Hi, thank you for this thoughtful response, I appreciate it. I would probably have to agree with much of what you say, especially since I have spent some time reconsidering Benatar’s arguments and many of the potential flaws of it.

I have also wondered how likely it is that Benatar’s assessment of the quality of human life in general is more accurate than other people’s. I did raise the point that it’s hard to know whether the positivity or negativity bias is at play in our judgements but that the positivity bias generally seems the stronger one. In any case, you’re right that it’s difficult to prove whose mental faculties are the most trustworthy.

I think the empirical asymmetry argument for antinatalism can be a bit messy and isn’t necessarily the strongest argument for the position – I was hoping in this piece to show one avenue for how mental health we deem to be worse (mild to moderate depression) might have some benefit (depressive realism), and how this benefit could tie into the empirical asymmetry argument.

Julius Bahnsen also took issue with judging life on the basis of pain. He criticised Schopenhauer and Hartmann for this reason, rejecting their pessimism, which was based on a hedonic calculus. He said calculating life in general to be a net harm was an impossible calculation to make since each individual’s life is different. He based his pessimistic worldview, instead, on this conflict between the moral aim of alleviating suffering and the impossibility of achieving it, even in a single individual.

I did briefly touch on the point in this piece that you need not assume the harms of life outweigh the benefits in order to argue that depressive realism can make people lean towards antinatalism. Life could just be worse than previously assumed (without thinking it’s a net harm) and this could be enough to decide it’s not worth creating a new life.

Also, and perhaps I didn’t clarify this enough in the piece, pain and pleasure are just exemplars of harms and benefits more generally in Benatar’s asymmetries (both his axiological and empirical asymmetries). He is not judging life solely on the metric of pain and pleasure (as Schopenhauer and Hartmann were) but on the basis of harms and benefits. This view of life isn’t that new or controversial when you consider that the First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that “life is unsatisfactoriness”, which expresses the view that unsatisfactoriness is the default, outweighing states of satisfaction. I’d accept that it’s difficult (or impossible) to accurately weigh dissatisfaction and satisfaction in life in general and in any individual life, but I can definitely see the logic to the Buddhist diagnosis of the human condition.

There are many different sorts of arguments for antinatalism and I don’t think, as many antinatalists seem to do, that you need to argue life is a net harm in order to refrain from procreation. There are philosophers such as Gerald Harrison, Julia Tanner, and Asheel Singh who say that exposing beings to serious and preventable harms and risks without their consent is what makes procreation morally wrong. But that sort of argument deserves its own discussion.