ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by clarifying Benatar’s ‘anti-natalist’ conclusion with care, forestalling misinterpretations of it and also comparing and contrasting it and its major motivations. By ‘anti-natalism’ Benatar means the view that it is generally wrong on balance to create new human persons. A crucial claim that makes sense of believing anti-natalism but not pro-mortalism is that death itself is something bad to be avoided. Benatar’s asymmetry argument for anti-natalism without promortalism is readily seen not to appeal to ‘negative utilitarianism’, the moral theory roughly according to which only the reduction of bad, and not the production of good, has ethical weight. Benatar says little about the underlying moral theory that might underwrite the inference to anti-natalism.
