I think you have a point with animals, but I don’t think the balance of human experience means that non-existence would be better than the status quo.
Will talks about this quite a lot in ch. 9 of WWOTF (“Will the future be good or bad?”). He writes:
If we assume, following the small UK survey, that the neutral point on a life satisfaction scale is between 1 and 2, then 5 to 10 percent of the global population have lives of negative wellbeing. In the World Values Survey, 17 percent of respondents classed themselves as unhappy. In the smaller skipping study of people in rich countries, 12 percent of people had days where their bad experiences outweighed the good. And in the study that I commissioned, fewer than 10 percent of people in both the United States and India said they wished they had never been born, and a little over 10 percent said that their lives contained more suffering than happiness.
So, I would guess that on either preference-satisfactionism or hedonism, most people have lives with positive wellbeing. If I were given the option, on my deathbed, to be reincarnated as a randomly selected person alive today, I would choose to do so.
And, of course, for people at least, things are getting better over time. I think animal suffering complicates this a lot.
I think you have a point with animals, but I don’t think the balance of human experience means that non-existence would be better than the status quo.
Will talks about this quite a lot in ch. 9 of WWOTF (“Will the future be good or bad?”). He writes:
And, of course, for people at least, things are getting better over time. I think animal suffering complicates this a lot.