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  1. How Best to Prevent Future Persons From Suffering: A Reply to Benatar.Brooke Alan Trisel - 2012 - South African Journal of Philosophy 31 (1):79-93.
    David Benatar claims that everyone was seriously harmed by coming into existence. To spare future persons from this suffering, we should cease having children, Benatar argues, with the result that humanity would gradually go extinct. Benatar’s claim of universal serious harm is baseless. Each year, an estimated 94% of children born throughout the world do not have a serious birth defect. Furthermore, studies show that most people do not experience chronic pain. Although nearly everyone experiences acute pain and discomforts, such (...)
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  • A Life Worth Living.Aaron Smuts - manuscript
    Theories of well-being tell us what makes a life good for the one who lives it. But there is more to what makes a life worth living than just well-being. We care about the worth of our lives, and we are right to do so. I defend an objective list theory of the worth of a life: The most worthwhile lives are those high in various objective goods. These principally include welfare and meaning. By distinguishing between worth and welfare, we (...)
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  • Personal Identity and Ethics.David Shoemaker - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    What justifies our holding a person morally responsible for some past action? Why am I justified in having a special prudential concern for some future persons and not others? Why do many of us think that maximizing the good within a single life is perfectly acceptable, but maximizing the good across lives is wrong? In these and other normative questions, it looks like any answer we come up with will have to make an essential reference to personal identity. So, for (...)
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  • Unintended Intrauterine Death and Preterm Delivery: What Does Philosophy Have to Offer?Nicholas Colgrove - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (3):195-208.
    This special issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy focuses on unintended intrauterine death (UID) and preterm delivery (both phenomena that are commonly—and unhelpfully—referred to as “miscarriage,” “spontaneous abortion,” and “early pregnancy loss”). In this essay, I do two things. First, I outline contributors’ arguments. Most contributors directly respond to “inconsistency arguments,” which purport to show that abortion opponents are unjustified in their comparative treatment of abortion and UID. Contributors to this issue show that such arguments often rely on (...)
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  • Benatar’s Anti-Natalism: Philosophically Flawed, Morally Dubious.Christian Piller - 2022 - Philosophia 51 (2):897-917.
    In the first part of the paper, I discuss Benatar’s asymmetry argument for the claim that it would have been better for each of us to have never lived at all. In contrast to other commentators, I will argue that there is a way of interpreting the premises of his argument which makes all of them come out true. (This will require one departure from Benatar’s own presentation.) Once we see why the premises are true, we will, however, also realise (...)
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  • On Risk-Based Arguments for Anti-natalism.Erik Magnusson - 2022 - Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (1):101-117.
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  • To Be or Never to Have Been: Anti-Natalism and a Life Worth Living.Aaron Smuts - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (4):711-729.
    David Benatar argues that being brought into existence is always a net harm and never a benefit. I disagree. I argue that if you bring someone into existence who lives a life worth living (LWL), then you have not all things considered wronged her. Lives are worth living if they are high in various objective goods and low in objective bads. These lives constitute a net benefit. In contrast, lives worth avoiding (LWA) constitute a net harm. Lives worth avoiding are (...)
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  • Still Better Never to Have Been: A Reply to My Critics.David Benatar - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (1-2):121-151.
    In Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, I argued that coming into existence is always a harm and that procreation is wrong. In this paper, I respond to those of my critics to whom I have not previously responded. More specifically, I engage the objections of Tim Bayne, Ben Bradley, Campbell Brown, David DeGrazia, Elizabeth Harman, Chris Kaposy, Joseph Packer and Saul Smilansky.
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  • Why We Should Create Artificial Offspring: Meaning and the Collective Afterlife.John Danaher - 2018 - Science and Engineering Ethics 24 (4):1097-1118.
    This article argues that the creation of artificial offspring could make our lives more meaningful. By ‘artificial offspring’ I mean beings that we construct, with a mix of human and non-human-like qualities. Robotic artificial intelligences are paradigmatic examples of the form. There are two reasons for thinking that the creation of such beings could make our lives more meaningful and valuable. The first is that the existence of a collective afterlife—i.e. a set of human-like lives that continue after we die—is (...)
