Dismantling the Asymmetry Argument

David Benatar claims that even for the merely possible people with heavenly good lives marred by a single minor harm (however minor), it is better never to come into existence. So much the more, he claims, it would have been better for actual people. In this article, I firstly try but ultimately fail to make a coherent sense of that claim. I call that claim the Betterness Thesis (BT) – for each human person, it would have been better had she never come into existence. Based on his own hints, I propose to replace BT, whenever needed, with the Regret Thesis (RT) – for each human person, it would be rational to be sorry for herself because of her coming into existence. Subsequently, I lay open and agree with Benatar’s four claims constituting that which he calls the basic asymmetry between harms and benefits. But in his transition from the asymmetry to BT, I find some dubious assumptions. I find them dubious regardless of whether BT is replaced with RT. I conclude by recapitulating why RT is probably false and so does not follow from the asymme-try. I cannot say that about BT as I do not quite know what BT means.