The Ethics Discussion Group: Comparing Existence and Non-existence'

We discuss the question of whether it can ever be better (or worse) for a person to exist than not to exist. The dominant argument in the literature on this question is due to Broome; we call this the `Incoherence Argument'. The majority of the existing literature accepts something like the Incoherence Argument for a negative answer, or at least for the more limited claim that if the person in question does not in fact exist then her nonexistence cannot be better (or worse) for her than any state of aff airs in which she does exist. We argue that this consensus is based on naivete about semantics: on an implicit presupposition that a sentence's deep semantic structure must closely mirror its surface grammatical structure. This presupposition is well-known to be false in general, and there is (further) no clear reason to think it must be true in the present case. Once it is dropped, there is no general obstacle to claiming that existence can be better/worse than nonexistence (and vice versa). In particular, we suggest one coherent semantic framework (what we will call the `Lives Framework') that, if correct, would make room for the full range of existence/nonexistence comparisons.