

Introduction

Life is so terrible, it would have been better not to have been

born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand!
Jewish saying

The central idea of this book is that coming into existence is always
a serious harm. That idea will be defended at length, but the basic
insight is quite simple: Although the good things in one’s life make
it go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have
been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who
never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence
one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen
one had one not come into existence.
To say that the basic insight is quite simple is not to say that
either it or what we can deduce from it will be undisputed. I
shall consider all the anticipated objections in due course, and
shall argue that they fail. The implication of all this is that
coming into existence, far from ever constituting a net benefit,
always constitutes a net harm. Most people, under the influence
of powerful biological dispositions towards optimism, find this
conclusion intolerable. They are still more indignant at the further
implication that we should not create new people.
 Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of
human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification.
Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should
or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words,
procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result
of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed
decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but
among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child.
One can never have a child for that child’s sake. That much should
be apparent to everybody, even those who reject the stronger view
for which I argue in this book—that not only does one not benefit
people by bringing them into existence, but one always harms them.
My argument applies not only to humans but also to all other
sentient beings. Such beings do not simply exist. They exist in a
way that there is something that it feels like to exist. In other words,
they are not merely objects but also subjects. Although sentience
is a later evolutionary development and is a more complex state of
being than insentience, it is far from clear that it is a better state
of being. This is because sentient existence comes at a significant
cost. In being able to experience, sentient beings are able to, and
do, experience unpleasantness.
Although I think that coming into existence harms all sentient
beings and I shall sometimes speak about all such beings, my focus
will be on humans. There are a few reasons for this focus, other
than the sheer convenience of it. The first is that people find the
conclusion hardest to accept when it applies to themselves. The
focus on humans, rather than on all sentient life, reinforces its
application to humans. A second reason is that, with one exception,
the argument has most practical significance when applied to
humans because we can act on it by desisting from producing
children. The exception is the case of human breeding of animals,¹

¹ I treat this as an exception because humans breed only a small proportion of

all species of sentient animals. Although this is an exceptional case, it has great

 ∼ Introduction
from which we could also desist. A third reason for focusing on
humans is that those humans who do not desist from producing
children cause suffering to those about whom they tend to care
most—their own children. This may make the issues more vivid
for them than they otherwise would be.

W H O I S S O LU CK Y ?
A version of the view I defend in this book is the subject of some
humour:
Life is so terrible, it would have been better not to have been born. Who
is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand!²

Sigmund Freud describes this quip as a ‘nonsensical joke’,³ which

raises the question whether my view is similarly nonsensical. Is it

significance, given the amount of harm inflicted on those animals that humans breed
for food and other commodities, and is thus worthy of brief discussion now. One
particularly poor argument in defence of eating meat is that if humans did not eat
animals, those animals would not have been brought into existence in the first place.
Humans would simply not have bred them in the numbers they do breed them.
The claim is that although these animals are killed, this cost to them is outweighed
by the benefit to them of having been brought into existence. This is an appalling
argument for many reasons (some of which are outlined by Robert Nozick. See his
Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, ) –). First, the lives of many of
these animals are so bad that even if one rejected my argument one would still have
to think that they were harmed by being brought into existence. Secondly, those who
advance this argument fail to see that it could apply as readily to human babies that
are produced only to be eaten. Here we see quite clearly that being brought into
existence only to be killed for food is no benefit. It is only because killing animals
is thought to be acceptable that the argument is thought to have any force. In fact
it adds nothing to the (mistaken) view that killing animals for food is acceptable.
Finally, the argument that animals are benefited by being brought into existence
only to be killed ignores the argument that I shall develop in Chapters  and —that
coming into existence is itself, quite independently of how much the animal then
suffers, always a serious harm.
² In the philosophical literature this Jewish witticism has been cited by Robert
Nozick (Anarchy, State and Utopia,  n. ), and Bernard Williams (‘The Makropulos
Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’ in Problems of the Self (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ) ).
³ Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vii, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, ) .

