David Benatar’s asymmetry argument has a certain austere elegance. He claims:
Presence of pain is bad.
Presence of pleasure is good.
Absence of pain is good (even if nobody benefits).
Absence of pleasure is not bad (unless someone exists to be deprived).
From this, he concludes: since life always contains pain, and nonexistence contains no pain, bringing a child into existence is always wrong.
It is a neat syllogism, but its neatness conceals a fatal overreach.
1. The False Asymmetry
Benatar’s central claim—that absent pleasures are never bad—depends on a peculiar moral accounting. If I could create a flourishing life, but I choose not to, the world contains less joy. To call that a “neutral” outcome is arbitrary. Absence of pleasure is not automatically bad, but neither is it morally void. There is symmetry: preventing suffering may be good, but preventing joy may also be bad. To deny this is to rig the scales in advance.
2. Smuggling in Hedonism
Benatar treats pain and pleasure as the sole moral currencies. This is the oldest utilitarian sleight of hand. But meaning, excellence, and agency are not reducible to hedonic calculus. Aristotle and the Stoics remind us: a good life is not merely about having more joy than sorrow, but about how one confronts hardship, how one flourishes despite suffering. Antinatalism assumes away this entire dimension of value.
3. The Problem of Subjectivity
Most people—when asked—are glad to exist. They value their lives despite pain. Benatar dismisses this as evolutionary delusion. But this is hand-waving: subjective valuation is not irrelevant, it is the raw material of ethics itself. If people authentically affirm their lives, that matters. To say their joy is an illusion is not philosophy—it is paternalism.
4. The Leap from Some to All
Even if Benatar’s asymmetry held, it would not justify universal antinatalism. At most, it might justify refraining from creating miserable lives. But it cannot condemn flourishing ones. The leap from “some lives are bad to create” to “all lives are bad to create” is a non sequitur. Fumitake Yoshizawa’s critique makes this point plain: Benatar’s conclusion simply does not follow from his premises.
5. The Devaluation of Agency
Finally, antinatalism insults the very capacity that makes moral discourse possible: agency. To exist is to have the possibility of choosing, of creating meaning, of shaping futures. Nonexistence forecloses that possibility absolutely. The absence of agency is not neutral—it is the deepest void. Antinatalism celebrates this void as victory. That is nihilism in disguise.
Conclusion: Life is Worth the Risk
Yes, life entails suffering. But suffering is not the trump card of existence. We are not porcelain dolls whose worth vanishes at the first crack. We are agents, meaning-makers, creators. Every birth is a gamble, but it is also an opening—an aperture through which new worlds of experience, meaning, and achievement can emerge.
Benatar asks us to shut that aperture forever. I say the opposite: to create life is to take part in the ongoing human wager—that joy, meaning, and flourishing can be built from the raw materials of suffering. The wager is not guaranteed, but it is noble. And it is worth making.