“If you don’t want to die, don’t be born!” — Child soldiers in Johnny Mad Dog.
In Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, lovable curmudgeon David Benatar argues that life always contains suffering and death and so we cause unnecessary harm by having children. Harm is only possible through existence, and though life contains pleasures, the good almost never outweighs the bad. And even if it does, it’s still a harm to be born, because life will inevitably contain some suffering, whereas non-existence contains no suffering and yet the lack of pleasures cannot be missed by the non-existent. It is always wrong, then, to bring harm-experiencing beings into existence. If pregnant, please abort.
The problem and solution, as Benatar sees them, are clear-cut:
Although sentience is a later evolutionary development and is a more complex state of being than insentience, it is far from clear that it is a better state of being. This is because sentient existence comes at a significant cost. In being able to experience, sentient beings are able to, and do, experience unpleasantness. (2) …
In the ordinary course of events [parents] will experience only some of the bad in their children’s and possibly grandchildren’s lives (because these offspring usually survive their progenitors), but beneath the surface of the current generations lurk increasingly larger numbers of descendents and their misfortunes. Assuming that each couple has three children, an original pair’s cumulative descendants over ten generations amounts to 88,572 people. That constitutes a lot of pointless and avoidable suffering. (6 - 7)
Is existence really so bad? In case you’re not convinced, Benatar succinctly describes the mundane tortures that inevitably befall any unwitting human thrust into life on this overrated, loathsome orb:
As a matter of fact, bad things happen to all of us. No life is without hardship. It is easy to think of the millions who live a life of poverty or of those who live much of their lives with some disability. Some of us are lucky enough to be spared these fates, but most of us who are, nonetheless suffer ill-health at some stage during our lives. Often the suffering is excruciating, even if it is in our final days. Some are condemned by nature to years of frailty. We all face death. We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any newborn 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 non-existent. Only existers suffer harm. (29) …
[W]e tend to ignore just how much of our lives is characterized by negative mental states, even if often only relatively mildly negative ones. Consider, for example, conditions causing negative mental states daily or more often. These include hunger, thirst, bowel and bladder distension (as these organs become filled), tiredness, stress, thermal discomfort (that is, feeling either too hot or too cold), and itch. For billions of people, at least some of these discomforts are chronic. These people cannot relieve their hunger, escape the cold, or avoid the stress. However, even those who can find some relief do not do so immediately or perfectly, and thus experience them to some extent every day. In fact, if we think about it, significant periods of each day are marked by some or other of these states. For example, unless one is eating and drinking so regularly as to prevent hunger and thirst or countering them as they arise, one is likely hungry and thirsty for a few hours a day. Unless one is lying about all day, one is probably tired for a substantial portion of one’s waking life. How often does one feel neither too hot nor too cold, but exactly right? (71 – 72).
Boy he sure left out a lot. Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that Benatar does not look on the bright side of life.
Benetar believes that even an impossibly charmed life in which everything is orgasmic pleasure save for a single pinprick is worse than never coming into existence, because the non-existent can neither experience pain nor lament lost pleasure. What intrigues me about his “anti-natalism,” besides that it’s outrageous and I love his chutzpah, is that this is the exact argument vegans make when they criticize humane animal farming on suffering reduction grounds. Veganism seeks to reduce demand for animal products so that fewer (and ideally zero) farm animals are born. The idea is that we do a disservice to these animals by bringing them into existence — even if it’s the best kind of humane farming and the animals are treated well and killed painlessly — since their lives include suffering and then death.
