Debating Procreation, By David Benatar And David Wasserman

Quality of the Quality of Life Argument Within philosophy there is an ongoing debate about the moral permissibility, and possibly even duty, of procreation. The positions range from those strong pro-natalists who argue that we have a moral obligation to procreate, across an entire spectrum to those staunch anti-natalists who believe that procreation is impermissible. Debating Procreation, written by David Benatar and David Wasserman, serves as an exploration and attempt to defend two views within this debate. Benatar is one of the strong antinatalists, beginning the book with a categorical attack on procreation. He argues that procreation is never morally permissible, and this position is then countered by Wasserman’s limited pro-natalist

In the preceding chapter he argues that coming into existence is always a harm, and in this chapter he attempts to show that the harms of existence are so great as to create a moral prohibition against creating humans who would experience these harms. In this chapter Benatar discusses why we may not consider our lives to be so horrible as to have been not worth starting, as well as the myriad reasons that our lives are indeed that horrible. His basic argument relies on the premises that (1) If humans have a sufficiently poor quality of life then it is wrong to create them, and (2) Humans have a sufficiently poor quality of life, which leads to the conclusion that it is therefore wrong to create humans. Overall Benatar makes a strong case for the poorness of the quality of human life and consequently the moral wrongness of creating

Firstly, sub-premise (h) appears to be an overly pessimistic and unrealistic assessment with troubling implications. Benatar argues that, “If we think that longevity is a good thing then a life of a thousand years...would be much better than a life of eighty or ninety years,”. The comparative nature of this statement implies that, if there is better alternative to strive for, then the current standard is bad. This could be continually applied in such a way to arrive at the conclusion that any lifespan less than eternity is not good enough: If one thousand years is better than ninety, then one million is better than one thousand, and so on. Benatar makes no qualification for how long this must go on to achieve a lifespan sufficiently