Our conversation inspired me to try to construct the strongest possible case for classical utilitarianism (or at least classical consequentialism). Here's my attempt:
Imagine a numerical scale extending from negative infinity to positive infinity. The numbers on this scale represent the net moral value of possible worlds, such that a world with a net value of 3 is five points better than a world with a net value of -2. This construction is valid because moral value has no natural units—we can adopt whatever measurement system proves most useful. Morally right actions are therefore those that bring about worlds with higher net values.
This framework essentially establishes classical consequentialism. Nothing else needs to be added to it. So the only thing that needs to be done is addressing the possible objections:
Objection 1: Such a scale is conceptually incoherent.
Response: I see no incoherence here. The concept of moral value is intuitive, and quantifying it through scales has long been standard practice in utilitarian theory.
Objection 2: Pain and suffering might outweigh pleasure and happiness in moral significance.
Response: The scale measures overall moral value, not merely pleasure-pain balances. It remains agnostic about what ultimately makes worlds morally valuable: whether hedonic states, preference satisfaction, or other factors entirely.
Objection 3: Positive value might be bounded while negative value is unbounded.
Response: Consider a world containing one universe with net positive value. We can add another positively valuable universe to this world, then another, and so on, continuing indefinitely. Each addition increases the world's total value, showing that positive value can grow without bound.
Objection 3.1: Adding more positive universes eventually stops contributing additional value.
Response: This seems implausible. Each added universe retains all the great-making properties of the original. These universes can be causally isolated to prevent any problematic interactions.
Objection 4: Positive moral value doesn't exist. The highest possible net value is zero.
Response: This, in my opinion, is the most challenging objection. There doesn't seem to be much more to say about it then that it seems like there is some positive moral value. I am not sure if I find this to be a completely satisfying response.
However, if this fourth objection can be adequately addressed, classical consequentialism would be established. I've attempted to make this case as simple and defensible as possible. If I'm correct, negative utilitarianism can only be maintained by denying the existence of positive moral value entirely. If I missed any potential objections feel free to let me know. I am also curious to see if you have a better response to objection 4, since I think that the entire negative utilitarian stance hinges on it.
I know you are just using the 50% 100% as an example, and not actually endorsing it, but I wanted to point out a serious problem with it. It implies that it is better to create someone who experiences (for example) 1 unit of pain and 2 units of pleasure, than it is to create someone who experiences 100 units of pain and 190 units of pleasure over their lifetimes. However, assuming that individuals value the two equally, most people would rather be the later than the former.
Still, I think the arguments for a hybrid standard are quite interesting and convincing, even if the axiology of your specific example could use some refinement!
Interesting stuff. Just skimmed it and I’ll be back to read it a second time so I can think about this more. My sense--and this is an observation, not an actual argument--is that anti-natalism is often a reflection of its proponent’s underlying psychological disposition towards life. I would grant that this is true of most philosophies, but I think it is true of anti-natalism more than most. That said, I’ve only read a few essays on the topic and heard Benatar speak a few times so I’m no expert on the literature. Thanks for writing.
Simon Knutsson has written a short article titled "Undisturbedness as the hedonic ceiling" (https://www.simonknutsson.com/undisturbedness-as-the-hedonic-ceiling/) where he argues that there is no experience with a higher hedonic level than an undisturbed experience (and preemptively responds to counterexamples). This belief seems to be at the core of the antinatalist/negative utilitarian thought. To my eye, Simon's article is quite thorough, but I am pretty sure that his conclusion is wrong (although I can't quite put my finger on it). Do you have any thoughts on why Simon's reasoning is wrong (if it is in fact wrong)?
The core of his article is the following assertion:
> "I question whether there is something hedonically positive about any proposed b state. For example, even if we can feel a sweet sensation and a warm hum, that doesn’t seem to make the experience have a positive hedonic level (even if the sweet sensation and the warm hum is all that one feels). Based on my inspection, there seems to me to be nothing as a matter of phenomenology that makes experiences be at a higher hedonic level than undisturbed experiences or a neutral hedonic level. As far as I can tell, there is nothing positive about them; nothing that would put them hedonically above or on the positive side of undisturbedness."
