The Optimism Delusion - David Benatar responds to Richard Dawkins.

[Viva June]

Quote Originally Posted by Kramdar

The unborn never ask to be born. This seems true enough. But the corollary is: The unborn never ask to not be born. This latter statement is true in precisely the same way as the former statement. The unborn do not desire life, but neither do they desire nothingness. To say "well, the unborn do not desire anything, so let's just leave them that way" may seem the better decision for those few unborn who would otherwise have manifested to think the transient "harm" of living overrides all other considerations, but it would just as easily be the worse decision for the many unborn who would have otherwise gone on to believe that the experience (good and bad) of existence is better than the perpetual ignorance of the void.

Again, you fail to recognise that the antinalist argument doesn't rely on there being actual entities who feel one way or another about the prospect of existence. Talk of the unborn and so on is just a kind of linguistic shorthand. The antinatalist may say that the unborn suffer no harm by remaining unborn, but what she actually means is that there can be no pain where there is no subject to experience it. For this claim to work she needs non-existence to be simply nothing and nothing else, since if there is an absence of everything, then the absence of subjectivity and hence of harm is included in that. Most people seem to think of non-existence in a similar way, which is why the shorthand of "the unborn" works often enough: people understand the argument along the same lines as the antinatalist, even if for various reasons they disagree with her conclusion. Now, you turn the shorthand on its head, but in doing so you violate the metaphysical assumptions supporting the argument: now the absence of everything includes the presence of a desire for something. The counterargument fails as a reductio because, rather than expose a contradiction within antinatalism, it introduces a contradiction from without.