Most people share the following intuitions:
We have a moral duty not to bring a suffering child into existence, but we have no corresponding moral duty to bring a happy child into existence.
When we hear about people suffering in distant places, we are sad for those people that do exist there; when we hear about an uninhabited island (or land, or planet), we are not sad for the happy people that donβt exist there.
These intuitions point to the axiological asymmetry β a fundamental difference in the way most humans value the absence and presence of pleasures and pains.
Most people intuit that experienced pains are a bad thing, while experienced pleasures are a good thing. Yet they also intuit the absence of pains as good (even when no one exists that would otherwise not experience that pain), while the absence of pleasures as merely not bad (so long as no one exists to be otherwise deprived of that absent pleasure).
Although the asymmetry is widely intuited, the implications are among the most counter-intuitive Iβve ever seen. Basically, this asymmetry implies that:
Coming into existence is always a harm relative to never-existence
Procreation is wrong
It is wrong not to abort fetuses in the earlier stages of pregnancy
It would be better if, as a result of there being no new people, humanity became extinct.
The book is an examination (and defense) of these counter-intuitive implications.