About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


56 J. Value Inquiry 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi56 and id is 1 raw text is: The Journal of Value Inquiry (2022) 56:1-4 https:Ildoi.org/l0.1007/si0790-022-09882-w PAPER FOR FORUM Introduction Oliver Hallichl 1 Michael Hauskeller2 Accepted: 23 January 2022 / Published online: 4 March 2022 © The Author(s) 2022 Since the publication of his book Better Never to Have Been. The Harm of Coming into Existence, the South African philosopher David Benatar is known as the lead- ing contemporary proponent of anti-natalism. Anti-Natalism is the view that pro- creation is morally wrong and that we ought not to procreate.2 It may be defended in various different ways, the most prominent being ecological anti-natalism and com- passion-based anti-natalism. Some anti-natalists have argued that the ecological footprint of each individual that is brought into existence makes it morally unjus- tifiable to bring new beings into existence, particularly in times of climate change,3 others - and that includes Benatar - that we ought not to procreate because procreat- ing gravely harms the being we bring into existence. The core idea of this kind of anti-natalism is that we should abstain from procreation to spare future individuals the pains and sufferings of existence. The starting point of Benatar's anti-natalism is his claim that there is an axiologi- cal asymmetry between the absence of pain and the absence of pleasure: whereas the absence of pain is always good, i.e. even if there is no one who perceives the absence of pain as such, the absence of pleasure is bad only if there is someone who is deprived of the pleasure. This, Benatar argues, shows that we harm individuals by bringing them into existence since by not procreating we spare potential people the pains and sufferings of existence, which is good for them, while not depriving them of the pleasures of existence (since only someone who exists can be deprived of David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been. The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2006). 2 For an overview on the history of anti-natalism and philosophical pessimism, see Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism. Philosophy, Ethics, Spirit, Princeton/Oxford 2006, and Ken Coates, Anti-Natalism: Rejec- tionist Philosophy from Buddhism to Benatar, Sarasota 2016. 3 For a recent discussion of this variant of anti-natalism, see Felix Pinkert/Martin Sticker, Procreation, Footprint and Responsibility for Climate Change, The Journal of Ethics 25 (2021): 293 321. E Oliver Hallich oliver.hallich@uni-due.de Michael Hauskeller M.Hauskeller@liverpool.ac.uk University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany 2 University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK I_) Springer