This claim strikes me as absurd on its face. I really don't know what could be more obvious than that some experiences (e.g. excitement, gratitude, love, sensory pleasure, etc.) are "positive" in their hedonic feel, and hence better than a purely neutral or "undisturbed" experience. As a result, I don't think the rest of the article is worth engaging with.
One background issue of further interest is that it may well be that for human beings, a fully "undisturbed" state of conscious experience (vividly aware, while lacking anything negative - no boredom or discomfort of any kind) may tend to be *inherently positive* to some extent. That is, there may be a tendency towards positive appreciation of vivid awareness as such, in which case a truly "neutral" experience would need to balance this out with a hint of boredom or some such. (Eden Lin has defended the more radical claim that even without anything hedonically positive in feel, conscious experience itself has some positive intrinsic value.) If a claim in this vicinity is correct, then even if "undisturbed" experiences were "peak" human experiences, antinatalism wouldn't follow because these experiences may yet have significant positive value (much better than lacking experience).
Eden Lin's line of response seems very promising, because it is completely disconnected from pain and pleasure. Does he argue that conscious experience is slightly good or strongly, non-trivially good (apologies if this sounds very layman-ish, I don't know how to express it better)? This matters, because if it's only slightly good, and we accept (for whatever reason) the premise that this is the only source of positive value, then I think something like the risk argument works. It would seem that expected value of life is negative, because of risks of huge suffering, while the benefits are rather meagres. But if the degree of goodness that conscious experience has is rather large, then that could be an incredible response to antinatalism and extinctionism!
More on the "slightly good" side of the scale, iirc, though it's a bit hard to calibrate exactly how to draw the line between "slightly" and "strongly, non-trivially" good!
If you're willing to grant Knutsson's premise that there's no positive feel to pleasure (!?), but also Lin's claim that raw consciousness has some slight intrinsic value, I guess a lot will come down to just how great a risk one thinks there is of great suffering for people in different circumstances. (Seems like something that could vary a fair bit.)
Even so, I think it strengthens the case against antinatalism, because now it doesn't even need to rely on pleasures being good, although Simon Knutsson and maybe Magnus Vinding were the only two people to deny that to the best of my knowledge.
To be fair, I think that that case can be made even without it, because in my opinion, the majority of good stuff in life doesn't come from raw pleasure anyway. Retrospecting on my life so far, I haven't experienced that much pleasure, but I would nevertheless call it wonderful. I don't think that happiness/wellbeing is reducible to the difference between pleasure and pain.
Out of curiosity, do you know of anyone who has argued that certain positive goods have intrinsic value and articulated which goods are those? This whole antinatalist discussion made me think about which things make life worth living. This seems pretty important in consequentialist thinking, since this is what we should be maximizing (in addition to minimizing suffering).
Generally any theory of well-being will focus on expounding what it takes to be the positive goods: e.g. pleasure, desire satisfaction, or the various goods on the "objective list". You can find some references here:
I just wanted to thank you for sharing all of these resources with me. I am a 19 year old guy and I was on the verge of committing suicide over this negative utilitarian stuff and your blog along with certain other blogs was what kept me going (I am not exaggerating). Thank you so so much for this!
When I first learned about negative utilitarianism, I found almost no articles that argued against it. I googled "critique of negative utilitarianism", "refuting negative utilitarianism", "against negative utilitarianism" and the only two essays that I found (one by Toby Ord and one by Johan Gustafsson) were already "refuted" by people like Magnus Vinding. So it created a strong dialectical impression that negative utilitarianism is "winning" and that classical utilitarianism is a superstition of old times (like theism). This was very bad news, because that meant that my entire life is net negative. And it was not just me. Kemi Badenoch (leader of a Conservative party here in the UK) had a cousin, who committed suicide over the exact same topic (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/kemi-badenoch-cousin-death-conservative-b2736006.html). So that's why I consider negative utilitarianism to be one of the most evil philosophies out there and it is really really really bad that there so few articles specifically arguing against it (as opposed to topics in its vicinity like antinatalism). And the ones that do, have their titles say something like "Retrospecting on happiness", and even if they do argue against negative utilitarianism, the Google search engine would never suggest them if you googled something like "critique of negative utilitarianism".
