into existence, but there is a duty to avoid an unhappy person. So if there's an axiological asymmetry that explains the judgment, that most people make about these things, then it's got an explanatory value which your hypothesis doesn't have.

So it's not that anybody who advances the view that you held is incoherent in some way. They have reached antinatalism without the axiological asymmetry, but there's nonetheless a great explanatory value in that axiological asymmetry. Sure. To clarify on my part, I wouldn't say, let me see how this was worded, I wouldn't, and I hope people don't interpret me as saying

that because anti-natalism can be reached as a conclusion without the axiological asymmetry, that therefore there's a problem with the axial asymmetry. That would be a totally invalid syllogism, of course. I suppose I was making two separate points. One is that in isolation, I felt like the asymmetry could be challenged. But that wasn't because you could reach the anti-natalist conclusion without it. It was just a side note for clarification that said that just so that people know you can reach it without the axial asymmetry.

So if there is a criticism that you have that you think holds, you can still be an anti-nacist. But it's worthwhile making the clarification you made there, I think. Thank you. So I'm pleased you now, you accept that, because I had the sense in the conversation that you were vacillating between those two positions and that sometimes you were moving from the claim

that the axial asymmetry wasn't necessary to the point that this was actually a challenge against the axial asymmetry. So if that's cleared up, then that's great. This is an important feature of our subsequent conversation here. Yeah, well, I certainly don't think that it's because it works without the asymmetry, that the asymmetry would fail. I don't think that's the reason that it fails, if that makes sense.

Now, I hope people didn't interpret me that way. Maybe some of them did. Maybe I actually did say things that suggested that. Part of the reason for that might be, and it's worth listeners kind of reflecting on this, is that because this is quite a unique area of philosophy that isn't addressed very much, sometimes the, I suppose, the terminology can get mixed up if you haven't been spending a long time making sure that you're using everything correctly and specifically. So it may well be that at a number of points, I accidentally equivocated or I kind of misunderstood an argument

quite, quite badly or something like that. So it is really worth paying attention when listening to a conversation of a topic that's brand new, and I hope listeners can do that. Are there any other areas that you feel are of pressing need to make sure that we're on the same page about? Thanks. First, let me say that I think you're quite right. These are very difficult matters. It's hard to get one's head around them. They're very challenging. I think it's one of the reasons that makes them so interesting. So I think there are two other points that I wanted to raise. The one was about the Epicurean arguments. And there were places where I think I was insufficiently precise in what I said about the Epicurean argument. I did correct it later

on. I made it clear what I meant by that. The odd thing for the Epicurean is that just as they can't say that death is bad for the person who dies, they also can't say that it is good for the person who dies. And both you and I acknowledge that in the course of the discussion. One of the counterintuitive implications of that is that if you have somebody who is suffering, they're in extremists, they've got a terminal condition, you can't say that it's, better for them to die. I can say that. I can say it's better because I don't believe that you have to exist in both of the scenarios

in order to make the comparative judgment. But if you're somebody like the Epicurean who insists on what's sometimes called the existence requirement, that is to say, you have to exist in both of the scenarios in order for the comparison to be made, they do run into that difficulty. But I can explain why death would be better. for somebody who's suffering greatly. Now, of course, you don't have to accept the anti-natalist argument in order to reach that conclusion,

but you do have to be able to compare existence and non-existence. Yes. And I do that with the coming into existence case, and I also do it with the going out of existence case. Right. I understand your point about consistency, and I would tend to agree, but I would question whether the Epicurean is committed to saying, especially if we consider the term good being used,

in a comparative sense. I wonder if it, I wonder if an Epicurean could still say, although that, you know, famously, death is nothing to us. When death comes, we're not there and when we're here, it's not there. That still, if somebody is suffering, the Epicurean could say that it's good to die in the sense that it's better to be dead because that it's better to have nothing than to have something, if that something is a net negative. I wonder if they'd be committed to it in that respect. I don't think you can say it. But again, yeah, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to kind of get caught up in our disagreements here rather than the, rather than the points of clarification, if you see what I mean. Sure. Look, I think they can say that continued life would be bad, but what they can't say is it would be either good or better.

