After making the claim – that as long as life contains even the smallest amount of bad, coming into existence is a harm – Benatar turns to show that all human lives contain much more bad than is ordinarily recognized. His motivation is that “If people realized just how bad their lives were, they might grant that their coming into existence was a harm even if they deny that coming into existence would have been a harm had their lives contained but the smallest amount of bad.” In other words, it is much harder to dismiss his conclusion considering how bad life actually is. However he argues that “this chapter can be seen as providing a basis, independent of asymmetry and its implications, for regretting one’s existence and for taking all actual cases of coming into existence to be harmful.”

Being aware that most people deny that their lives are bad, Benatar focuses most of the chapter to answering the question, how can it be a harm to come into existence if most of those who have come into existence are pleased that they did? His answer is that their self-assessments are completely unreliable indicators of life’s quality, mainly due to a number of psychological features which distort their ability to make objective assessments of the actual quality of life and constitute instead a fallacious positive assessment.
The following are the 3 mechanisms Benatar mentions, along with a brief explanation of each, taken from the book.

1. The Pollyanna Principle

“The first, most general and most influential of these psychological phenomena is what some have called the Pollyanna Principle, a tendency towards optimism. This manifests in many ways. First, there is an inclination to recall positive rather than negative experiences. For example, when asked to recall events from throughout their lives, subjects in a number of studies listed a much greater number of positive than negative experiences. This selective recall distorts our judgement of how well our lives have gone so far. It is not only assessments of our past that are biased, but also our projections or expectations about the future. We tend to have an exaggerated view of how good things will be.” (p.65)

And here is another educating description of how selective perception and memory contribute to the perception that life is good, taken from an article called Bad is Stronger than Good:

“As Taylor (1991) argued, the human psyche has powerful mechanisms for retrospectively minimizing bad experiences. Although both good and bad feelings may fade with time, the bad ones are actively suppressed; whereas the good memories may be cultivated and sustained (e.g., through reminiscence). By the same token, people may treat bad experiences as isolated events while integrating good ones into an ongoing general perception of goodness. In this way, individuals may sustain a broadly favorable view of their lives.
These considerations are quite consistent with the view that the good life consists of a consistent pattern of good outcomes, even if these are individually relatively small and weak. A few bad outcomes can be minimized by making external attributions or regarding them as unimportant, thereby preserving the subjective impression of a stable pattern of good outcomes. As long as the individual perceives that pattern of consistent goodness, life may seem strongly good overall even if nothing strongly good ever happens.” (Baumeister, R and Bratslavsky, E and Finkenauer, C and Vohs, K, 2001, p.36)

Some may argue that the very fact that people have a structured optimism bias, practically makes their lives better since reexperiencing past events in a better way actually makes them feel better even though it is false. That might be true, but it is crucial to remember that the issue here is not should existing people continue to exist, but should existing people force others into existence. Therefore, even if bad experiences are remembered as better than they actually were, which makes them less bad for the ones who have experienced them, it can’t make similar experiences less bad for the ones who haven’t yet experienced them. For them these experiences would be as bad as they really are. It may be that in the future they too will remember these events as less bad than they actually were, but even if so, it won’t make these experiences less bad when they actually experience them, and as opposed to existing people which in their case it’s too late, these kinds of bad experiences can be prevented in the case of non-existents.
Anyway, the main problem with the false assessment is its ethical implication. If people think that life is much better than it actually is, it would be much harder to convince them not to create new people.

2. Adaptation

“When a person’s objective well-being takes a turn for the worse, there is, at first, a significant subjective dissatisfaction. However, there is a tendency then to adapt to the new situation and to adjust one’s expectations accordingly.
As a result, even if the subjective sense of well-being does not return to the original level, it comes closer towards it than one might think…
Because the subjective sense of well-being tracks recent change in the level of well-being better than it tracks a person’s actual level of well-being, it is an unreliable indicator of the latter.” (p.67)

Like in the case of the Pollyanna principle, some may argue that if people can adapt and adjust, then life is not that bad even when it is not easy. But why condemn people to such a state in the first place? Why force them to adapt to a bad situation when it is absolutely unnecessary?
It is so cruel to say that life is hard on everybody and they are all managing and they all adjust, since not everybody adjust, and since no one should adjust to a situation they don’t choose or haven’t agreed to come into before they were forced to. Why knowingly create someone who would have to adjust to bad situations, instead of easily avoiding any bad situation that person would be forced to endure? Why create someone who would want things all the time, which obviously not all of them would be obtained and the question is only how frustrated that person would be? And why create desires which wouldn’t exist otherwise? Wanting is not good since it means that there is a deficit, otherwise it wasn’t a want but a satisfaction, and sentient creatures, and most certainly humans, always want. And they don’t get what they want most of the time. Statements such as life is a compromise, or that we don’t always get what we want in life, are so common, and yet people consciously choose to throw other people into the position in which they must always compromise and never get everything they want. Why create a need when it is not necessary?

