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Better Never to Have Been
First published in paperback in 2008. Reprinted 2009, 2013.
Better Never to Have Been
Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence. Thus, if they ever do reflect on whether they should bring others into existence—-rather than having children without even thinking about whether they should—-they presume that they do them no harm. Better Never to Have Been challenges these assumptions. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does ...
The Second Sexism
While the manifestation of sexism against women is widely acknowledged, few people take seriously the idea that males are also the victims of many and quite serious forms of sex discrimination. So unrecognized is this form of sexism that the mere mention of it will be laughable to some. Yet women are typically exempt from military conscription even where men are forced into battle and risk injury, emotional repercussions, and death. Males are more often victims of violent crime, as well as of legalized violence such as corporal punishment. Sexual assault of males is often taken less seriously. Fathers are less likely to win custody of their children following divorce. In this book, philosophy professor David Benatar provides details of these and other examples of what he calls the “second sexism.” He discusses what sexism is, responds to the objections of those who would deny that there is a second sexism, and shows how ignorance of or flippancy about discrimination against males undermines the fight against sex discrimination more generally.
Life, Death, and Meaning
Life, Death, and Meaning is designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy.
The Fall of the University of Cape Town
Destructive forces have been eroding the University of Cape Town, Africa's leading university. This book tells the sad, true tale of what has been transpiring. It is a saga of lunacy, criminality, pandering, and identity politics. The mad and the bad - the deranged, deluded, the depraved - have been granted endless latitude in bullying and abusing others. The decline began in 2015 with the Rhodes Must Fall protest that resulted in the offending statue's removal within a month, and which spawned similar protests abroad. Emboldened by their local success, the protestors issued new and ever-increasing demands later that year and then again in 2016 and 2017. Their methods also became criminal - including intimidation, assault, and arson. The university leadership capitulated to this behaviour, and this fostered a broader and now pervasive toxic environment within the institution. These developments offer important lessons for universities around the world that are yielding to the forces of a faux "progressivism".
The Human Predicament
Are our lives meaningful, or meaningless? Is our inevitable death a bad thing? Would immortality be an improvement? Would it be better, all things considered, to hasten our deaths by suicide? Many people ask these big questions -- and some people are plagued by them. Surprisingly, analytic philosophers have said relatively little about these important questions about the meaning of life. When they have tackled the big questions, they have tended, like popular writers, to offer comforting, optimistic answers. The Human Predicament invites readers to take a clear-eyed and unfettered view of the human condition. David Benatar here offers a substantial, but not unmitigated, pessimism about the c...
Debating Procreation
While procreation is ubiquitous, attention to the ethical issues involved in creating children is relatively rare. In Debating Procreation, David Benatar and David Wasserman take opposing views on this important question. David Benatar argues for the anti-natalist view that it is always wrong to bring new people into existence. He argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm and that even if it were not always so, the risk of serious harm is sufficiently great to make procreation wrong. In addition to these "philanthropic" arguments, he advances the "misanthropic" one that because humans are so defective and cause vast amounts of harm, it is wrong to create more of them. David ...
Life, Death & Meaning
Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better if we were immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Life, Death and Meaning brings together key readings, primarily by English-speaking philosophers, on such big questions.
Anti-Natalism: Rejectionist Philosophy from Buddhism to Benatar
The last few decades seem to have begun what has been called 'the childless revolution'. In developed countries, increasingly people are choosing not to have children. The causes of this 'revolution' are many including the belief that to create a new life is to subject someone unnecessarily, and without their consent, to life's many sufferings including death. This belief and its underlying philosophy is known as anti-natalism. There has been a recent resurgence of this philosophy, with David Benatar's book Better Never To Have Been (2006) as a major catalyst. Anti-natalism can be seen as part of a broader philosophy, described here as Rejectionism, which finds existence -directly or indirec...
Summary of David Benatar's The Human Predicament
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The human condition is a tragic one. Life has no meaning from a cosmic perspective, and our lives have no broader point or purpose. Our quality of life is as poor as it is. Death does not help us overcome our cosmic meaninglessness, and it only makes things worse. #2 Death is bad, and while some have tried to cope by denying it, there is no avoiding it. The human predicament is that we are mortal, and we must face this fact. #3 There is a distinction between optimism and pessimism in the realm of the facts. An optimist believes that a terrible fate will not befall him, whereas a pessimist believes that he will fall victim to that fate. They both agree that the fate is terrible, but they have differing views about whether it will occur. #4 Optimism and pessimism are both matters of degree rather than binary positions. If some feature of the human condition is negative, it can be more or less negative. If some other feature is positive, then, similarly, it can be more or less positive.
