You just can't make this kind of stuff up.And yet the weirdness of life in the post-Christian 21st Century makes things like David Benatar's Oxford-published Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence almost de rigeur. Here's a few excerpts from Michael Cook's wry and useful commentary about the book and its mopey, irreconcilable to real life philosophy.
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.’...
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...
Read the entirety of Cook's fine review in spiked! right over here.
