Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence [Hardcover]

This book is nicely written and his argument is easy to understand fairly early in.

His argument rests on an intuitive asymmetry between the 'good' that is the 'absence of pain', and the 'not bad(ness)' (or neutralness) that is the 'absence of pleasure'. His argument also turns on the distinction between two ways of talking about 'a life worth living'. We can (and ought to) separate our ideas on 'a life worth starting' from 'a life worth continuing'. This is very important. Where as some lives may be worth continuing (he agrees most are) NO life is worth starting. If i come down with a painful condition i may consider my life to still be worth continuing. However if i am faced with the choice whether to create a being who has such a condition it is As all life contains guaranteed harm the interests of a conceivable person are best served by not creating them.

I am unsure the problem some of the other commentators have with this. This is a good argument.

I think where one might want to attack his position, however, will be by rejecting the assumed asymmetry. But, as Benatar himself notes (near the end), such will be difficult to do without spawning other counter intuitive results. I would probably want to still go down this line - though i think his conclusion is right

Either way, i highly recommend this book

Captivating and intellectually stimulating argumentation on a series of serious subjects. On the emotional side however, reading this book made me feel suicidal.

The truth of the propositions contained in this book has been obvious to me since I was 14 years old and is the reason why I became an atheist at that time. A few years later I realised that the validity of these propositions still allowed for a pantheistic God or process with certain conditions limiting that God or process as in Neoplatonism and Buddhism. A few years later I discovered that this position, after taking acount of the horrors of history and the reality of materialism, has the ancient and traditional name of Gnosticism, which is a broad church, that is to say there are many variants, but all of the variants can be reconciled with the arguments of this excellent book. Gnosticism itself could be regarded as a variant of Buddhism although I am not claiming a causal connection (which is however quite possible).
That anyone should fail to understand and agree with the argument astonishes me but I have always found that people do indeed find it difficult to accept, apparently, as far as I can see, because they just can't understand it. Why don't they understand it?

Experimental psychologists have recently proved that humans are biologicaly programmed to see reality more optimistically than objectively. They do not see reality as it really is, unless they are traumatised in some way, and they will usually find a way to make the best of reality as given. Other recent studies have shown that even after psychological trauma people will gradually forget, unless forced to re-live it.
I have therefore only been able to come to the conclusion that there is a psychological safety mechanism that blocks the truth about life from being transparently obvious, without which people would be vulnerable to some sort of mental collapse as a result of questioning their own existence, and the existence of their own chidren even more. For women there would be a biological block on that realisation in addition to the psychological one.
Atheists often pride themselves on being more tough minded than believers but if atheists don't accept these arguments they are just as unable to face the truth as those who, at least with some logic, are able to believe the REASON for their existence is guaranteed by a God whom they believe to be benign and who created them in a conscious and deliberate act.
I, of course, on the other hand would say that if we were created by a conscious and deliberate act then whatever entity or process was responsible for that act cannot be benign. That is Gnosticism. It is pretty much the same as Buddhism, is closely related to Sufism, and in some ways similar to Hinduism*; reality is seen as an illusion or as deceiving in all four, but the entity or process is more neutral and less opposed to humanity in the others: I've never understood why and it doesn't need to be - it seems like an evasion which Gnosticism confronts head on.
Just in case you think I have excluded Christianity I should point out that the most common form of Gnosticism outside science fiction is Gnostic Christianity.
You might ask what Gnosticism adds to the argument of this book. The answer is that it adds a context of meaning which is what those of us who are already alive - as opposed to the unborn - need TO GO ON. Unless we are going to commit suicide, whether individually, or collectively as a civilisation, then we need to affirm a meaning, a reason for being here. But it is not the same thing as the fundamental reason for being here which cannot be a good reason.
I could go further than the author of this book and say that from a purely rational, objective ethical point of view bringing life into this horrifying and cruel world (even if there are some compensating distractions for some people some of the time) is as great a crime as killing. Both cause suffering, often of exactly similar kinds and degree. Killing of course usually involves some suffering for the victim, and often even more suffering for those left behind, and means the end of any personal projects the victim was engaged in; these factors all play a part in our feelings - as does it's irrevocable aspect, and the way in which the perpetrator arrogates to him or herself the right to end the life of the already living, and perhaps more important than their lives as such, their life-projects which might have involved considerable personal investment. The already living in the world (not in the womb) have rights the not yet born don't have - namely the right to go on living, the right to complete their life-projects.
But bringing someone into the world can and does lay them, or their descendants for whom the original parents would be just as responsible, open to any amount of suffering including being the victim of murder, torture, painful accidents and diseases, mental pain, or continual and excessive exploitation - and the parents arrogate to themselves this right. Time honoured, commonplace, and instinctive it may be but is it rational and is it ethical?.
Those who think that existence is on balance an acceptible condition should read more history and world news. Yes it's happening right now somewhere else - Zimbabwe, Darfur, Angola, the Congo, Somalia, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia etc. etc. There are acid attacks on women in Bangladesh, India and now Pakistan and Cambodia, with bride burnings continuing in India, we have recently had more people burned alive in their churches and cut down with machetes in Kenya, and even more recently immigrants from Zimbabwe have been beaten to death and burned alive in South Africa. And right here too of course there is plenty of appalling violence and vicious cruelty - just read the local papers especially the Scottish ones.

Even the Bible and Koran are 'realistic' enough to offer, or appear to offer to the naive reader, heaven/paradise as the only true home fit for humans. It is fairly clear that for most of those who believe in these faiths life is only justified by the life hereafter. I can't help thinking there is an undeniable realism about that attitude leaving aside the unfortunate lack of evidence for the final destination. Perhaps they do see life itself unvarnished, and clearer than the rest of us.
No one has ever suggested a reason for human existence other than that it is for the glory or self satisfaction of God. Not much of a reason, especially if you have no God. In any case, as any Gnostic will tell you, this is the very explanation which forced him to come to the conclusion that the God who supposedly created humanity is no friend of ours but a callous observer, and that there might possibly therefore be another sort of God who is sensitive to our plight and wants to extricate us from this world.
Since it is impossible to provide a reason for life as such this means you can only provide contingent justification for life, for the individual who is already living and with the natural instinctive compulsion to stay alive, and since that inevitably means getting involved in projects, small and large, these too provide other reasons to stick around. But none of these natural and strong attachments to being alive apply to someone who doesn't exist, so why burden someone with these unnecessary problems, obligations and duties when there is no good reason to be alive in the first instance.

* just where Buddhism is least like Gnosticism is where Hinduism is most like it i.e in the mythology. The mythology of Gnosticism never really crystalised into a satisfactorily rational form. William Blake our greatest Gnostic had the same problem with his Prophetic Books, and similarly Philip Pullman our best known current exemplar and a great admirer of Blake.
Thomas Hardy, another great Gnostic, had absolutely no problem finding a way to express his vision.
Kafka, Mann, Rilke and Becket can only be properly understood in Gnostic terms.