I think this is exactly right! And I think this allows for a very strong objection to the asymmetry--if there's an asymmetry, you should constantly be very happy that bad things happened and that you did something deeply wrong. It seems bizarre that the asymmetry is committed to the claim that
a) procreation is deeply wrong
b) you should, after you procreate, not regret the deeply wrong, terrible action that you did.
Notably, this problem applies to any partialist view--including yours, Richard. Suppose that you create a person with 50 utils and this deprives an existing person of 45 utils. When you do that action, it's wrong, but once they exist, their well-being is just as important, so you should feel regret about that, on your account, it would seem.
It actually seems perfectly plausible to me that changing who exists (even in bad or morally mistaken ways) could change how we should subsequently feel about that decision. Liz Harman is very good on this point, in her "'I'll be Glad I Did It' Reasoning and the Significance of Future Desires": https://philpapers.org/rec/HARIBG-3
I'll read the paper, but that seems very odd. Imagine you read about some act that causes current suffering to create a current person with well-being. You're asked how to feel about that act. It seems strange to answer "wait, what year was that act taken? Has the kid been born yet?"
It's a tricky question precisely *when* we should get attached to actual people. It may be more plausible to track, not *time* (or whether the future person has come into existence yet), but just *whether the action has happened* (such that the future person's existence is now settled). I'm not sure.
But the basic phenomenon of *attachment* seems familiar enough, and not odd. Just consider a parent considering the counterfactual prospect of having had a slightly happier child in place of their actual child. In advance, they should of course prefer a happier child over a less happy one, all else equal. But at least once they know & love their actual child, it would seem messed up for them to wish that a slightly happier alternative person had existed instead.
So, if we are to accommodate the phenomenon of (warranted) attachment, we must be open to the possibility of shifting normative standards pre- vs post-attachment.
Benatar is notoriously difficult to interpret, and I think Draper's argument rests on a misinterpretation. Benatar would deny the "Fundamental Asymmetry." This, in particular:
"For any possible subject S of pain and pleasure, S's pain has unconditional intrinsic disvalue"
Benatar says the goodness of the absence of pain for the never-existent is not an intrinsic good, but is rather a "relative" (or purely comparative) good. He isn't very clear about this in "Better Never to Have Been," (though I think it's possible to find him saying this even there) but he is clear about this in his response to Skott Brill in "Every Conceivable Harm: a Further Defense of Anti-Natalism" (2012).
On page 144 of that, he writes:
"Professor Brill seems to think that I deny that the non-badness in quadrant (4) [the absence of pleasure for the never-existent] is intrinsic non-badness. However, that is a mistaken account of my view. The absence of pleasure in the non-existent is indeed intrinsically neither good nor bad. It is intrinsically value-neutral. However, the intrinsic value (including value-neutrality) of something does not preclude a different relative value. Thus the pain in (1) [pain for the existent] is intrinsically bad, but also relatively bad, in comparison with (3) [the absence of pain for the never existent] for example. Similarly, I take (3) [the absence of pain for the never existent] to be intrinsically neutral, but relatively good – that is, better than (2) [sic. Benatar means (1)]. And I take the non-badness of (4) [the absence of pleasure for the never-existent] to be both intrinsic and relative. The absent pleasure is intrinsically neither good nor bad, but it is also not worse than the presence of pleasure in (2) [the presence of pleasure for the existent]. That said, it is true that when I describe (4) as “not bad” I am not referring to its intrinsic value, and am instead referring to its being “not worse” than (2), as that is what is key to the comparison of existence and non-existence."
If pain has unconditional intrinsic disvalue, as the Fundamental Asymmetry claims, then it follows that the *absence* of pain -- as the absence of an unconditional intrinsic bad -- is *comparatively* good, which is just what Benatar also holds.
I don't think anyone here is claiming that the absence of pain is intrinsically (non-comparatively) good -- that would be a bizarre claim.
Okay, I think I understand the claim now, thanks! I still don't know if Benatar needs to accept the Fundamental Asymmetry. Do you think he's committed to it? Does Benatar need to say that pain has intrinsic disvalue even if no one exists to experience it, in order to be able to say that it's better for a possible person that they aren't existing and feeling pain?
