David Benatar Quotes

[T]he overwhelming urge to repeat the optimistic messages, especially in the bleakest times, suggests that they are not quite reassuring enough. It is as if the repetition of the “good news” is essential because it is so at odds with the way the world seems to be. While the optimists have answers to life’s big questions, they are not the right ones, or so I shall argue. Their answers are believed, when they are believed, because people so desperately want to believe them, and not because the force of arguments supporting them makes it the case that we must believe them.

It is these very conditions that facilitate the emergence of new infectious diseases and that also inflict horrific harms on animals — being kept in confined conditions and then butchered. Simply put, the coronavirus pandemic is a result of our gross maltreatment of animals.

If we take a cold, hard look at the human condition, we see an unpleasant picture. However, there are powerful biological drives against fully recognizing the awfulness of the human predicament that explain why so many people succeed in putting it out of their minds for much of the time. This is a mixed blessing. Ignorance is an existential analgesic, but those who do not sufficiently feel the weight of the human predicament are also vectors for its transmission to new generations.

Meaning from the cosmic perspective would be good for extensions of the same reasons that meaning from the other perspectives is good. People, quite reasonably, want to matter. They do not want to be insignificant or pointless. Life is tough. It is full of striving and struggle; there is much suffering and then we die. It is entirely reasonable to want there to be some point to the entire saga. The bits of terrestrial meaning we can attain are important, for without them, our lives would be not only meaningless but also miserable and unbearable. It would be hard to get up each day and do the things that life necessitates in order to continue. One writer has sniffed at this suggestion, saying that the “idea that the natural consequence of finding one’s life meaningless is to commit suicide is somewhat ridiculous.” In fact, however, failed social belonging is, at least according to some, the most important factor in predicting suicide. Failed social belonging is one consequence of perceiving one’s life to have no meaning from the perspective of some other humans.

Even the extent to which our desires and goals are fulfilled creates a misleadingly optimistic impression of how well our lives are going. This is because there is actually a form of self “censorship” in the formulation of our desires and goals. While many of them are never fulfilled, there are many more potential desires and goals that we do not even formulate because we know that they are unattainable. For example, we know that we cannot live for a few hundred years and that we cannot gain expertise in all the subjects in which we are interested. Thus, we set goals that are less unrealistic (even if many of them are nonetheless somewhat optimistic). Thus, one hopes to live a life that is, by human standards, a long life, and we hope to gain expertise in some, perhaps very focused, area. What this means is that, even if all our desires and goals were fulfilled, our lives are not going as well as they would be going if the formulation of our desires had not been artificially restricted.

Moreover, it is thought that there is something absurd about the earnestness of our pursuits. We take ourselves very seriously, but when we step back, we wonder what it is all about. The step back need not be all the way to the cosmos. One does not need much distance to see that there seems something futile about our endless strivings, which are not altogether different from a hamster on its wheel. Much of our lives are filled with recurring mundane activities, the purpose of which is to keep the whole cycle going: working, shopping, cooking, feeding, abluting, sleeping, laundering, dishwashing, bill-paying, and various engagements with ever-expanding bureaucracies. Even if these mundane activities are thought to serve other goals, the attainment of those goals only yields further goals to be pursued. There is plenty of scope for questioning the significance of even the broader goals of one’s life. This (personal) cycle continues until one dies, but the treadmill is intergenerational because people tend to reproduce, thereby creating new mill-treaders. This has continued for generations and will continue until humanity eventually goes the way of all species—extinction. It seems like a long, repetitive journey to nowhere.

Some anti-natalist positions are founded on either a dislike of children¹ or on the interests of adults who have greater freedom and resources if they do not have and rear children. My anti-natalist view is different. It arises, not from a dislike of children, but instead from a concern to avoid the suffering of potential children and the adults they would become, even if not having those children runs counter to the interests of those who would have them.

There are some who will characterize my view as “nihilistic." Left unqualified, that characterization is false. My view of cosmic meaning is indeed nihilistic. I think that there is no cosmic meaning. If I am right about that, then calling me a nihilist about cosmic meaning is entirely appropriate. However, my view is not nihilistic about all meaning because I believe that there is meaning from some perspectives. Our lives can be meaningful, but only from the limited, terrestrial perspectives. There is a crucial perspective—the cosmic one—from which our lives are irredeemably meaningless. In thinking about meaning in life, two broad kinds of mistakes are made. There are those who think that the only relevant meaning is what is attainable. They ignore our cosmic meaninglessness or they find ways either to discount questions about cosmic meaning or to minimize the importance of cosmic meaninglessness. The other kind of mistake is to think that because we are cosmically insignificant, “nothing matters,” where the implication is that nothing matters from any perspective. If we lack cosmic meaning but have other kinds of meaning, then some things do matter, even though they only matter from some perspectives. It does make a difference, for example, whether or not one is adding to the vast amounts of harm on earth, even though that makes no difference to the rest of the cosmos.

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad—and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.

The question is not whether humans will become extinct, but rather when they will. If the anti-natalist arguments are correct, it would be better, all things being equal, if this happened sooner rather than later for, the sooner it happens, the more suffering and misfortune will be avoided.

Humans inflict untold suffering and death on many billions of animals every year, and the overwhelming majority of humans are heavily complicit.

Disability rights advocates also correctly note that quality-of-life assessments differ quite markedly between those who have impairments and those who do not. Many of those without impairments tend to think that lives with impairments are not worth starting (and may even not be worth continuing) whereas many of those with impairments tend to think that lives with these impairments are worth starting (and certainly are worth continuing). There certainly does seem to be something self-serving about the dominant view. It conveniently sets the quality threshold for lives worth starting above that of the impaired but below normal human lives. But is there anything less self-serving about those with impairments setting the threshold just beneath the quality of their lives? Disability rights advocates argue that the threshold in most people’s judgements about what constitutes a minimally decent quality of life is set too high. However, the phenomenon of discrepant judgements is equally compatible with the claim that the ordinary threshold is set too low (in order that at least some of us should pass it). The view that it is set too low is exactly the judgement that we can imagine would be made by an extra-terrestrial with a charmed life, devoid of any suffering or hardship. It would look with pity on our species and see the disappointment, anguish, grief, pain, and suffering that marks every human life, and judge our existence, as we (humans without unusual impairments) judge the existence of bedridden quadriplegics, to be worse than the alternative of non-existence.

Our species is prone to a flattering view of itself. Humans have regarded themselves as the pinnacle of creation, formed by and in the image of an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God, and inhabiting a planet at the center of the universe—a planet around which all others revolve. Science has done much to debunk some of these ideas. We now know that our planet is not at the center of the universe: the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. And we know—or at least some of us do—that we are Johnny-come-lately products of a long, blind evolutionary process.

A pessimistic book is most likely to bring some solace to those who already have those views but who feel alone or pathological as a result. They may gain some comfort from recognizing that there are others who share their views and that these views are supported by good arguments.

We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child—pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm.