18 Quotes by David Benatar

One has to seek out pleasurable sensations, in the absence of which blandness comes naturally. The upshot of this is that we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life. There are moments, perhaps even periods, of satisfaction, but they occur against a background of dissatisfied striving.

To kill an animal in order to satisfy your nutritional desires, not your nutritional needs, that seems to me to be completely unacceptable.

It's entirely possible that self-awarebeings have more value than those thatare not self-aware, but that doesn't meanto say that those that are notself-aware have no value. And when we arespeaking about just desires - you want tosatisfy a desire to eat flesh - then youdon't have a good reason for overridingthe value that animal life has. Ithas all the value that animal seesin it. That life is all that animal hasand it cares a great deal about it, evenif not as much as you do about your life.

Those who take their own lives, especially when the quality of those lives is much less bad than those of the cancer patient or the concentration camp prisoner, fly in the face of the normal will to live. They are seen as abnormal, not merely in the statistical sense of being unusual, but of being defective, either morally or psychologically.

Life's big questions are big in the sense that they are momentuous. However, contrary to appearances, they are not big in the sense of being unanswerable. It is only that the answers are generally unpalatable. There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror.

Perhaps we would not be human if the quality of our lives were much better than it is. It does not follow that the quality of human life is good.

It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.

Some anti-natalist positions are founded on either a dislike of children or on the interests of adults who have greater freedom and resources if they do not have and rear children. My anti-natalist view is different. It arises, not from a dislike of children, but instead from a concern to avoid the suffering of potential children and the adults they would become, even if not having those children runs counter to the interests of those who would have them.

It is not only the ratio of pleasure to pain that determines the quality of a life, but also the sheer quantity of pain. Once a certain threshold of pain is passed, no amount of pleasure can compensate for it.