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  • What’s So Good About Non-Existence?: An Alternative Explanation of Four Asymmetrical Value Judgments.Brian McLean - 2015 - Journal of Value Inquiry 49 (1-2):81-94.
    There are cases where many think it would have been better for some child never to have been born. We can imagine a life characterized exclusively by suffering, never containing even the briefest moment of pleasure. The life goes exceedingly poorly – so poorly, we think, that it would have been better for the child never to have been. However, most of us think that many lives are not of this sort. Many lives are at least all right: the good (...)
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  • Quality of Life Assessments, Cognitive Reliability, and Procreative Responsibility.Jason Marsh - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2):436-466.
    Recent work in the psychology of happiness has led some to conclude that we are unreliable assessors of our lives and that skepticism about whether we are happy is a genuine possibility worth taking very seriously. I argue that such claims, if true, have worrisome implications for procreation. In particular, they show that skepticism about whether many if not most people are well positioned to create persons is a genuine possibility worth taking very seriously. This skeptical worry should not be (...)
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  • Five Tests for What Makes a Life Worth Living.Aaron Smuts - 2013 - Journal of Value Inquiry 47 (4):1-21.
    I evaluate four historically precedented tests for what makes a life worth living: (1) The Suicide Test (Camus), (2) The Recurrence Test (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), (3) The Extra Life Test (Cicero and Hume), and (4) The Preferring Not to Have Been Test (Job and Williams). I argue that all four fail and tentatively defend the heuristic value of a fifth, The Pre-Existence Test for what makes a life worth living: (5) A life worth living is one that a benevolent caretaker (...)
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  • The Hypothetical Consent Objection to Anti-Natalism.Asheel Singh - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (5):1135-1150.
    A very common but untested assumption is that potential children would consent to be exposed to the harms of existence in order to experience its benefits. And so, would-be parents might appeal to the following view: Procreation is all-things-considered permissible, as it is morally acceptable for one to knowingly harm an unconsenting patient if one has good reasons for assuming her hypothetical consent—and procreators can indeed reasonably rely on some notion of hypothetical consent. I argue that this view is in (...)
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  • (1 other version)Welfare, Meaning, and Worth.Aaron Smuts - manuscript
    The central thesis of this book is that there is more to what makes a life worth living than welfare. I argue that the notion of worth captures matters of importance that no plausible theory of welfare can account for. Worth is best thought of as a higher-level kind of value. I defend an objective list theory (OLT) of worth¬—lives worth living are net high in various objective goods. Not only do I defend an list of some of the goods, (...)
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  • The Predicament That Wasn’t: A Reply to Benatar.Christine Vitrano - 2020 - Philosophical Papers 49 (3):457-484.
    In his recent book The Human Predicament, David Benatar describes the human condition as a tragic predicament, and the upshot is that we ought to refrain from having children and adopt an attitude...
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  • Why would very bad lives be worth continuing?Matej Sušnik - 2020 - South African Journal of Philosophy 39 (3):285-295.
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  • „Besser, nicht geboren zu sein“ Ist es rational, die eigene Existenz zu bedauern?Oliver Hallich - 2018 - Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie 5 (2):179-212.
    Wer das eigene Leben für sinnlos hält, wird oft auch die Ansicht haben, dass es besser wäre, nicht geboren worden zu sein. In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, ob Äußerungen wie „Ich wäre lieber nicht geboren“ sinnvoll sind und ob sie sich begründen lassen. Im einleitenden Teil wird gezeigt, dass diese Äußerungen entgegen einer von manchen Philosophen vertretenen Ansicht nicht sprachwidrig sind. Im zweiten Teil wird David Benatars „Asymmetrieargument“ in modifizierter Form verteidigt. Benatar bringt dieses Argument zur Verteidigung der These vor, (...)
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