Introduction ∼ 
sheer drivel to say that coming into existence is a harm and thus
that it is better never to come into existence? Many people think
that it is. Much of the argument in Chapter  will show that they
are mistaken. But first some ground must be cleared of confusion.
Dr Freud says that anybody ‘who is not born is not a mortal man
at all, and there is no good and no best for him’.⁴ Here Dr Freud
anticipates an aspect of what is called the ‘non-identity’ problem,
which I shall discuss at length in Chapter . Some contemporary
philosophers offer a similar objection when they deny that one
could be better off not being born. The never-existent cannot be
benefited and cannot be better off.
I shall not claim that the never-existent literally are better off.
Instead, I shall argue that coming into existence is always bad for
those who come into existence. In other words, although we may
not be able to say of the never-existent that never existing is good
for them, we can say of the existent that existence is bad for them.
There is no absurdity here, or so I shall argue.
Once we acknowledge that coming into existence can be a
harm, we might then want to speak loosely about never coming
into existence being ‘better’. This is not to say that it is better for
the never-existent, nor that the never-existent are benefited. I grant
that there is even something odd about speaking about the ‘never-
existent’, because that is surely a referentless term. There clearly
are not any never-existent people. It is, however, a convenient

⁴ Ibid. Although this is the deepest concern Dr Freud has with the quip, he
has others too. These, however, arise from his version of the quip, which sounds
particularly nonsensical. He says: ‘Never to be born would be the best thing for
mortal men.’ ‘But’, adds the philosophical comment in Fliegende Blätter, ‘this happens
to scarcely one person in a hundred thousand.’ (Ibid.) The embellishment that never
being born ‘happens to scarcely one in a hundred thousand’ does add to the joke’s
incongruity. Never being born happens to not one in a hundred thousand, and not to
scarcely one in a hundred thousand. (James Strachey describes the Fliegende Blätter as
a ‘well-known comic weekly’. I leave to others the minor, but interesting, historical
question whether the Fliegende Blätter drew on Jewish wit or whether it was the
source of this particular piece of Jewish humour, or whether both draw on some
other source.)

 ∼ Introduction
term, of which we can make some sense. By it we mean those
possible people who never become actual.
With this in mind, consider the joke again. It can be viewed as
making two claims: () that it is better not to be born, and () that
nobody is lucky enough not to be born. We now see that there is
a (loose) sense in which one can say that it is better not to be born.
It is an indirect way of saying that coming into existence is always
a harm. And there is nothing nonsensical in claiming that nobody
is lucky enough never to have come into existence, even though it
would have been (playful) nonsense to claim that there are some
people who are lucky enough not to come into existence.
In any event, the fact that one can construct a joke about the
view that coming into existence is always a harm, does not show
that that view itself is laughable nonsense. Although we can laugh
at silliness we can also laugh about very serious matters. It is into
the latter category that I place jokes about the harm of coming
into existence.⁵ Lest it be thought that the arguments I advance are
intended as mere philosophical games or jokes, I should emphasize
that I am entirely serious in my arguments and I believe the
conclusions.
I am serious about these matters because what lies in the balance
is the presence or absence of vast amounts of harm. I shall show in
Chapter  that each life contains a great deal of bad—much more
than people usually think. The only way to guarantee that some
future possible person will not suffer this harm is to ensure that
that possible person never becomes an actual person. Not only is
this harm all readily avoidable, but it is also so utterly pointless (at
least if we consider only the interests of the potential person and
not also the interests others might have in that person’s coming

⁵ There are other such jokes. For example, it has been joked that life is a sexually
transmitted terminal disease. (In cases of artificial reproduction, life is not sexually
transmitted, but it remains a terminal disease.) Others have jested that we are
born cold, naked, hungry, and wet—and that it is downhill from there. (Although
neonates cry not from a recognition of this, their cries, on my view, are ironically
appropriate.)

Introduction ∼ 
into existence). As I shall show in Chapter , the positive features
of life, although good for those who exist, cannot justify the negat-
ive features that accompany them. Their absence would not have
been a deprivation for one who never came into existence.
It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare
their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the
one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their
children is not to bring those children into existence in the first
place.⁶ There are many reasons why people do not notice this, or
why, if they do notice it, that they do not act on the realization, but
the interests of the potential children cannot be among them, as I
shall argue.
Nor is the harm produced by the creation of a child usually
restricted to that child. The child soon finds itself motivated to
procreate, producing children who, in turn, develop the same
desire. Thus any pair of procreators can view themselves as
occupying the tip of a generational iceberg of suffering.⁷ They
experience the bad in their own lives. In the ordinary course of
events they will experience only some of the bad in their children’s
and possibly grandchildren’s lives (because these offspring usually
survive their progenitors), but beneath the surface of the current
generations lurk increasingly larger numbers of descendents and
their misfortunes. Assuming that each couple has three children,
an original pair’s cumulative descendents over ten generations
amount to , people. That constitutes a lot of pointless,

