better never to have been the harm of coming into existence oct 2006

[...]... (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ) –  ∼ Why Coming into Existence Is Always a Harm  Thus coming into existence cannot be worse than never coming into existence  Therefore, coming into existence cannot be a harm One way of responding to this argument is to deny the first premiss’s claim that for something to harm somebody it must (that is, always) make that person worse off For something to. .. come into existence In other words, although we may not be able to say of the never- existent that never existing is good for them, we can say of the existent that existence is bad for them There is no absurdity here, or so I shall argue Once we acknowledge that coming into existence can be a harm, we might then want to speak loosely about never coming into existence being better This is not to say... impossible to bring the same person into existence without the condition that is thought to be harmful This may occur, for instance, where prospective parents are carriers of a serious genetic disorder which, for one reason or another, they will pass on to their offspring The choice is either to bring a defective child into existence or not to bring that child into existence at all.⁵ On other occasions the. .. something to harm somebody, it might be sufficient that it be bad for that person⁹ on condition that the alternative would not have been bad.¹⁰ On this view of harm, coming into existence can be a harm If a life is bad for the person brought into existence, as it must be if the life is not worth living, then that person’s coming into existence is a harm (given that the alternative would not have been bad)... Feinberg offers a different response to the argument that coming into existence can never be a harm Instead of denying that to harm is to make somebody worse off, he disputes the assumption that to be worse off in a particular condition, it must be the case that one would have existed in the alternative condition with which it is compared.¹¹ What we mean when we say that somebody would have been better off... simply not have bred them in the numbers they do breed them The claim is that although these animals are killed, this cost to them is outweighed by the benefit to them of having been brought into existence This is an appalling argument for many reasons (some of which are outlined by Robert Nozick See his Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, ) –) First, the lives of many of these animals... way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.⁶ There are many reasons why people do not notice this, or why, if they do notice it, that they do not act on the realization, but the interests of the potential children cannot be among them, as I shall argue Nor is the harm produced by the creation of a child usually restricted to that... conception The recognition of how unlikely it was that one would have come into existence, combined with the recognition that coming into existence is always a serious harm, yields the conclusion that one’s having come into existence is really bad luck It is bad enough when one suffers some harm It is worse still when the chances of having been harmed are very remote ⁸ Derek Parfit calls this the ‘Origin... is nothing nonsensical in claiming that nobody is lucky enough never to have come into existence, even though it would have been (playful) nonsense to claim that there are some people who are lucky enough not to come into existence In any event, the fact that one can construct a joke about the view that coming into existence is always a harm, does not show that that view itself is laughable nonsense... but different, child into existence ⁶ For a defence of the use of this pronoun see Benatar, David, ‘Sexist Language: Alternatives to the Alternatives’, Public Affairs Quarterly, / () – ⁷ The example is Derek Parfit’s See his Reasons and Persons,  Why Coming into Existence Is Always a Harm ∼  Whereas the claim that coming into existence is always a harm runs counter to most (but not all) .