Never having been born means one can’t benefit from one’s life,
This seems as much a mis-answer as the saying “someone lost their life”, as if the someone and the life are separable.
“One can’t benefit from one’s life if one isn’t born” implies that one exists before one is born—that there is a “person” (a specific person) hanging around somewhere real, waiting to be born. This is not the case. A child is born and it’s neural patterns arrange themselves into a person.
Before a child is born, there is no real extant thing, anywhere, posessing the attribute “lack-of-benefitting-from-it’s-possible-future-life”.
(Similarly, you cannot ask what it would be like if you were born in another country, or born in 1750, or born to a wealthier family, because that style of question makes the same mistake of getting the order of the wrong way around).
There isn’t any X to satisfy the sentence “X is not being born”, so “not being born” isn’t evil. [Edit: I suppose, unless you class miscarriages or abortions, but I think the point still holds because that still carries the same misconception of a whole “you” within the unborn cell cluster somewhere].
This seems as much a mis-answer as the saying “someone lost their life”, as if the someone and the life are separable.
“One can’t benefit from one’s life if one isn’t born” implies that one exists before one is born—that there is a “person” (a specific person) hanging around somewhere real, waiting to be born. This is not the case. A child is born and it’s neural patterns arrange themselves into a person.
Before a child is born, there is no real extant thing, anywhere, posessing the attribute “lack-of-benefitting-from-it’s-possible-future-life”.
(Similarly, you cannot ask what it would be like if you were born in another country, or born in 1750, or born to a wealthier family, because that style of question makes the same mistake of getting the order of the wrong way around).
There isn’t any X to satisfy the sentence “X is not being born”, so “not being born” isn’t evil. [Edit: I suppose, unless you class miscarriages or abortions, but I think the point still holds because that still carries the same misconception of a whole “you” within the unborn cell cluster somewhere].