This New Yorker piece<\/a> is worth reading. (HTs: Dave Lull, Karl White) It helps clarify Benatar's anti-natalism. <\/span><\/p>\nOne feature of his position is that death is no solution to the human predicament. As I would put it, the Grim Reaper is not a Benign Releaser. For while life is bad, so is death. Not just dying, but being dead. His arguments for this in Chapter 5 of The Human Predicament<\/em> are fascinating. I will examine them in due course in my series on Benatar's book. I agree that dying is bad, but not being dead.<\/span><\/p>\n\nPeople sometimes ask themselves whether life is worth living. Benatar thinks that it\u2019s better to ask sub-questions: Is life worth continuing? (Yes, because death is bad.) Is life worth starting? (No.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nOne can see from this that Benatar's position is a nuanced one, and that it is a miserable psychologizing cheap-shot to protest, "Well, if life is so bad, why don't you just kill yourself." That is a perfectly stupid response for two reasons. First, if death is bad, then death is no solution. Benatar describes the human predicament as an existential vise: we are under squeeze both from life and from death. Second, Benatar is a philosopher: he aims to get at the truth of the matter; he is not emoting like the cheap-shot man who is not comfortable with what Benatar believes the truth to be.<\/span><\/p>\nA second feature of Benatar's position is that his is not a misanthropic anti-natalism, but a compassionate anti-natalism:<\/span><\/p>\n\nFor misanthropic anti-natalists, the problem isn\u2019t life\u2014it\u2019s us. Benatar, by contrast, is a \u201ccompassionate anti-natalist.\u201d His thinking parallels that of the philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence; Metzinger espouses digital anti-natalism, arguing that it would be wrong to create artificially conscious computer programs because doing so would increase the amount of suffering in the world. The same argument could apply to human beings.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nAs I read Benatar, his view is that life itself is the problem, insofar as life involves sentience. So it would be better if all life ceased to exist, which of course includes human life. He is an anti-natalist with respect to all living things, not just humans. <\/span><\/p>\nA further clarification that just now occurs to me, and one with which I think Benatar would agree, is that he is axiologically<\/em> anti-natalist across the board inasmuch as he holds that it would be better if all life, insofar as it involves sentience, cease to exist. But he is ethically<\/em> anti-natalist only with respect to humans for the obvious reason that only the latter can have a moral obligation not to procreate.<\/span><\/p>\n\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n