Agriculture Reference
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Then, I will explore the most important challenge to that view which
claims that existence and non-existence are incommensurable. One way
of comparing existence to non-existence is to put the welfare level in
case of non-existence at the zero level. Those who want to claim that
nonexistence counts as zero welfare, rather than no welfare, have to
point out that such a comparison is possible and what it entails. They
also have to point out for whom non-existence has zero welfare. This
cannot be done without violating some conceptual assumptions about
what 'better off' and 'worse off' mean. I will conclude that existence
cannot make a being better or worse off than non-existence.
2 The view that coming into existence
can make a being better or worse off
If we talk about being made better off, we usually compare two situa-
tions. Consider the question whether accepting a certain job offer made
me better off. In order to answer this question, one may compare my
welfare increase that is due to accepting the offer with my welfare before
I did so. Alternatively, one could compare my welfare after having
accepted the offer with what my welfare would otherwise have been,
had I not accepted the offer. How does this example translate to the
question whether coming into existence can benefit a being? The state
of affairs in which the being exists would need to be compared with the
state of affairs before the being existed. Alternatively, the state of affairs
in which the being exists would need to be compared with the counter-
factual state of affairs in which the being does not exist. More precisely,
we need to compare these states of affairs in terms of what is better for
the animal . We need to compare them in terms of prudential value.
A complication with the comparison of a certain state of affairs with
what would otherwise have happened - i.e. the so-called counterfac-
tual comparison - is that it may be hard to guess what would otherwise
have happened. For instance, it can be hard to guess what would have
happened had I not accepted the job offer. When we compare existence
with non-existence, this problem does not arise. If we want to compare
the animal's coming into existence with the counterfactual situation,
we recognize that had the animal not come into existence, it would
not exist at all. So, in this particular case, there is really no doubt of
what the counterfactual situation would have been. This is an advan-
tage. However, comparisons that involve non-existence raise particular
problems, as we will see. The major problem is that we have to compare
two states of affairs in terms of prudential value, i.e. in terms of their
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