When vegans talk about humanely raised animal products, they may admit that it is at least slightly better than factory farming, but they tend to be like Benatar and focus on the harms. Even if the animals get to wander around, play and eat a natural diet, and are eventually killed painlessly, such a life is worse than never coming into being. While humane farm life may be relatively pleasant overall, the incidents of suffering farm animals often face — branding, dehorning, the separation of the calf from the mother, castration, artificial insemination, and early death — hopelessly taint the life beyond justifiability. As HumaneMyth.org says in “Happy Cows: Behind the Myth”:
The truth of the matter is that each purchase of dairy products or veal directly contributes to more individuals brought into existence who will endure confinement, social deprivation, mutilation, reproductive manipulation, indignity and premature death. (41)
The sufferings can be minimized and some can be eliminated, but even if these animals are going to suffer only a little then be killed before their natural lifespan is up, they just shouldn’t have been born.
Fair enough, but when vegans use any amount of suffering to disqualify the legitimacy of bringing a life into existence, this creates some unintended philosophical consequences. If they are going to be so strict about any amount of suffering ruling out the desirability of starting a life, their priority shouldn’t be merely the end of animal farming — their priority should be ending humans.
There are a few reasons for this. One is that even the self-proclaimed ethical humans cause more suffering than even the most unrepentant carnivore species. As Benatar says:
Although the arguments I have advanced have not been misanthropic, there is a superb misanthropic argument against having children and in favour of human extinction. This argument rests on the indisputable premiss that humans cause colossal amounts of suffering—both for humans and for non-human animals. In Chapter 3, I provided a brief sketch of the kind of suffering humans inflict on one another. In addition to this, they are the cause of untold suffering to other species. Each year, humans inflict suffering on billions of animals that are reared and killed for food and other commodities or used in scientific research. Then there is the suffering inflicted on those animals whose habitat is destroyed by encroaching humans, the suffering caused to animals by pollution and other environmental degradation, and the gratuitous suffering inflicted out of pure malice.
Although there are many non-human species—especially carnivores—that also cause a lot of suffering, humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth. The amount of suffering in the world could be radically reduced if there were no more humans. (223 – 224)
Some vegans already agree with Benatar here and wish for the extinction of humans for the sake of other animals. But even these vegans are overlooking another reason for wanting the end of humans; it’s not just that humans cause more suffering than other animals — they also suffer more. If vegans believe that the life of a humanely raised farm animal is not worth living because of the sufferings endured, then we especially shouldn’t be bringing humans to life, since we suffer even more.
Most vegan philosophers provide a survival exemption to veganism, allowing for the consumption of animal products when human life immediately depends on it. Their justification for this apparent discrepancy is that human lives are richer than the lives of other animals, since we have a greater appreciation for nuance and a wider variety of pleasures. In other words, our lives are more complicated and thus better. The problem with this is the flipside: due to our complexity and wider range of potential experiences, humans also endure a greater variety of sufferings than other animals do.
So why do vegans generally believe that the pleasures humans experience outweigh our sufferings and make our lives worth starting, but the same is not true for animals humanely raised for food? Clearly there comes a point when life has too much suffering to be worth experiencing, but if life and death on a humane farm goes beyond the tolerable suffering threshold, then life as a modern human must too.
Is life worthwhile if it includes suffering and ends in death? If the answer is no, we shouldn’t be raising animals for food, but then we shouldn’t be raising humans either.
No doubt it hurts like hell to be castrated as a young pig. But is it that much more painful and scary than being circumcised or getting vaccinations? Maybe so, but after that early agony, pigs on humanely raised farms are likely to have a relatively tranquil life that is free of major pains and anxieties, and then they’re ideally killed before they know what is happening to them, without ever having to suffer much — if any — stress about their mortality.
Humans don’t have it so easy. An oyster doesn’t suffer because it is so simple an organism; humans suffer the most because we are perhaps the most complex animal organism. From a suffering reduction paradigm, the more complex you are, the greater your suffering — and the harder it is to justify your existence.