⁶ Rivka Weinberg makes a similar point when she says that ‘many of the parents
who are willing to make huge sacrifices for the sake of their desperately ill children
may never consider that the most important sacrifice they ought to make is not
to create these desperately ill children in the first place.’ (‘Procreative Justice: A
Contractualist Account’, Public Affairs Quarterly, / () .) Her point is more
restricted than mine because she applies it only to desperately ill children whereas I
would apply it to all children.
⁷ I owe the image of the iceberg to University of Cape Town geneticist Raj
Ramesar. He uses it to represent the relationship between carriers of a genetic
disorder and their (potential or actual) offspring. I have broadened the image to
apply not only to those with genetic disorders but to all those (members of sentient
species) with genes.

 ∼ Introduction
avoidable suffering. To be sure, full responsibility for it all does
not lie with the original couple because each new generation
faces the choice of whether to continue that line of descendents.
Nevertheless, they bear some responsibility for the generations
that ensue. If one does not desist from having children, one can
hardly expect one’s descendents to do so.
Although, as we have seen, nobody is lucky enough not to
be born, everybody is unlucky enough to have been born—and
particularly bad luck it is, as I shall now explain. On the quite
plausible assumption that one’s genetic origin is a necessary (but
not sufficient) condition for having come into existence,⁸ one
could not have been formed by anything other than the particular
gametes that produced the zygote from which one developed.
This implies, in turn, that one could not have had any genetic
parents other than those that one does have. It follows from
this that any person’s chances of having come into existence are
extremely remote. The existence of any one person is dependent
not only on that person’s parents themselves having come into
existence and having met⁹ but also on their having conceived that
person at the time that they did.¹⁰ Indeed, mere moments might
make a difference to which particular sperm is instrumental in
a conception. The recognition of how unlikely it was that one
would have come into existence, combined with the recognition
that coming into existence is always a serious harm, yields the
conclusion that one’s having come into existence is really bad luck.
It is bad enough when one suffers some harm. It is worse still when
the chances of having been harmed are very remote.

⁸ Derek Parfit calls this the ‘Origin View’. Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, ) .
⁹ Derek Parfit asks ‘how many of us could truly claim ‘‘Even if railways and
motor cars had never been invented, I would still have been born’’?’, Reasons and
Persons, .
¹⁰ Think of how many people are conceived because of a power failure, a
nocturnal noise waking their parents, or any other such opportunity merging
with urge.

Introduction ∼ 
 Now there is something misleading about this observation.
This is because of all the trillions of possible people who could
have come into existence and assessed the odds, every one of
those who is in a position to assess the odds is unlucky whereas
there exists nobody whom the odds favoured. One hundred per
cent of assessors are unlucky, and nought per cent are lucky.
In other words, given procreation there was an excellent chance
that somebody would be harmed, and although the chances of any
person coming into existence are small, the chances of any existing
person having been harmed are one hundred per cent.

A N T I - NATA L I S M A N D T H E
P RO - NATA L B I A S
I shall argue that one implication of the view that coming into exist-
ence is always a serious harm is that we should not have children.
Some anti-natalist positions are founded on either a dislike of chil-
dren¹¹ or on the interests of adults who have greater freedom and
resources if they do not have and rear children.¹² My anti-natalist
view is different. It arises, not from a dislike of children, but instead
from a concern to avoid the suffering of potential children and the
adults they would become, even if not having those children runs
counter to the interests of those who would have them.
Anti-natalist views, whatever their source, run up against an
extremely powerful pro-natalist bias. This bias has its roots in
the evolutionary origins of human (and more primitive animal)
psychology and biology. Those with pro-natal views are more
likely to pass on their genes. It is part of the pro-natal bias that most

¹¹ W.C. Fields said that he did not like children . . . unless they were very well
cooked. (Or was it that he only liked them fried?) See also Ogden Nash’s poems,
‘Did someone say ‘‘babies’’?’ and ‘To a small boy standing on my shoes while I am
wearing them’ in Family Reunion (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, ) –.
¹² Andrew Hacker refers to some of these arguments. See his review, ‘The Case
Against Kids’, The New York Review of Books, / () –.

 ∼ Introduction