On Existence, Non-Existence, and the Fallacies of Anti-Natalism

This paper provides a metaphysical, logical, and axiological critique of contemporary anti-natalism, focusing on David Benatar’s asymmetry argument and the rhetoric of “forced existence.“. It argues, first, that Benatar’s asymmetry rests on a fundamental category mistake: the illicit reification of non-existence as a value-bearing state. Non-existence, construed as pure privation, cannot instantiate value predicates, participate in the Good, or serve as a welfare-subject, whether on an Aristotelian, moderate realist, or even Platonic account of value-properties. Second, the paper shows that the asymmetry equivocates between person-affecting and impersonal evaluative standards, licensing impersonal value to secure the positivity of pain-absence while invoking a person-affecting deprivation condition to block the negativity of pleasure-absence. This equivocation is not resolved but merely relocated by recasting the argument in possible-worlds terms. Third, the paper exposes a logical conflation between contraries and contradictories within Benatar’s four premises, showing that a consistent application of either evaluative standard restores symmetry or yields incomparability rather than a preference for non-existence. Finally, the consent-based antinatalist argument is shown to be structurally incoherent: prior consent to existence is not merely practically unavailable but metaphysically impossible, since the normative apparatus of rights and obligations presupposes co-existent parties within a shared normative order, a condition that cannot be satisfied prior to the procreative act itself. The paper situates these objections in relation to existing critiques by Boonin, McMahan, and others, and argues that its central contribution lies in grounding the impossibility of prior consent in a positive ontological account of what normative relations require, rather than merely noting the absence of a welfare-subject.