Benatar provides the general outlines of human misery, but I’m surprised he didn’t devote an entire chapter to all the bad things most lives contain. Sit down and think about your past for a minute or two and a chapter like that writes itself. Here are just a few of the standard unpleasantries I can think of that even the most privileged humans face, some of them shared by other animals, but many of them unique to humans:
Work suffering. Being out of work, having a job you hate, tedium, stress, lamenting disregarded ambitions, wasted time, fears of not being productive or good enough and being fired, identity suppression to fit in the work culture, resenting others for getting away with doing less than you, the drive to be successful and impress your peers, irritating assignments you’d rather not do or which go against your beliefs, getting fired.
Farm animals often have to work too. Depending on their species, they may have to lay eggs, have their wool sheared, or be milked. But none of that has to take very long — it’s certainly not an eight-hour work day — and on a humane farm it shouldn’t be that painful.
Relationship suffering. Unrequited love or lust, the passion paradox, sexual frustration or disappointment, being stuck in an unhappy relationship, STDs, long distance woes, jealousy, fears that the person you love will leave you or cheat on you, discovering lies, mutually waning love, getting dumped, feeling guilty for dumping someone, unwanted pregnancies, depression over miscarriages, post-partum depression, sleepless nights as parents, terror that something will happen to your child or that your child will misbehave, getting divorced, having parents who get divorced.
Most other animals experience sexual frustration, and cats sometimes fall prey to the passion paradox, becoming more clingy and desperate the more you ignore them. And sometimes dogs can develop separation anxiety. But the rest of these are more or less human problems.
Pain. Minor injuries like slamming your finger in a door, severe injuries from accidents or attacks, throwing up, colds, chronic sicknesses, menstrual cramps, headaches, migraines, cluster headaches, burns, puncture wounds, the emergencies that bring you to the doctor, the treatments themselves, going to the dentist, the pain of growing a baby inside of you, having the baby, passing a kidney stone, fracturing limbs, bruising your tailbone, aging, paper cuts.
It’s likely that animals are about even with us on this one, except that they are less likely to have psychological scars from especially traumatic pain experiences.
Violence. Rape, murder, assault and fear of all of these.
Animals certainly experience violence, but for them violence would go under the heading of pain, because for humanely raised farm animals, violence is most relevant as a visceral unpleasant momentary experience. Vegans sometimes call it rape when animals such as cows are artificially inseminated, but cows hardly seem to notice this as it is happening, and it certainly does not cause the long-lasting trauma that rape does for humans. Animals experience fear too, but they are less likely to experience chronic fear at the contemplation of something disturbing. Fear for animals usually means reacting to immediate threatening stimuli that they need to escape. On humane farms, this should not be a common occurrence.
Self-esteem suffering. Feeling inadequate, ugly, unloved, stupid or worthless; regrets about decisions you made in the past and worries about the future.
Animals can feel unloved, but probably don’t experience the rest of these.
Self-determination infringement suffering. Structural injustice, inequality, oppression, patriarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, dirty subversives threatening straight marriage and Christmas (j/k), immigration restrictions, addiction, bullying, the freedom curtailments that come with voluntary responsibilities such as parenthood, feeling a need to conform to society’s expectations, fear that the wrong people are in power and will restrict your freedoms, prison, religious demands, onerous societal or governmental restrictions, over-controlling parents, ideological summer camps, compulsory education.
Just because there is not a visible fence around most of us most of the time does not mean that humans feel freer than animals on humane farms do. Other animals don’t need as much freedom as we usually require to be happy because they have simpler and fewer needs. The typical humanely raised animal is probably more content with their level of freedom than the typical human living in a country such as The United States or The Netherlands. At least animals don’t torture themselves by reading news stories about ideological opponents making laws they don’t like, or by contemplating freer animals elsewhere.
Vegans point to calves sent to auction or slaughter, and the stress they feel while being transported to a new location. But what human has not felt the stress of an uncomfortable transportation experience to a location that fills them with anxiety?
Vegans don’t like that cows are impregnated every year to keep them lactating. But is that any worse than being a woman in a religious community who is expected to produce as many children as she possibly can?
