“We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child—pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm.”
“Those who consume animals not only harm those animals and endanger themselves, but they also threaten the well-being of other humans who currently or will later inhabit the planet.”
David Benatar
“Killing people or helping them to kill themselves is usually wrong, because continued life is, we assume, usually in those people’s interest. It is extremely implausible, however, to think that contin...”
David Benatar
“Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad—and considerably worse than most people recognize it to b...”
David Benatar
“One particularly poor argument in defence of eating meat is that if humans did not eat animals, those animals would not have been brought into existence in the first place. Humans would simply not hav...”
David Benatar
“Although, as we have seen, nobody is lucky enough not to be born, everybody is unlucky enough to have been born – and particularly bad luck it is, as I shall now explain. On the quite plausible assump...”
David Benatar