Christopher Belshaw’s Review:

Better if it had never been

David Benatar
In the preface to my book, Better Never to Have Been1, I predicted that many “readers
will be inclined to dismiss my arguments and will do so too hastily”. “When rejecting an
unpopular view”, I noted, “it is extraordinarily easy to be overly confident in the force of
one’s responses” (p. vii).

If Christopher Belshaw read those words before he wrote his glib review2 of my book,
then he certainly did not take them to heart. That, however, is in keeping with his reading
of the rest of the book.

Dr Belshaw’s review of my book bears a number of hallmarks of unfairness. These

include mischaracterizing, ignoring or trivializing my central arguments, and raising
objections without mentioning that I anticipate these and respond to them. Unfortunately
this will be apparent only to those who have already read the book, whereas the primary
readership of a book review consists of those who have not read the book being reviewed.

Dr Belshaw’s reconstruction of and response to my central argument is meandering.

Instead of stepping us through an argument systematically, he makes three attempts at
characterising and responding to my argument.

In his first attempt, he asks his readers to consider an “initial asymmetry”: whereas we
have an obligation not to start lives that will be very bad, we have no obligation to start
lives that will be as good as human lives get. Most people think, however, that although
we have no obligation to start good lives, it is permissible for us to do so. “If your life is
going to be good”, he says, “you’re not harmed by being brought into existence”. He then
says that I think “that while this is true of a uniformly good life – it isn’t true for mixed
lives, those that contain perhaps a lot of pleasure but still some degree of pain”.

This is a shoddy representation of my argument. The deontic asymmetry to which Dr

Belshaw refers is not the initial (or most basic) asymmetry in my argument. Thus,
contrary to his misrepresentation of what I said, I did not attempt to infer that coming into
existence is always a harm from the deontic asymmetry. I did refer to the deontic
asymmetry, as well as to many other widely accepted claims, but I suggested that these
are all best explained by a much deeper asymmetry between pleasure and pain.
According to this deeper asymmetry, the presence of pain is bad and the absence of pain
is good, but whereas the presence of pleasure is good, the absence of pleasure is bad only
if somebody is deprived of that pleasure. If nobody is deprived of an absent pleasure –
because the person who would have experienced the pleasure never existed – then the
absence of that pleasure is not bad. I argued at some length for this asymmetry and then
showed why it entails that coming into existence is always a harm (unless a life contains
no pain). Dr Belshaw ignores all this, preferring a sloppily constructed straw man. In a
second attempt at presenting my argument, Dr Belshaw does obliquely refer to the deeper
asymmetry, but he considers none of the arguments for it.
One response to my argument, he says, “is to abandon the asymmetry” because “it is
more likely that Benatar’s claim is false than that the asymmetry is true”. Here he makes
no mention of the fact that I anticipate this very objection. It goes without saying,
therefore, that he does not consider or reply to my detailed response to it. Instead he gives
his readers the impression that considering this objection simply eluded me.

Dr Belshaw then proceeds to offer another response – denying that my conclusion

follows from the asymmetry. This too is a response that I considered in my book. I did
not consider Dr Belshaw’s specific way of denying the inference, but that is only because
his way has so little to be said for it. He argues as follows. First he considers a situation
in which one can bring seven lives into existence, six of which will be good while the
seventh will be very bad. Of this case, Dr Belshaw says that “we can’t justify starting this
bad life by appeal to the good in other, separate, lives”. “So far”, he says, “things are
going Benatar’s way”. But then he asks us to consider another situation – one in which
one can bring a “mixed life into existence”. Of such a life he says as follows:

“Depending on the mix, this life may well not be bad. Even if a life contains elements
which, on their own, would make it worse than nothing and no element which makes it
better than nothing, still, when mixed, these elements might render the life not worse than
nothing.”
He concludes that a “view that is plausible over separate lives is not obviously plausible
over blended elements within a life”.
Dr Belshaw seems oblivious to how little argumentative work he has done here. Indeed,
all he has done is gesture at the fact that most people reject my conclusion.

However, in doing so he has not shown that my arguments do not lead to my conclusion.
This is because instead of actually considering my argument, he considers only the
palatability of my conclusion. He has shown only that most people’s initial reaction to his
“mixed life” case is that it may, under the right circumstances, not be a harm to start. He
has certainly not shown what he wants to conclude: “give Benatar a charitable reading
and there are still objections to be made. Give him what may in the end be a fairer
reading, and the objections are stronger”.

In his third characterization of my argument, Dr Belshaw says that I argue as follows:

“suppose you can choose between two packages. The first contains something good and
something bad, while the second contains something good and something neutral. The
second package is to be preferred. But the first package is one in which we exist … The
second is one in which we don’t exist …. So on balance, existence is worse than non-
existence”.
This argument, Dr Belshaw pronounces to be a “dreadful argument”. It is, he says, “most
obviously dreadful in taking no account of the quantities of pleasure and pain involved”.
This diagnosis presupposes that the quantities of pleasure and pain are indeed relevant.
My arguments show that they are relevant in many cases, but not in cases where the
absent pleasures do not constitute a deprivation for anybody – that is, in cases where we
are choosing whether to bring somebody into existence. In dismissing my argument as
“dreadful”, Dr Belshaw surreptitiously appeals to people’s intuitions in cases where
somebody is deprived of absent pleasures, and he completely ignores my arguments for
why these judgements should not apply in cases of bringing people into existence.

Here, finally, Dr Belshaw does at least admit that I consider his objection. However, he
does so begrudgingly. He says: “You might think that Benatar must at least anticipate this
objection”. This sounds like a prelude to an announcement that I do not. Yet he then
concedes that I do anticipate the objection. You might think that he would then spell out
my response and reply to it. Instead, in the final sentence of his review he baldly states,
without offering any justification, that I appear “almost altogether to misunderstand” the
objection. Here he seems not to have followed NDPR reviewer guidelines to “give
reasons for any evaluations, particularly negative ones”.

In my response to Dr Belshaw’s review I have focused on his criticism of my central

argument. However, the first three quarters of his review are devoted to the rest of the
book. Here he summarizes my views, again often simplistically or inaccurately, while
taking numerous unsubstantiated sideswipes. I shall not respond to each of these, both
because they are less important and because I have already demonstrated the quality of
his review. Those who want to know just how compelling my arguments are would do
better to read my book rather than Dr Belshaw’s glib dismissal of my conclusion, a
dismissal that he mistakenly thinks is a refutation of my arguments.

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1 David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
2 Christopher Belshaw, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 9 June 2006,
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=9983