So continued life being bad, kind of relative to, because the way I understand that is if the Epicurean says that continued life is bad, then they're kind of saying, as compared. to not continued life that that's what makes it bad we're kind of comparing continuing life and not continuing life and they say that continuing life is bad which would imply that not continuing life is not bad which is which if not bad is better than bad and by the way that you're using the term good I suppose I could say that that's better and therefore good you're careful because I can say that they can't say because the whole point is that they can't compare existence with non-existence and reach a conclusion

about what's better for the person because you aren't there when you're dead death can't be worse for you on their view not in my view on their view and just as it can't be worse it also can't be better is this like the non-identity problem

that you think that they're committed to the idea that they can't say anything about a person who's dead because they believe that the person who's dead there's kind of there's nothing of them. They're just not there. Non-identity problem is normally advanced

or that term is used with regard to coming into existence. But they think you can only make these comparisons if somebody exists. If somebody ceases to exist, you can't say it's better or worse for them. Which is just another of the odd implications of epicureanism.

There are a whole array of them. And so when I did say in our earlier discussion that when I'm trying to reflect on whether I should accept the epicurean view. I need to examine all of its implications and see whether on balance this is a wise view to accept. And when I do that, I don't reach that conclusion that it's a wise view to accept. Obviously, I've not done it for justice here. This is an old and a resilient argument. There's much more to be said that could be said in a podcast. But what we've discussed

now is clarificatory and advances our earlier discussion. Yes. So I want to press to the listener that the purpose of this addendum here is to clarify points. So I would I would stress that I still disagree with a lot of what you're saying here. I'd even potentially disagree still with the idea that Epicureanism is committed to what you're saying. I'm not sure on that. Maybe it's something that I'll revisit and write about in the future, but our purposes here are just to make sure that we at least understand the points that are kind of being made as they're being made, right? So I think when I'm saying kind of sure that makes sense throughout this little conversation that we're having now, I don't mean in terms of I'm bulled over and agree with you. I just mean to say that

that's a useful clarification, but it doesn't mean that I agree with the argument. Having said that, we can kind of keep going for as many as you think are worth clarifying unless that was the last major one that you had. Just one more if you don't mind. Of course. So at the end of our discussion, you were presenting me with the benevolent world explodeer. You didn't use exactly that terminology, but if I was presented with the option of destroying all sentient life, then would I press the button or not? And the challenge was obviously, because of all the suffering of generations in the future that I could prevent, there's presumably some very strong reason for me to press that button.

And I stepped through the different theoretical positions, and I suggested that a utilitarian might be willing to press the button, but might also not want to let on that they would press the button because there might be negative consequences to letting on. And then I raised the case of the deontologist and said, well, they may well not press the button because although there'd be a vast amount of suffering that they'd be preventing, they might plausibly say it's not within their rights to press that button. And I gave the example of somebody who is suffering from a terminal disease. It's very likely, let's say, in my view, that the bad,

far outweighs the good and that it would be in their interest to die. And I asked myself, should I kill this person? And my view is, no, I shouldn't. Because if this person is competent, then they get to decide for themselves. They may well be mistaken, but I don't get to override a competent person and decide to take the mind of existence if they want to continue. And my point, and I didn't make this, I suppose I said to some extent, my point about the benevolent world, Epoena is that you just multiply that.

case by, let's say, seven or eight billion cases in the case of human beings, and even still more in the case of all the other sentient beings. So just as I don't have a right to kill the one person, I wouldn't have the right to kill all of the others. What I worried about discussion was that we got a little bogged down about the case you raised of the time traveler, and I noted that that was a sort of hypothetical case, but it's not the hypotheticality of it that counts per se. It's, I think that it's just not relevant to the example I was giving.