I think the four propositions you set out as part of his "response to Brill" are collectively equivalent to the Fundamental Asymmetry. (One could imagine an alternative view which spoke purely of "goodness for", not intrinsic value/disvalue, but such a view would struggle to explain the comparative goodness of preventing miserable life, since in the empty world there is nobody for whom it is comparatively better.)
I agree that alternative view would struggle for the reason you say, but to me, that seems to be the route Benatar goes. In "Better Never to Have Been," he seems to endorse the alternative view on p. 4 and p. 31. In "Still Better Never to Have Been: A Reply to (More of) My Critics," he seems to endorse the alternative view in greater detail, on pages 125–6.
On pages 41-42 of the digital version of "Better Never to Have Been," Benatar says that the not-badness of the absence of pleasure for the never existent is a comparative not-badness rather than an intrinsic one, and that the badness of the absence of pleasure for the existent is a comparative rather intrinsic badness. This strongly implies that the absence of pain for the never-existent is a purely comparative goodness rather than an intrinsic one, but that requires reading between the lines. I'm not sure if he's more clear about this elsewhere in "Better Never to Have Been." But, again, he is clear about this in his response to Brill.
In his response to Brill, he endorses the following:
1) pain is intrinsically bad
2) pleasure is intrinsically good
3) the absence of pain for the never-existent is intrinsically neutral and is better than the presence of pain for the existent
4) the absence of pleasure for the never existent is intrinsically neutral and is not worse than the presence of pleasure for the existent
This is how he should have written his asymmetry from the beginning. It would have avoided a lot of confusion.
No, that reply just seems to bite the bullet, brutely asserting disagreement while citing a bunch of fellow-travellers whose theories commit them to doing likewise. It offers no actual *reason* to deny my "Awesome Lives" premise.
Our conversation inspired me to try to construct the strongest possible case for classical utilitarianism (or at least classical consequentialism). Here's my attempt:
Imagine a numerical scale extending from negative infinity to positive infinity. The numbers on this scale represent the net moral value of possible worlds, such that a world with a net value of 3 is five points better than a world with a net value of -2. This construction is valid because moral value has no natural units—we can adopt whatever measurement system proves most useful. Morally right actions are therefore those that bring about worlds with higher net values.
This framework essentially establishes classical consequentialism. Nothing else needs to be added to it. So the only thing that needs to be done is addressing the possible objections:
Objection 1: Such a scale is conceptually incoherent.
Response: I see no incoherence here. The concept of moral value is intuitive, and quantifying it through scales has long been standard practice in utilitarian theory.
Objection 2: Pain and suffering might outweigh pleasure and happiness in moral significance.
Response: The scale measures overall moral value, not merely pleasure-pain balances. It remains agnostic about what ultimately makes worlds morally valuable: whether hedonic states, preference satisfaction, or other factors entirely.
Objection 3: Positive value might be bounded while negative value is unbounded.
Response: Consider a world containing one universe with net positive value. We can add another positively valuable universe to this world, then another, and so on, continuing indefinitely. Each addition increases the world's total value, showing that positive value can grow without bound.
Objection 3.1: Adding more positive universes eventually stops contributing additional value.
Response: This seems implausible. Each added universe retains all the great-making properties of the original. These universes can be causally isolated to prevent any problematic interactions.
Objection 4: Positive moral value doesn't exist. The highest possible net value is zero.
Response: This, in my opinion, is the most challenging objection. There doesn't seem to be much more to say about it then that it seems like there is some positive moral value. I am not sure if I find this to be a completely satisfying response.
However, if this fourth objection can be adequately addressed, classical consequentialism would be established. I've attempted to make this case as simple and defensible as possible. If I'm correct, negative utilitarianism can only be maintained by denying the existence of positive moral value entirely. If I missed any potential objections feel free to let me know. I am also curious to see if you have a better response to objection 4, since I think that the entire negative utilitarian stance hinges on it.
I know you are just using the 50% 100% as an example, and not actually endorsing it, but I wanted to point out a serious problem with it. It implies that it is better to create someone who experiences (for example) 1 unit of pain and 2 units of pleasure, than it is to create someone who experiences 100 units of pain and 190 units of pleasure over their lifetimes. However, assuming that individuals value the two equally, most people would rather be the later than the former.