Vegans also don’t like that calves are separated from their mothers and confined while they are being weaned. But this is a minor inconvenience compared to separating human children from their parents on the first day of Kindergarten or, god forbid, pre-school, to initiate the next 12 years of their lives confined to a desk, in which they will be forced to memorize and re-hash information they care little about, with summers being the only reprieves, since homework keeps them chained to their desks at night.
The suffering unto death. Losing a pet, losing a loved one, losing yourself; also, contemplating all these inevitable future instances of death, and the related existential angst of feeling alone in a meaningless universe.
Even if every moment of suffering and discomfort could be extricated from humane animal farming, most vegans could not get behind it because it involves death. Specifically, it requires inducing death before the animal’s natural lifespan is up. (Aka, murder). But death is just as inevitable for humans as it is for farm animals. And even though the cause of death is less predictable for most humans than it is for animals raised on a humane farm, and humans often get to live to the natural end of their lives — which vegans take as the gold standard for the best possible death — it’s far from clear that death by murder is worse for other animals than death by all means (including natural causes) is for humans.
When vegans are disturbed by an animal’s early demise, they’re projecting their fears about human death onto animals who don’t have the same neurosis about non-existence. Even though most humans aren’t murdered, every aspect of death is more brutal for us. Animals don’t know what their natural lifespan is, and they don’t have to worry about living long enough to accomplish their goals. Surely death by common non-murderous causes like cancer or heart attacks is worse for humans than it is for an animal to die of slaughter. Even a human dying of old age has more to fret about than a slaughtered animal who has no concept of death or desire to see their great grandchildren grow up.
Living long as a human means seeing loved ones die, an experience that hits humans harder than it does other animals. We never know how we are going to die, so even if it will be of old age, we still spend plenty of time worrying that we will die another way, or that someone we love will die before us. Even though farm animals are the ones guaranteed to die at the hands of someone else, humans stress themselves about this possibility far more than other animals do.
Entering the slaughterhouse can be frightening for animals because they are in strange new surroundings, and sometimes they realize that something bad is going to happen, but this is nothing compared to the lifetime humans spend dreading the end.
Keep this in mind before you have kids, vegans — you are bringing a being into this world whose confrontation with the inevitability of death will be far worse than what any animal experiences at slaughter.
Humans do at least have religion to counter the sense of existential despair that often accompanies mortality and living in an apparently meaningless world, but this is an imperfect solution to a problem that other animals simply don’t have.
It’s not only that humans have to endure more kinds of suffering than humanely raised farm animals do. Even worse is that the bad things that happen to us linger longer. Humans are nature’s most neurotic creations. We may have invented Buddhism, but we’re not the most natural practitioners of it. Mother cows are said to moo sadly when their calves are taken from them, but this only lasts for a few days. Human parents suffer more by sending their children to college; if parents were to actually lose a child, they might be wrecked for the rest of their lives.
Some may object that I’m overlooking the cheerier aspects of human life. Well of course I am, but vegans do the same thing when they condemn humane animal farming by focusing on the worst bits.
However, even if it’s agreed that humans suffer more and in more ways than humanely raised farm animals, there is still the question of whether humans have a greater and richer variety of pleasures to enjoy and whether this high-end pleasure explains why it’s okay to bring humans but not domesticated animals into existence.
Even though humans have potential to enjoy a greater variety of pleasures than animals do, in many cases it is other animals who are better positioned to enjoy the pleasures of life. Humans often undercut the nice things they have through contemplation of the transitory nature of good things. Sex and food are overloaded with caveats for humans; it’s unlikely that other animals worry about getting fat or unhealthy because of what they eat, or feel moral guilt or regret about their food choices or who they sleep with. What animal other than a human would watch a gorgeous sunset and worry about an email they need to write?