3. Comparison with Others

“It is not so much how well one’s life goes as how well it goes in comparison with others that determines one’s judgement about how well one’s life is going. Thus self-assessments are a better indicator of the comparative rather than actual quality of one’s life. One effect of this is that those negative features of life that are shared by everybody are inert in people’s judgements about their own well-being. Since these features are very relevant, overlooking them leads to unreliable judgements.” (p.68)

This feature is one of the most cynical, oxymoronic and cruel aspects of the issue. That is so since, if to put it bluntly, it means that as long as everyone’s life is miserable, everything is fine. According to this feature, parents shouldn’t be worried that their children would have bad lives, but that someone else would have a good one, since then they and their children would realize how bad their lives actually are. This world is so cynical and cruel that people’s desire to procreate is not threatened by the chance that their children would be miserable, but by the chance that others’ children would be a little bit better.

Life Addiction

Unfortunately, it is almost pointless to throw psychological theories on people since the trick about these psychological biases is that they prevent people even from noticing their utterly biased perception regarding the very existence of these biases, not to mention a more objective and reliable assessment of their own existence. It is a deadlock.

It is hard to see any of that changes since, as Benatar himself claims, these psychological features have a strong evolutionary advantage:

“The above psychological phenomena are unsurprising from an evolutionary perspective. They militate against suicide and in favour of reproduction. If our lives are quite as bad as I shall still suggest they are, and if people were prone to see this true quality of their lives for what it is, they might be much more inclined to kill themselves, or at least not to produce more such lives. Pessimism, then, tends not to be naturally selected.” (p.69)

People won’t be convinced that they shouldn’t procreate because their children would experience the daily discomforts Benatar specifies along the chapter, no matter how abundant and prevalent these are, and they would certainly not avoid procreation because they are biased to optimism. People procreate even when the chances for serious lifelong maladies are very high (for example in the case of genetic diseases or even when problems are observed through ultrasound).
Even people who have had horrible lives don’t hesitate and procreate despite that they know firsthand how easily life can become nightmarish. Procreation is way stronger than rational arguments, and people are anyway not very rational.

Another factor which I find crucial in affecting people’s perceptions, which is also another kind of a psychological mechanism, is that it is hard to imagine non-existence. Not that it should be a required part of making life assessments, but it seems that Benatar’s argument – that life is much worse than people think it is and therefore coming into existence is a very serious harm – necessitates that people would think that their lives are not worth living. No matter how many times he explains that the two differ, I think that people find it hard to distinct and so reply to his argument by an answer to a question he doesn’t ask. They confuse the claim that it is better never to have been, with the claim that their lives better not continue in one case, and the less confused who understand the difference between not continuing their lives and not starting them, find it hard not to imagine losing what they have experienced if their lives had never started, though clearly this is not what would have happened had they never existed.
The source for the second confusion makes sense to me since it is hard to imagine non-existence as a preferable position. Most people find it hard not to imagine non-existence as something bad, as a deprivation, as some sort of mental prison, a state in which their consciousness floats outside of existence or something of this sort. Non-existence is not only a state they find hard to imagine, it is not a state at all. People can’t put themselves in such a position because it literally doesn’t exist. Non-existence is not a comparable state with existence. So they imagine other states in which they would be deprived of everything they experienced during their existence. Despite that this is not the case, this is the intuition of many. Non-existence is not an existential alternative for a bad life and therefore prioritization in this case is irrelevant. It is irrelevant to ask someone if they rather never to have been since there is no such option for an existing person. And since the intuition behind the question ‘whether it’s better never to have been’ is: is it better that the life you have lived so far would have never started, the answer of many is no. But it’s an answer to the wrong question. When someone exists they inevitably weigh their own life as if this is what the question refers to. This false intuition makes them think that since they feel their lives are worth living, then their children’s lives would be so as well. That is despite that Benatar explains and emphasises the difference between living and non-existence. Still something in the structure of his argument makes people think about it wrongly.

This question is problematic from another angle. Even when people are asked to make life assessments, they rarely do it via some sort of hedonistic balance, they don’t compare bad and good experiences, but to them life is just what it is. It is a journey everybody has to take, nobody really chose and only few chose to quit. It is just something one has got to do. It is what it is. There is no alternative.
People think it is better to live hard lives than missing them, even though they won’t miss a thing had they never had a life. Nobody is harmed by a great life that nobody lived. But someone is definitely harmed by living a horrible life.

Biased assessments and the difficulty to imagine non-existence are not the only problems. Many people feel that they are not even qualified to make life evaluation, a task preserved, according to them, only to god, and their god is very pro-natalist. Some of them believe that the suffering on earth would be compensated in the afterlife, and so generally accept the existence of suffering in this life. They usually don’t ponder over whether their children would share the same belief system, and so condemn them to suffer existence for the sake of salvation in the afterlife despite that before they were born, their children need not to be saved from anything.

