Benatar Asymmetry

Overview and Context

The Benatar Asymmetry is a central argumentative device in contemporary debates about antinatalism, the view that bringing new sentient beings into existence is morally problematic or wrong. Developed and defended most prominently by South African philosopher David Benatar, the asymmetry is intended to show that coming into existence is, in an important moral sense, always a harm to the one who comes to exist.

The asymmetry focuses on how we evaluate pleasure and pain in cases where a person exists versus in hypothetical cases where that person never exists. Benatar argues that common moral intuitions already presuppose a systematic asymmetry between the value of absent pains and absent pleasures, and that when this asymmetry is made explicit, it supports the conclusion that it is better never to be born.

Formal Structure of the Asymmetry

Benatar’s argument is often summarized in a four-fold comparison between existence and nonexistence:

1. The presence of pain is bad.
2. The presence of pleasure is good.
3. The absence of pain is good, even if there is no one who experiences this good.
4. The absence of pleasure is not bad, unless there is someone who is thereby deprived.

On this formulation, the key asymmetry lies between (3) and (4). It is claimed that we can call the absence of pain “good” even when there is no existing subject, but we should not call the absence of pleasure “bad” in such cases, because there is no one who is missing out.

Using this structure, Benatar compares two scenarios:

• A (existence): A person exists and has some mix of pleasure and pain.
• B (nonexistence): That person never exists.

Relative to A and B:

• A contains good (pleasures) but also bad (pains).
• B contains the good of absent pain and, on Benatar’s view, no corresponding bad (because the absence of the would-be person’s pleasures is not bad if there is no person deprived).

From this comparison, Benatar draws the conclusion that, all else equal, nonexistence is better than existence from the standpoint of the would-be person. This underwrites the antinatalist claim that bringing someone into existence is never a benefit to that person and is typically a harm.

Philosophical Motivations and Implications

Benatar maintains that the asymmetry is not ad hoc, but rather helps to explain several pre-theoretical moral judgments:

• Procreation vs. non-procreation:
  We often think it is not morally wrong to refrain from having children, even when we know that children who might have been born would have good lives. The asymmetry explains this by holding that failing to create those pleasures is not bad, since there is no one who is deprived.

• The duty to prevent suffering vs. no duty to create happy people:
  There seems to be a strong moral reason to avoid creating miserable lives, but no corresponding duty to create additional happy people. Again, the asymmetry makes sense of this: avoiding pain (or its possibility) is morally urgent, whereas not creating extra pleasure for non-existent people is not a moral failing.

• Regret about suffering lives vs. lack of regret about absent happy lives:
  People often think that bringing a severely suffering child into existence can be lamentable or tragic, but they typically do not lament the merely possible happy child who was never created.

Benatar uses these patterns to argue that many of our population ethics and reproductive ethics intuitions implicitly rely on the asymmetry, and that taking it seriously leads toward an antinatalist conclusion: it is better, for the would-be person, never to have been.

The implications extend to:

• Comparative value judgments about lives worth starting versus lives worth continuing.
• The distinction between harm in coming into existence and harm within an existing life.
• Debates about whether existence can be a “benefit” to the one who exists, or only a locus of harms and goods once existence is already given.

Major Objections and Responses

The Benatar Asymmetry is highly controversial, and critics challenge both its coherence and its implications.

1. Symmetry-based objections

Some philosophers argue that Benatar’s treatment of absence is arbitrary or inconsistent. If we say that the absence of pain is “good” even when unexperienced, symmetry might suggest that the absence of pleasure should be “bad” even when unexperienced. On this view, once we allow evaluative predicates to apply in the absence of a subject, we should do so for both pain and pleasure.

Benatar responds by insisting that our ordinary moral judgments already support the asymmetry: we do not typically mourn the merely possible pleasures of never-existing people, yet we do think it good to avoid creating suffering people, even when we never create them at all. Thus, he maintains that the asymmetry tracks existing evaluative practice rather than distorting it.

2. Person-affecting and deprivation worries

Another line of objection questions whether it makes sense to say that nonexistence can be “better for” someone. If a person never exists, there is arguably no subject for whom the absence of pain is good. Critics claim that comparative judgments like “better for X never to exist” may be incoherent when there is no concrete individual to bear the comparison.

Benatar attempts to sidestep this worry by appealing to counterfactual comparisons: we can compare the state of affairs in which a particular person exists with the state of affairs in which that same individual never comes into existence, and then assess which would have been better for that individual, even if in the second scenario the individual is merely possible. This remains a contested move.

3. Life-evaluation and optimism bias

A further criticism targets the step from the asymmetry to antinatalism. Many object that even if the structure is correct, it does not follow that all lives are on balance worse than nonexistence. They point out that many people evaluate their lives positively, claiming that their lives are worth living and that it is good they exist.

Benatar counters by arguing that such evaluations are systematically distorted by optimism bias, adaptive preferences, and limited self-knowledge. He claims that people tend to underestimate the harms in their lives and overestimate the goods, so their positive assessments are unreliable as evidence against the asymmetry-based antinatalist conclusion.

4. Alternative explanations of the intuitions

Some philosophers grant that Benatar has correctly identified certain asymmetries in our moral thinking, but argue that these can be explained without adopting his evaluative framework. For instance, they appeal to:

• Agent-centered constraints and permissions (we may be permitted not to create happy people even though their existence would be good);
• The idea that duties to avoid harm are stronger than duties to provide benefit, without requiring the specific absence-based asymmetry Benatar posits.

On such views, the asymmetry in duties does not entail that nonexistence is better for potential persons, but only that agents are not always required to create them.

Because of these sustained challenges, the Benatar Asymmetry remains a focal point of debate in ethics and population philosophy. It is widely recognized as a powerful and provocative argument structure, yet its soundness, its underlying metaphysics of value and personhood, and the strength of its antinatalist implications are all matters of ongoing philosophical dispute.