He recently had an article Aeon.co on his anti-natalism, spreading around the sales patter. Anti-natalism, of course, is the philosophical position that it is morally wrong to have children at all. It's a bit of a hard sell, but he has the argumentative tap-dance down well. It's a perfect topic for the swindle: it has nothing of value for ordinary people, it depends on arguments that even academics have difficulty following, but people who sign on get to think of themselves as cleverer than the rubes, and in a matter of moral importance, to boot. But it is all tap-dancing. Sophistry is never dead. And the position itself, despite Benatar's claims otherwise, is both mad and wicked: mad, because it takes a skewed line of reasoning to an absurdity and insists that this is not a reductio, and wicked, because it accuses the bulk of the human race of immorality for doing something entirely ordinary and decent.
Benatar considers first an argument that people generally disagree with this position because they feel that their own lives are in fact morally worthwhile. He responds:
It is curious that the same logic is rarely applied to those who are depressed or suicidal. In these cases, most optimists are inclined to think that subjective assessments can be mistaken.
This response only works to the limited extent it does because he has rigged it by framing the argument as if the point were that it were impossible for subjective assessment to be wrong, rather than (for instance) presumptively right, or always right for normally functioning adults, both of which would still be enough. But even if we insisted that subjective assessment of life's value is always right, the response is irrelevant. Anti-natalism is an extremely strong position; as a logical matter, its opponents do not have to argue the contrary extreme that every life is worth living in order to refute it, but only that enough are. And, quite clearly, most people are not suicidal or depressive. Benatar goes on to argue that if suicides and depressives can underestimate life's value, other people could overestimate life's value. But this, too, is irrelevant: first, because Benatar's opponents don't actually have to commit to the view that suicides and depressives are underestimating the value of their lives at all, and second, because even if they do, the cases aren't symmetrical -- nondepressive nonsuicidal people who think their lives worth living massively outnumber depressive or suicidal people who don't, and nondepressive nonsuicidal people are massively more likely to be thinking reasonably than depressive or suicidal people are, or, if you prefer, are massively less likely to be engaging in thought patterns (in making these judgments) that distort judgments in recognizable ways on other matters, and third, because what needs to be argued is not that people can overestimate the value of their lives, but that they do this so thoroughly and often and to such a degree that we should expect them generally to be judging the opposite of what is the case. Benatar recognizes that he himself only has to argue that the risk of a bad life is too high; he fails to recognize that ordinary people only need to have good reason, even on the terms of his own argument, to think that the risk is low enough.
The reason, of course, that Benatar has to argue as he does, is that his position hinges on the idea that the judgments of ordinary people can be dismissed as having any bearing on the conclusion. Ordinarily, if you are trying to determine the answer to a question like, "Is living more good than bad?" you would start by (among other things) looking at what people who are most informed about the matter judge to be the case. Nothing requires that these judgments be taken as infallible, but the endoxa give you a picture of what reasonable people tend to conclude on the basis of what they know, and that would be a form of evidence for the kind of conclusion you could draw. It could be, again, that people are missing something, or that their standards of judgment need work, or any number of other things, but this would have to be established independently, and their judgments would in any case be evidence that you would need to consider, and would be sufficient to establish something relevant to the conclusion. But, of course, if we start with ordinary people's assessments of whether living is more good than bad, we would be starting with a rather considerable body of evidence that indicates that it probably quite often is. What Benatar needs is a way to dismiss ordinary people as sources of evidence for the worthwhileness of their own lives.
Later in the essay, he tries to argue that we should distinguish the question, "How good a life can a human reasonably expect?", from the question, "How good is human life?". But in fact in this case they are the same question, if the latter is not interpreted in a crazy way. We aren't talking, pace Benatar, of how good human lives are in an absolute scale of goodness (which he never provides in any case); obviously human lives are less good than the lives of angels and infinitely less good than the life of God, for instance. But this is not like comparing mice and humans, or humans and angels. We are asking a question about a human decision -- whether it is good to have human children -- that (it is assumed by Benatar) requires assessment of what good one can reasonably expect of human lives, and "How good a life can a human reasonably expect?" is the sensible way to ask how good a human life is in that context. The only reason for distinguishing the questions is, again, to take the assessment out of the hands of ordinary human beings who usually look at what is good specifically for human beings when answering the question of whether a human life is more good than bad. (It is Benatar, in fact, who actually shifts questions, shifting between "Is life more bad than good?" and "Is life better not to have been?", which are completely different questions, unless, as noted below, you are making highly controversial ethical assumptions.)
If we clear away ordinary people as being so wrong that their assessments don't count as presumptive evidence, then we can move on to Benatar's primary line of argument:
Considering matters carefully, it’s obvious that there must be more bad than good. This is because there are empirical asymmetries between the good and bad things.
He gives a number of reasons to think this asymmetry is the case. This argument cannot get off the ground if we allow the testimony of ordinary people as to the quality of their own lives, because then we have presumptive to reason to take good as outweighing bad -- namely, almost everyone estimates the good to outweigh the bad. It's always possible even if the good outweighs the bad that these empirical asymmetries exist for particular comparisons of good or bad things. Perhaps it's true, for instance, that the worst pains are worst than the best pleasures, as Benatar claims, or that pain lasts longer than pleasure. I don't think either of these is true as a general rule (for instance, his argument for the first is problematic because people would arguably avoid making the trade precisely because they think their lives are actually pretty good to begin with, so there's no reason to make it much worse just to raise it a little bit more, particularly given that in the real world it would seem like trying to fix something that isn't broken), but even if they were, all this shows is that those particular comparisons are asymmetrical in such a way that badness outweighs goodness. There could very well be other comparisons in which goodness outweighs badness: for instance, it's often been thought that comparisons of quality of pleasure introduce an asymmetry that favors the good. Perhaps there are more kinds of pleasure than kinds of pain. Perhaps there are goods that have nothing to do with pleasure and pain that introduce asymmetries of their own.
Of course, what we are getting to is that Benatar's "obvious" conclusion is not, in fact, based on the empirical asymmetries, but on the standard of comparison being used to judge whether good outweighs bad or vice versa. Anti-natalism, after all, is an ethical position, so it matters what ethical approach is being used. Benatar by the time he has even started building his argument has put aside positions like Kant's -- who regards the moral law in us, as the supreme and per se good, as the standard of good -- and Aristotle's, and, indeed, a great many others. It is a very specific and far from universal -- and far from obvious -- ethical approach whose principles of evaluation are really doing the work here.
Benatar goes on to note a 'misanthropic' argument for anti-natalism (as opposed to the 'philanthropic' argument so far) that human beings are bad for everything else. I confess I've never seen how this kind of argument is supposed to work at all -- what ethical standard is in play here, given that ethics is something human beings do? So I will not consider it, beyond noting again that the conclusion doesn't actually follow from the facts noted, but from some underlying ethical principles that are not given. There's a lot of rhetorical lightshow going on, given that we don't really get a look behind the curtain.
