"A few of my critics have claimed that I am committed to the desirability of suicide and even speciecide. They clearly intend this as a reductio ad absurdum of my position. However, I considered the questions of suicide and speciecide in Better Never to Have Been and argued that these are not implications of my view. First, it is possible to think that both coming into existence is a serious harm and that death is (usually) a serious harm. Indeed, some people might think that coming into existence is a serious harm in part because the harm of death is then inevitable."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
David Benatar
63 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by David Benatar →
Related Quotes
"I shall argue that although suicide is always tragic (because it always involves serious costs), we ought to be less …"
"Suicide is sometimes morally wrong, and it is sometimes the consequence of psychological problems. However, it is not…"
"Humans inflict untold suffering and death on many billions of animals every year, and the overwhelming majority of hu…"
"Killing people or helping them to kill themselves is usually wrong, because continued life is, we assume, usually in …"
"The question is not whether humans will become extinct, but rather when they will. If the anti-natalist arguments are…"
"It is these very conditions that facilitate the emergence of new infectious diseases and that also inflict horrific h…"
"Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a ju…"
"Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even t…"
"One particularly poor argument in defence of eating meat is that if humans did not eat animals, those animals would n…"
"The argument that coming into existence is always a harm can be summarized as follows: Both good and bad things happe…"