Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar

Author:David Benatar [Benatar, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Death, Ethics, Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Psychology
ISBN: 9780199296422
Google: -6UbHqrdWy4C
Amazon: 0199549265
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 2006-10-11T23:00:00+00:00

Responding to the Disability Rights Arguments

These arguments raise a formidable challenge to ordinary qualityof-life assessments and judgements about what lives are not worth starting. I shall not consider the various responses that have been offered, because these responses all assume that lives without impairments are lives worth starting. (Indeed, such lives have even been referred to as `perfect' individuals 22 and I have argued that no actual lives come anywhere near this description.) Instead I shall show how my argument that coming into existence is always a serious harm bolsters the disability rights position against its usual opponents while showing that both it and the position it criticizes are wrong.

One strength of the `social construction of disability' argument is that it highlights the fact that there are normal human inabilities that go unnoticed in most people's assessments of quality of life. Part of the explanation for this is the obvious fact that the unusual generally stands out more than the usual. In this particular case it is partly because society, unsurprisingly, tends to get constructed in a way that fits well with the usual range of abilities and inabilities. It is only if special attention is given to unusual inabilities that these are accommodated. But this does not exhaust the explanation. As we saw in Chapter 3, various features of our psychology, including Pollyannaism, adaptation to misfortune, and comparison of one's own life with the lives of others, all conspire to make us think that our lives are much better than they really are. We are blinded, then, to the negative features of our own lives. We can now see that this problem is worse, in some ways, for those with usual inabilities. Not only does the social structure not show up these inabilities but neither are there other people without these inabilities with whom they can compare themselves or who will compare themselves with them.23

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