[DEBATE] : Who's the miserabilist of them all?

[Russell Grinker]

Friday 30 November 2007

Who’s the miserabilist of them all?

There is stiff competition these days for the title of ‘Biggest
Misanthrope’. But with his ‘pro-death’ book on why it is better never to
have been born, David Benatar pips the rest to the post.

Michael Cook 

What is it about utilitarians that makes them such miserabilists? 
The greatest happiness for the greatest number is the heart of their
philosophy, but just try to find a happy utilitarian. The first of them,
Jeremy Bentham, was such a sourpuss that he seemed pickled in vinegar. And
in fact, he was, sort of. His embalmed body still sits in a cabinet in
University College London, one of its principal tourist attractions. He had
no wife and no children. 
Herbert Spencer, a mutton-chopped Victorian who seems to be enjoying a quiet
revival nowadays amongst sociobiologists, used utilitarianism to create a
colossal metaphysical system. But the nearest he came to romance was a
friendship with the rather horsey-looking George Eliot. In his early
thirties he had a nervous breakdown and spent the rest of his long life as a
hypochondriac semi-hermit wearing earplugs to avoid trivial conversation.
And while Peter Singer, the most notorious of contemporary utilitarians, may
be a karaoke champ in private life, his writings are frequently
misanthropic. 
However, these are bit players in the drama of miserabilism compared with
South African academic David Benatar, author of Better Never to Have Been:
The Harm of Coming into Existence. Although the book has not been widely
reviewed in the popular press, it was published by Oxford University Press
and has been presented as a serious contribution to the increasingly
influential philosophy of utilitarianism. 
Professor Benatar’s thesis is that life is so horrid that we all would be
better off had we never existed. And not just us, but all sentient life. He
introduces his thesis with a Jewish witticism: ‘Life is so terrible, it
would have been better never to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in
a hundred thousand!’ 
But Benatar is serious. ‘The central idea of this book is that coming into
existence is always a serious harm.’ And, he continues, ‘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.’ 
How does he reach this conclusion, which, even by his own reckoning, seems
absurd and repellent? As a utilitarian, he calculates the benefits of
existence by balancing benefits against harms. What possible benefit could a
non-existent person receive that would outweigh a pinprick of pain? Since
most people find this hard to accept, Benatar spends a chapter demonstrating
that ‘human lives contain much more bad than is ordinarily recognised’. 
Given his distaste for life, why has he hung around for so long? It’s hard
to say. Perhaps he agrees with American writer Dorothy Parker: 
Razors pain you, Rivers are damp, 
Acids stain you, And drugs cause cramp. 
Guns aren’t lawful, Nooses give, 
Gas smells awful. You might as well live. 
As you might expect, the extinction of the human race seems like an
excellent idea to Prof B, although he acknowledges that it might be
difficult for society to manage it in a humane fashion. However, if a couple
of asteroids could be coaxed into colliding with our planet, it would be a
positive outcome for all concerned. 
The nineteenth-century German Arthur Schopenhauer is generally reckoned the
most pessimistic of all philosophers, but in Benatar he has no mean rival.
For the South African academic has more than a philosophy – he has a
practical bioethical programme. Although, as a libertarian, he acknowledges
that people have a right to have children, he feels that it is generally
unethical, since it brings them into a world of harm. Supporters of abortion
contend that women have a moral right to have abortions, but Prof B begs to
differ: they have a moral obligation to have abortions, lest they add to the
total amount of suffering in the world. Needless to say, this applies to
animals, too. He describes his standpoint, somewhat defiantly, not as
pro-choice, but as ‘pro-death’. 
Philosophers have often inspired poets. Epicurus had Lucretius; Thomas
Aquinas had Dante; Shaftesbury had Pope; Kant had Coleridge; Mme Blavatsky
had Yeats. But I can’t think of a poet who could bear to warble on about
Professor Benatar’s vision. Perhaps the novelist HG Wells comes closest. In
his classic The Time Machine, the Time Traveller goes so far into the future
that all life is extinct: 
‘All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum
of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was
over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant,
dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one
by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills
vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black
central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the
pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was
absolutely black.’ 
Sounds like a great place to send Prof B for his Christmas holiday. 
Benatar’s bleak pessimism would be comic if it were not so widely shared
amongst the woollier sort of environmentalists. The World Without Us, for
instance, explores how long it would take for the human footprint to be
washed away by the effluxion of time – about 500 years, it seems, although
the good news is that plastic bags will hang around for a few million years
(see Josie Appleton’s review of The World Without Us in the July issue of
the spiked review of books here). Meanwhile, a morbid fascination with a
suicidally shrinking population seems to hold groups like the Optimum
Population Trust in its thrall. 
Tim Flannery, science’s answer to Stephen King, insists that the population
Down Under (where I live) should contract from 20million to an optimum level
of six million to keep us from wreaking havoc upon the environment. He was
named 2007 Australian of the Year, so his message seems to have struck a
chord amongst the extra-skinny soy latté set, at least. And judging from the
hectoring of the United Nations Population Fund and its gaggle of birth
control busybody NGOs, nearly everyone in Africa, Asia and South America
urgently needs condoms to keep brown babies from entering the world and,
later on, from entering Europe. 
As one Amazon reviewer of Better Never to Have Been pointed out, ‘you need a
PhD to be this stupid’. Benatar’s pessimism is the blind elaboration of the
central utilitarian thesis: that good is a balance of pleasure and pain. But
everyday life gives the lie to this. Utility is a soulless way to assess
happiness and to know what is good. You don’t have to be a martyr to realise
that the pain of raising children is amply compensated by their love. Or
that the pain of work is outweighed by the joy of achievement. Or that a
sunrise over Everest obliterates the pain of climbing there. 
Are these watertight refutations? No, and, to be fair, Benatar deserves a
few rounds of philosophical fisticuffs with a fellow academic. But common
sense is enough for me. The great Samuel Johnson was once challenged to
counter Berkeley’s theory that matter was a figment of our imagination: ‘I
never shall forget’, says his biographer Boswell, ‘the alacrity with which
Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone,
till he rebounded from it, “I refute it THUS”.’ 
Nonetheless, Better Never to Have Been has its own modest utility. It
unveils ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’ as the secret password of
nihilism. And it is a lesson in intellectual history: after two centuries,
the bitter streams gushing from Bentham and Spencer have finally trickled
into the Dead Sea of the University of Cape Town philosophy department.
Anyone toying with the seductive arguments of Peter Singer and his ilk
should read it. There they will see what happens when the precepts of
utilitarianism are taken to their logical conclusions. 

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet. 

Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence by David
Benatar is published by Clarendon Press. 
reprinted from:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/4134/