Still, I think the arguments for a hybrid standard are quite interesting and convincing, even if the axiology of your specific example could use some refinement!
Interesting stuff. Just skimmed it and I’ll be back to read it a second time so I can think about this more. My sense--and this is an observation, not an actual argument--is that anti-natalism is often a reflection of its proponent’s underlying psychological disposition towards life. I would grant that this is true of most philosophies, but I think it is true of anti-natalism more than most. That said, I’ve only read a few essays on the topic and heard Benatar speak a few times so I’m no expert on the literature. Thanks for writing.
Simon Knutsson has written a short article titled "Undisturbedness as the hedonic ceiling" (https://www.simonknutsson.com/undisturbedness-as-the-hedonic-ceiling/) where he argues that there is no experience with a higher hedonic level than an undisturbed experience (and preemptively responds to counterexamples). This belief seems to be at the core of the antinatalist/negative utilitarian thought. To my eye, Simon's article is quite thorough, but I am pretty sure that his conclusion is wrong (although I can't quite put my finger on it). Do you have any thoughts on why Simon's reasoning is wrong (if it is in fact wrong)?
The core of his article is the following assertion:
> "I question whether there is something hedonically positive about any proposed b state. For example, even if we can feel a sweet sensation and a warm hum, that doesn’t seem to make the experience have a positive hedonic level (even if the sweet sensation and the warm hum is all that one feels). Based on my inspection, there seems to me to be nothing as a matter of phenomenology that makes experiences be at a higher hedonic level than undisturbed experiences or a neutral hedonic level. As far as I can tell, there is nothing positive about them; nothing that would put them hedonically above or on the positive side of undisturbedness."
This claim strikes me as absurd on its face. I really don't know what could be more obvious than that some experiences (e.g. excitement, gratitude, love, sensory pleasure, etc.) are "positive" in their hedonic feel, and hence better than a purely neutral or "undisturbed" experience. As a result, I don't think the rest of the article is worth engaging with.
One background issue of further interest is that it may well be that for human beings, a fully "undisturbed" state of conscious experience (vividly aware, while lacking anything negative - no boredom or discomfort of any kind) may tend to be *inherently positive* to some extent. That is, there may be a tendency towards positive appreciation of vivid awareness as such, in which case a truly "neutral" experience would need to balance this out with a hint of boredom or some such. (Eden Lin has defended the more radical claim that even without anything hedonically positive in feel, conscious experience itself has some positive intrinsic value.) If a claim in this vicinity is correct, then even if "undisturbed" experiences were "peak" human experiences, antinatalism wouldn't follow because these experiences may yet have significant positive value (much better than lacking experience).
Eden Lin's line of response seems very promising, because it is completely disconnected from pain and pleasure. Does he argue that conscious experience is slightly good or strongly, non-trivially good (apologies if this sounds very layman-ish, I don't know how to express it better)? This matters, because if it's only slightly good, and we accept (for whatever reason) the premise that this is the only source of positive value, then I think something like the risk argument works. It would seem that expected value of life is negative, because of risks of huge suffering, while the benefits are rather meagres. But if the degree of goodness that conscious experience has is rather large, then that could be an incredible response to antinatalism and extinctionism!
More on the "slightly good" side of the scale, iirc, though it's a bit hard to calibrate exactly how to draw the line between "slightly" and "strongly, non-trivially" good!
If you're willing to grant Knutsson's premise that there's no positive feel to pleasure (!?), but also Lin's claim that raw consciousness has some slight intrinsic value, I guess a lot will come down to just how great a risk one thinks there is of great suffering for people in different circumstances. (Seems like something that could vary a fair bit.)
Even so, I think it strengthens the case against antinatalism, because now it doesn't even need to rely on pleasures being good, although Simon Knutsson and maybe Magnus Vinding were the only two people to deny that to the best of my knowledge.
To be fair, I think that that case can be made even without it, because in my opinion, the majority of good stuff in life doesn't come from raw pleasure anyway. Retrospecting on my life so far, I haven't experienced that much pleasure, but I would nevertheless call it wonderful. I don't think that happiness/wellbeing is reducible to the difference between pleasure and pain.
