Would it have been better never to have been born even if the life you live is worth living?
A friend tells you:
“My life is happy, full of pleasures and even of moments of ecstatic joy. It consistently brings me profound affective and professional satisfaction. I have the sense of being entirely fulfilled. And, don’t you see, this feeling of happiness is not fleeting: it is present all the time, and in my life it has always been so”
You observe that it is not April Fool’s Day, that your friend is not joking, and that he has not been drinking, and nothing suggests that he is any more mad than the average person. It is quite simply an exceptional case of authentic happiness!
You congratulate your friend, you declare that you are happy for him, which should increase his happiness yet more. He thanks you, then adds: “My life is worth living. But I would have preferred never to have been born”
For the philosopher Bernard Williams, your friend is talking nonsense! He contradicts himself in one and the same sentence.
For Williams, indeed, asserting that “I would have preferred never to have been born” implies “my life is not worth living”
1 There is not even any need to specify this if the person you are addressing has a modicum of common sense.
When you say to that person, “I would have preferred never to have been born,” they must spontaneously understand, “my life is not worth living.”
Consequently “my life is worth living but I would have preferred never to have been born” is a contradictory proposition.
Is Williams right? Is it really incoherent to say, “My life is worth living, but I would have preferred never to have been born”
2The first problem posed by this kind of statement is the fact that the question of knowing what “a life worth living” is does not have an answer that obtains unanimous agreement.
Some demand that objective criteria be employed to define this kind of life. Others leave it up to each person to decide. I will consider both cases.
The second, still more complicated problem is that it is hard to understand what “a preference for never having been born” means.
It cannot literally be a question of a preference for the state in which we are in when we are not born. We do not know what state we are in when we are not born. How could we “prefer” it, choose it, say that it is better than the state in which we find ourselves?
It is therefore more reasonable to think that the judgment “my life is worth living but I would have preferred never to have been born” relates to the life that we have.
But in this case, how can we fail to agree with Bernard Williams? How can we not think that, if we would have preferred never to have been born, it is because something is amiss in the life we are living, even if we are incapable of knowing what. “My life is worth living, but I would have preferred never to have been born” would mean: “I believe that my life is worth living, but in reality, objectively, it is not, for otherwise I would not say, ‘I would have preferred never to have been born.’”
WOULD IT HAVE BEEN BETTER NEVER TO HAVE BEEN BORN RATHER THAN TO LIVE AN IMMORAL LIFE?
It seems nonetheless that it is possible to give a meaning to “my life is worth living but I would have preferred never to have been born” that does not rest upon the idea
that we deceive ourselves regarding the quality of our life.Suppose we consider the following propositions:
1. My life is worth living, but so much effort was needed to make it such that I would have preferred never to have been born.
32. My life is worth living, but so many terrible trials had to be endured for it to be such that I would have preferred never to have been born.
43. My life is worth living, but there will be an end to it, I am going to die, and this prospect so distresses me that I would have preferred never to have been born.
54. My life is worth living, but I had to commit so many immoral acts for it to be such that I would have preferred never to have been born.
65. My life is worth living from a personal or subjective point of view, but it has no meaning from an impersonal or objective point of view, and this feeling of absurdity is so deep that I would have preferred never to have been born.
7
All these answers are ambiguous. They may indeed signify: “my life is worth living, but I would have preferred never to have been born.” But they may also mean: “all things considered, my life is not worth living, which is why I would have preferred never to have been born” Is it possible to find an unambiguous meaning in the proposition “my life is worth living, but I would have preferred never to have been born”?