Yes, and as I said to you privately, not long ago, reflecting on it, I do think that the Time Traveler case is disanalogous in the crucial aspect, that the person is therefore making the decision for themselves, and the point that you were making was that you don't have the right to make the decision on behalf of somebody else who's competent. The point that I would probably make, if I were to kind of rehash it under that light, would be to say that presumably you, as much as you don't think I have a right to override that person's autonomy, you also think that that person doesn't have a right to bring people into existence. So the way that I see it on the anti-natalist view is that we have here a conflict of rights.

We have a situation where, yes, if I killed people, it would violate their rights. But if I don't kill these people, I know that they're going to violate other people's rights, that is the people who haven't been born yet, by causing them to suffer. And so you've kind of got a situation whereby, if you don't, you know somebody is going to violate someone else's rights, do you have the right to violate the first person's right, knowing that that's the only way to stop them from violating another person's right, especially if that violation that they're going to commit is of generational proportions? But then the question becomes about the nature of when and if we can override rights, which isn't necessarily kind of a question that's specific to antinatalism. but would be a question that would need to inform your answer as to whether you personally would press the button. I hope that makes sense. In a way, yes, you have to distinguish, I think, between a utilitarianism of rights and strictly deontological view.

So a utilitarian rights would seek the minimization of rights violations, but then you are dealing with a version or a species of utilitarianism. And so it's just a question of minimizing rights violations. Sure. Deontologists, I think, would, there'd be a much higher bar there. So I'm not saying that deontologists are always committed to respecting rights irrespective of the outcome and irrespective what other rights violations might follow. There's going to be an extremely strong presumption. And in some versions of deontology, an absolute prohibition on killing innocence in order to prevent them from violating rights down the line. I mean, think about this, for example, among the people that you would kill in the benevolent world explode are sentient animals who are not moral agents, and so not violating anybody's rights. You'd also have human babies who would potentially become procreaters down the line, and you've got no idea whether they would or wouldn't procreate, but you'd certainly be violating their right to life in the process.

So there'd be lots of rights violation there that couldn't be justified in the way that you were suggesting. in. Yeah, I could see ways around it, but again, that would be a point of disagreement rather than one of clarification. I suppose just to close out, because thinking about it now, we never kind of landed on a question. And perhaps it's one that you wouldn't want to personally answer, but I wonder what the answer, in your view, would be to the question of whether it is good to press the button. I don't mean from each perspective, I mean, from your perspective, if the button is in front of you, am I to take from what you've just said that you would not press the button.

I think let's leave my view on this particular one out of. I've spelled out to different options and I've shown you that there's no implication. I may answer that at some point, but I think I'd just rather not answer it now. That's fine. Leave it to the consideration of the audience at least. I know that certainly when I've been asked it in the past, I've not wanted to answer it because it's one of those really controversial questions, so I totally understand that. well unless there's anything that you wanted to clarify on top of that you said I think you said

that was the last point the last major point at least yeah that's that's right thanks very much fantastic well then I just wanted to thank you again and do so publicly to say that it's the fact that you wanted to have this conversation shows that you do really care about making sure that our listeners are understanding you properly and really getting the best chance at engaging properly with the anti-nationalist argument so it's it's refreshing to see this hasn't happened with the guests before. It's nice that you've kind of listened back and been willing to do this follow-up. I hope people listening will take this seriously and take these clarifications on board and go and revisit the arguments that Professor Benison makes and read the book with these things

in mind and see what they think about it. And if they do have any points or questions about it, leave a comment in the original video because I know that there's a very strong active anti-Latelist community online who are always willing to talk about these things and respond to comments like that. So do be willing to do so. But really, yes, I have to thank you again, Professor David to Professor Venza for joining me and for doing this follow-up discussion. Thank you very much. Appreciate you being willing to do the follow-up. I don't know. Oh,

Oh, Thank you.