Out of curiosity, do you know of anyone who has argued that certain positive goods have intrinsic value and articulated which goods are those? This whole antinatalist discussion made me think about which things make life worth living. This seems pretty important in consequentialist thinking, since this is what we should be maximizing (in addition to minimizing suffering).
Generally any theory of well-being will focus on expounding what it takes to be the positive goods: e.g. pleasure, desire satisfaction, or the various goods on the "objective list". You can find some references here:
https://www.utilitarianism.net/theories-of-well-being/
A recent popular book on the topic was Tom Hurka's "The best things in life: a guide to what really matters":
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Best_Things_in_Life/V06jg3iwkeEC?hl=en
So that's why I am very grateful for what you are doing to combat negative utilitarianism!
I just wanted to thank you for sharing all of these resources with me. I am a 19 year old guy and I was on the verge of committing suicide over this negative utilitarian stuff and your blog along with certain other blogs was what kept me going (I am not exaggerating). Thank you so so much for this!
When I first learned about negative utilitarianism, I found almost no articles that argued against it. I googled "critique of negative utilitarianism", "refuting negative utilitarianism", "against negative utilitarianism" and the only two essays that I found (one by Toby Ord and one by Johan Gustafsson) were already "refuted" by people like Magnus Vinding. So it created a strong dialectical impression that negative utilitarianism is "winning" and that classical utilitarianism is a superstition of old times (like theism). This was very bad news, because that meant that my entire life is net negative. And it was not just me. Kemi Badenoch (leader of a Conservative party here in the UK) had a cousin, who committed suicide over the exact same topic (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/kemi-badenoch-cousin-death-conservative-b2736006.html). So that's why I consider negative utilitarianism to be one of the most evil philosophies out there and it is really really really bad that there so few articles specifically arguing against it (as opposed to topics in its vicinity like antinatalism). And the ones that do, have their titles say something like "Retrospecting on happiness", and even if they do argue against negative utilitarianism, the Google search engine would never suggest them if you googled something like "critique of negative utilitarianism".
I think this is exactly right! And I think this allows for a very strong objection to the asymmetry--if there's an asymmetry, you should constantly be very happy that bad things happened and that you did something deeply wrong. It seems bizarre that the asymmetry is committed to the claim that
a) procreation is deeply wrong
b) you should, after you procreate, not regret the deeply wrong, terrible action that you did.
Notably, this problem applies to any partialist view--including yours, Richard. Suppose that you create a person with 50 utils and this deprives an existing person of 45 utils. When you do that action, it's wrong, but once they exist, their well-being is just as important, so you should feel regret about that, on your account, it would seem.
It actually seems perfectly plausible to me that changing who exists (even in bad or morally mistaken ways) could change how we should subsequently feel about that decision. Liz Harman is very good on this point, in her "'I'll be Glad I Did It' Reasoning and the Significance of Future Desires": https://philpapers.org/rec/HARIBG-3
I'll read the paper, but that seems very odd. Imagine you read about some act that causes current suffering to create a current person with well-being. You're asked how to feel about that act. It seems strange to answer "wait, what year was that act taken? Has the kid been born yet?"
It's a tricky question precisely *when* we should get attached to actual people. It may be more plausible to track, not *time* (or whether the future person has come into existence yet), but just *whether the action has happened* (such that the future person's existence is now settled). I'm not sure.
But the basic phenomenon of *attachment* seems familiar enough, and not odd. Just consider a parent considering the counterfactual prospect of having had a slightly happier child in place of their actual child. In advance, they should of course prefer a happier child over a less happy one, all else equal. But at least once they know & love their actual child, it would seem messed up for them to wish that a slightly happier alternative person had existed instead.
So, if we are to accommodate the phenomenon of (warranted) attachment, we must be open to the possibility of shifting normative standards pre- vs post-attachment.
Benatar is notoriously difficult to interpret, and I think Draper's argument rests on a misinterpretation. Benatar would deny the "Fundamental Asymmetry." This, in particular:
"For any possible subject S of pain and pleasure, S's pain has unconditional intrinsic disvalue"
Benatar says the goodness of the absence of pain for the never-existent is not an intrinsic good, but is rather a "relative" (or purely comparative) good. He isn't very clear about this in "Better Never to Have Been," (though I think it's possible to find him saying this even there) but he is clear about this in his response to Skott Brill in "Every Conceivable Harm: a Further Defense of Anti-Natalism" (2012).
