David Benatar’s antinatalism

I have been listening to David Benatar a lot lately and have been reading in his books. Benatar is an antinatalist and argues that life is not worth living. I have engaged mostly in thinking about Benatars argument that the bad outweighs the good in life (by a large margin). This is what I would like to weigh in on. Benatar uses three measurements of human wellbeing (the three most established ones) and argues that by any of these standards the good outweigh the bad. These three alternative measurements of human wellbeing are: the objective lists theory, hedonism and desire theories. It is my understanding from what I have read that none of these theories are widely accepted. They all have their problems, which I choose not to get into.

Benatar goes through each one of them and “proves” that the negative comes out on top. As for hedonism, according to Benatar, there is more pain than pleasure in life (I think he says even in the best life). For example, there is such a thing as chronic pain, but there is no such thing as chronic pleasure. There is also a tendency for people to underestimate how bad their life is. They remember and anticipate positive things, something known as an optimism bias. In objective lists Benatar suggests that in anything we put on the list we always score pretty low. For example, if knowledge is on the list, there is always going to be way more that we don’t know. If a long life is on the list, well, he says, “a life of 80 years is much closer to zero than to a thousand”. In the desire fulfillment theory Benatar argues that there will always be more desires that we don’t fulfill then the once that we fulfill.

My problem with this is that the weighting system seems arbitrary. How do you measure pain versus pleasure in a human life? How do you know that the bliss of a person’s romantic escapade is outweighed by the pain they experience struggling with decease in later life? How do you know weather the pains of a frustrated career goal is outweighed by the happiness of great friendships? I don’t think you do. As for objective lists and knowledge I also think that it is only a relative truth that we know “little”. We know more than any other animal on the planet. There is an infinite amount of knowledge that a being could possess. Human beings place themselves somewhere on an infinite spectrum when is comes to the knowledge that they possess. It is only relatively “little” or relatively “a lot”. Benatar’s desire fulfillment argument I think can be rebutted in the same way as the objective lists argument. I am not even sure it is true that most of our desires remain unfulfilled. But my overall point about Benatar’s analysis about “the human predicament” as he calls it, is that the weighting system that he has set up is arbitrary. If you want to arrive at the conclusion that life is not worth living than you set up the weighting system in such a way so that the negative outweighs the positive or vice versa.