Life is much worse than people tend to think, but even if they weren’t, each bad moment happening during them is unnecessary. Every pain, every sickness, every fear, every frustration, every regret, every broken-heartedness, every moment of boredom and etc. are all needless. They exist only because the person experiencing them exists. They exist because the parents of that person have forced existence on that person, as well as forcing that person’s existence on others. There is no good reason for that to happen. Every problem could have been easily prevented instead of being difficultly solved, if solved at all. People exist because it was decided for them to exist by other people, not because it is necessary in any way. People can choose whether to create a sentient creature who would necessarily suffer, and they chose that it would. They chose that that person would experience pain, frustration, fear, boredom, death and the fear of dying for most of their life, they chose it would get disappointed, sick, rejected, and humiliated.
Yes, that person may enjoy parts of life too, but that is not mandatory, while it is mandatory that this short list of bad things will happen at some point, at least once in that person life. Pleasure is optional, happiness isn’t, and suffering is inevitable. Why would anyone willingly force a sentient creature into this condition?

The fact that people who are living horrible lives still don’t think they were better never to have been, is not an indication that life is not that horrible, but exactly the opposite. It goes to show how deeply trapped humans are in the life mechanism. People are victims not only of their biology but also of their psychology. They would adapt and adjust themselves and their expectations according to how bad the lives they are forced to endure are. Low expectation, adaptation ability, and the fact that everyone else’s lives is not much better, can’t justify bad situations which shouldn’t have been created in the first place.
But an even sadder fact is that humans are not really looking for justifications to procreate. Most just do. They don’t even really need mechanisms to sooth their worries about the future of their children, because as inevitable as it is that bad things would happen to their children, it rarely crosses their minds. Unfortunately people are that apathetic to the fate of others, even when it comes to their future children, and definitely when it comes to the rest of the victims of procreation.

The Harm to Others

The fact that life is much worse than people tend to think, is not only relevant to the claim that creating a person harms that person, it is also very relevant to the central antinatalism argument of this blog – the harm to others. That is because as long as people think that life is good, the greater the chances they would create more units of suffering, exploitation and pollution.
Since most humans, more than 95% of them actually, are not even vegans – the most basic and primal ethical decision one must make – procreation is practically letting a mass murder on the loose. When procreating people are choosing that more fish would suffocate to death by being violently sucked out of water, that more chickens would be cramped into tiny cages with each forced to live in a space the size of an A4 paper, that more calves would be separated from their mothers, and more cow mothers would be left traumatized by the abduction of their babies, it is choosing more pigs who suffer from chronic pain, more lame sheep, more beaten goats, more turkeys who can barely stand as a result of their unproportionate bodies, more ducks who are forced to live out of water and in filthy crowded sheds, more rabbits imprisoned in an iron cage the size of their bodies, more geese being aggressively plucked, more male chicks being gassed, crushed or suffocated since they are unexploitable for eggs nor meat, more snakes being skinned alive, and more crocodiles and alligators being hammered to death and often also skinned alive to be worn, and more mice, cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, and monkeys being experimented on.

Benatar sums the chapter with the following paragraph:

“everybody must experience at least some or other of the harms in the above catalogue of misery. Even if there are some lives that are spared most of this suffering, and those lives are better than I have said they are, those (relatively) high-quality lives are exceedingly uncommon. A charmed life is so rare that for every one such life there are millions of wretched lives. Some know that their baby will be among the unfortunate. Nobody knows, however, that their baby will be one of the allegedly lucky few. Great suffering could await any person that is brought into existence. Even the most privileged people could give birth to a child that will suffer unbearably, be raped, assaulted, or be murdered brutally. The optimist surely bears the burden of justifying this procreational Russian roulette. Given that there are no real advantages over never existing for those who are brought into existence, it is hard to see how the significant risk of serious harm could be justified. If we count not only the unusually severe harms that anybody could endure, but also the quite routine ones of ordinary human life, then we find that matters are still worse for cheery procreators. It shows that they play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun—aimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring.” (p.92)

When considering the harms to others, people play Russian roulette not with a fully loaded gun but with a fucking machine gun, aimed, of course, not only at the heads of their future offspring, but at the heads of everyone who would ever be hurt by their future offspring.

References

David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Benatar, D. Every Conceivable Harm: A Further Defence of Anti-Natalism
S. Afr. Journal Philos., 31 2012

Benatar, D. Grim news for an unoriginal position Journal of Med Ethics 35 2009

Benatar, D. Still Better Never to Have Been: A Reply to (More of) My Critics
Journal of Ethics 2013

Bradley, B Benatar And The Logic Of Betterness Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy 2010

Cabrera, j. A Critique of Affirmative Morality: a reflection on death, birth and the value of life.
Brasília: Julio Cabrera Editions 2014

Harman, E. Critical study of Benatar (2006). Nouˆs 43: 776–785.

McGregor, R & Sullivan-Bissett, E, ‘Better No Longer to Be: The Harm of Continued Existence’ South African Journal of Philosophy, vol. 31, no. 1, 2012 pp. pg.55-68

Parfit, D. Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984)

Shiffrin, S.V. Wrongful life, procreative responsibility, and the significance of harm. 1999
Legal Theory 5: pg.117–148