On page 144 of that, he writes:
"Professor Brill seems to think that I deny that the non-badness in quadrant (4) [the absence of pleasure for the never-existent] is intrinsic non-badness. However, that is a mistaken account of my view. The absence of pleasure in the non-existent is indeed intrinsically neither good nor bad. It is intrinsically value-neutral. However, the intrinsic value (including value-neutrality) of something does not preclude a different relative value. Thus the pain in (1) [pain for the existent] is intrinsically bad, but also relatively bad, in comparison with (3) [the absence of pain for the never existent] for example. Similarly, I take (3) [the absence of pain for the never existent] to be intrinsically neutral, but relatively good – that is, better than (2) [sic. Benatar means (1)]. And I take the non-badness of (4) [the absence of pleasure for the never-existent] to be both intrinsic and relative. The absent pleasure is intrinsically neither good nor bad, but it is also not worse than the presence of pleasure in (2) [the presence of pleasure for the existent]. That said, it is true that when I describe (4) as “not bad” I am not referring to its intrinsic value, and am instead referring to its being “not worse” than (2), as that is what is key to the comparison of existence and non-existence."
If pain has unconditional intrinsic disvalue, as the Fundamental Asymmetry claims, then it follows that the *absence* of pain -- as the absence of an unconditional intrinsic bad -- is *comparatively* good, which is just what Benatar also holds.
I don't think anyone here is claiming that the absence of pain is intrinsically (non-comparatively) good -- that would be a bizarre claim.
Okay, I think I understand the claim now, thanks! I still don't know if Benatar needs to accept the Fundamental Asymmetry. Do you think he's committed to it? Does Benatar need to say that pain has intrinsic disvalue even if no one exists to experience it, in order to be able to say that it's better for a possible person that they aren't existing and feeling pain?
I think the four propositions you set out as part of his "response to Brill" are collectively equivalent to the Fundamental Asymmetry. (One could imagine an alternative view which spoke purely of "goodness for", not intrinsic value/disvalue, but such a view would struggle to explain the comparative goodness of preventing miserable life, since in the empty world there is nobody for whom it is comparatively better.)
I agree that alternative view would struggle for the reason you say, but to me, that seems to be the route Benatar goes. In "Better Never to Have Been," he seems to endorse the alternative view on p. 4 and p. 31. In "Still Better Never to Have Been: A Reply to (More of) My Critics," he seems to endorse the alternative view in greater detail, on pages 125–6.
On pages 41-42 of the digital version of "Better Never to Have Been," Benatar says that the not-badness of the absence of pleasure for the never existent is a comparative not-badness rather than an intrinsic one, and that the badness of the absence of pleasure for the existent is a comparative rather intrinsic badness. This strongly implies that the absence of pain for the never-existent is a purely comparative goodness rather than an intrinsic one, but that requires reading between the lines. I'm not sure if he's more clear about this elsewhere in "Better Never to Have Been." But, again, he is clear about this in his response to Brill.
In his response to Brill, he endorses the following:
1) pain is intrinsically bad
2) pleasure is intrinsically good
3) the absence of pain for the never-existent is intrinsically neutral and is better than the presence of pain for the existent
4) the absence of pleasure for the never existent is intrinsically neutral and is not worse than the presence of pleasure for the existent
This is how he should have written his asymmetry from the beginning. It would have avoided a lot of confusion.
This article rather elegantly refutes Benatar's asymmetry. Definitely worth checking out.
https://fortheloveofwisdom.net/952/ethics/the-double-standard-behind-benatars-asymmetry-argument-for-anti-natalism/
I think this article provides a great critique of Benatar's asymmetry.
https://fortheloveofwisdom.net/952/ethics/the-double-standard-behind-benatars-asymmetry-argument-for-anti-natalism/
No, that reply just seems to bite the bullet, brutely asserting disagreement while citing a bunch of fellow-travellers whose theories commit them to doing likewise. It offers no actual *reason* to deny my "Awesome Lives" premise.