Vegans say that the pleasure of eating animal products is fleeting, and not nearly sustained enough to compensate for the suffering that animals endure. If all pleasure were ranked against suffering in that way, it would all fall short of defeating the avalanche of suffering in the world. By this standard, even love, with its comforting, slow, relatively consistent release of joy, isn’t enough to make up for all the heartbreak, unhappy relationships, sexual frustration, jealousy, betrayals, dissatisfaction, boredom and waning passion we face on the way to love or after it. It seems highly implausible, then, that the balance is tipped toward suffering for humanely raised animals and toward pleasure for humans.
The vegan suffering reduction argument also has major implications for wild animals. In “The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering,” an anonymous utilitarian writes:
The number of wild animals vastly exceeds that of animals on factory farms, in laboratories, or kept as pets. … The agony endured by, say, a frog while being eaten alive by a snake is probably at least as great as anything that a battery-cage hen or factory-farmed turkey experiences, as terrible as their treatment often is. … While death may often constitute the peak of suffering during an animal’s life, day-to-day existence isn’t necessarily pleasant either. Unlike most humans in the industrialized world, wild animals don’t have immediate access to food whenever they become hungry. They must constantly seek out water and shelter while remaining on the lookout for predators. Unlike us, most animals can’t go inside when it rains or turn on the heat when winter temperatures drop far below their usual levels. …
It is often assumed that wild animals live in a kind of natural paradise and that it is only the appearance and intervention of human agencies that bring about suffering. This essentially Rousseauian view is at odds with the wealth of information derived from field studies of animal populations. Scarcity of food and water, predation, disease and intraspecific aggression are some of the factors which have been identified as normal parts of a wild environment which cause suffering in wild animals on a regular basis. …
When we think about nature, we may picture chirping songbirds or frolicking gazelles, rather than deer having their flesh chewed off while conscious or immobilized raccoons afflicted by roundworms, waiting pleadingly for death to come.
Fish and other wild animals suffer immensely even if humans aren’t to blame. If vegans long for the extinction of domesticated farm animals because they suffer, vegans should root even more loudly for the extinction of wild animals. An impending fish supply collapse should be considered progress – with so many breeds of fish going extinct forever, there is less suffering in the oceans. Death is painful, but any premature death of a wild animal spares it from future suffering. If humanely raised animals ought not have been born, then the same must hold true for wild animals, who usually suffer even more than the animals we raise on humane farms.
Many vegans believe in not having children, but many others praise the land-use efficiency of vegan food and tout how many more humans a vegan world could feed. If vegans are concerned with suffering, it does not make sense for them to regret the birth of a calf on a humane farm and not regret the birth of a human even more. By any sane suffering reduction standards, the birth of a human (even in the best possible circumstances) brings more harm to the world, especially when you look at the suffering humans cause as well as endure. Vegans concerned with suffering should not waste time passing out pro-vegan pamphlets to meat eaters — they should be passing out anti-natalism pamphlets to married couples and pregnant women. (It does, however, make sense to end factory farming if suffering reduction is your goal, but human extinction takes care of that as well.)
Animals don’t consent to being born into a humane farming scenario, but humans don’t consent to being born either. If it is wrong to bring animals into a situation with disagreeable aspects, why is it not wrong to do the same for humans, when there are so many more disagreeable aspects to being human?
Do suffering reduction vegans think human pleasure outweighs human suffering, even with the whirlpool of unpleasantness all of us experience every single day? If vegans believe that human existence with all its agonies is better than non-existence, why is this not the case for other animals, who have a purer experience of pleasure and fewer unavoidable sufferings?
Since humans suffer and cause suffering, and since it is not necessary to create more people, creating people causes unnecessary suffering. If a vegan is okay with humans having kids, that means they are okay with causing unnecessary (and extreme) harms. And so they cannot object to someone eating animal products on the grounds that this is an unnecessary harm. Therefore, they should be able to accept humanely raised animal products.
Otherwise, their first priority should be hastening the end of humanity.
