How is the lack of existence a punishment?
(1) You’re confusing “killing” with “never having been alive/created.” The Holocaust didn’t cause millions of people’s “lack of existence.” It caused their extermination. Murder is evil.
(2) Life is good, innately.
(2a) The suicide rate is incredibly low in comparison to the total size of the population, and most suicides are done in fits of despair (suggesting that, had cooler heads prevailed, even many of the successful suicides may not have done it, were they to calmly and logically examine the balance of their lives). It’s strong evidence that people realize this on some level.
(2b) Christians also have **Biblical support **as early as Genesis 1: God created us and saw that it was good. So the one actor competent of weighing the sum total of our existence pro v. con says it’s worth it.
(2c) Christians have **theological support **for this, as well. We believe in an all-good Creator. As such, He wouldn’t create something bad. An all-good God’s mere act of creating suggests that existence is better than non-existence. As a second theological support, the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God suggests that existence is better than non-existence: otherwise, He wouldn’t exist.
(2d) **Natural law **recognizes the natural goodness of existence in its condemnation of murder: there’s a reason that civilizations worldwide had strong prohibitions (or at least regulations) regarding murder, before we ever had anything like globalization.
(2e) **Evolution **recognizes this: it’s virtually impossible for an individual to kill itself (without outside aid). Try and stop breathing, and once you slip into unconsciousness, your body will save you. Try and drown yourself in shallow water, and your reflexes will kick in to try to save you. You get the idea. Survival of the fittest is only logical from the starting point that existence is preferable to non-existence, and that even the smallest organisms act accordingly.
If you accept any or all of the premises in 2, then depriving someone of existence (even if you don’t want to acknowledge it as murder) violates the natural law as well as the Moral Law, and imposes our will upon God. (God thinks it’s a good idea to have a baby, we think we know better).
Some people’s lives have far more suffering than good.
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*(3) This isn’t really true. People tend to only see the sufferings in others (particularly physical abnormalities). A wise uncle of mine who has diabetes told me once he didn’t want to be described by his disease: he refused the label “diabetic,” because it didn’t really describe him as a person at all. I think he’s on to something pretty important.
This may seem abstract, but it’s critical. We see people, and think, “oh, how hard it must be to have x condition,” but we typically don’t see all the private beauty in their life: their family connections, their friendships, their relationship to God, etc.
As a result, people with disabilities statistically rate their quality of life much higher than their non-disabled peers predict.
(4) I really like this ad to sum up my point:
feministsforlife.org/img/cop/ads_PDF/03ToMyFace.pdf
(5) It is intensely arrogant to presume to know the value or worth of another person’s life, particularly a person in a vastly different social location, and particularly when you know about only one facet of a person (some specific gene, or perhaps their mother’s socioeconomic status).
I was born into a lower-middle class family, and was one of six. My half-sister was born to my mother when she was 18. Would we have been better off if you’d ‘caused us not to exist’? You can know next to nothing about how a person’s life is going to turn out by the information available at (or prior to) birth.
(6) This view assumes a static world: it denies social mobility, and the advancement of medicine. So even if we accepted your faulty premise, (effectively, that the poor and disabled’s lives aren’t worth living in the status quo), it still wouldn’t prove your eugenic conclusions. Think about the generation born with polio at the time of Salk. Prior to their birth, their lives may have looked bleak (people who write off the disabled tend to forget about people like FDR), but Salk’s cures meant they could live their lives able-bodied.
(7) This line of argumentation is terribly dangerous (which is why I may have been a bit sharp in my response): I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is what Hitler used to justify exterminating the handicapped, as well as forcing “undesirables” to have abortions. (He actually legalized abortion, but only for non-Aryans, and for just this purpose: there’s discussion on this, and the connection with Sanger, on other threads). This eugenics reasoning is what caused liberalism to devour itself. Whereas liberalism once meant caring for the poor, now it means telling the poor that they should be dead.*
