There is an old legend that King Midas for a long time hunted the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, in the forests, without catching him. When Silenus finally fell into the king’s hands, the king asked what was the best thing of all for men, the very finest. The daemon remained silent, motionless and inflexible, until, compelled by the king, he finally broke out into shrill laughter and said these words, “Suffering creature, born for a day, child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what would give you the greatest pleasure not to hear? The very best thing for you is totally unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second-best thing for you, however, is this — to die soon.”
-Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
A classic metaphysical question is “why is there something rather than nothing?” An interesting value question is “is it better to be nothing rather than something?” That is, is it better “not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing?”
Addressing this question requires determining the measure of value that should be used. One standard approach is to use the crude currencies of pleasure and pain. A somewhat more refined approach is to calculate in terms of happiness and unhappiness. Or one could simply go generic and use vague categories of positive value and negative value.
What also must be determined is the best moral theory to use. For the individual, a sensible theory would be ethical egoism, that what a person should do is what maximizes the positive value for them. On this view, it would be better if the person did not exist if their existence would generate more negative than positive value for them. It would be better if the person existed if their existence would generate more positive than negative value for them.
To make an argument in favor of never existing being better than existing, one likely approach is to make use of the problem of evil, such as the version developed by David Hume. When discussing this matter, Hume contends that everyone believes life is miserable and presents an impressive catalog of pains and evils. While he considers that pain is less frequent than pleasure, he notes that even if this is true, pain “is infinitely more violent and durable.” As such, Hume makes a strong case that the negative value of existence outweighs its positive value.
If it is true that the negative value outweighs the positive value, and better is measured in terms of maximizing value, then it would thus seem to be better to have never existed. After all, existence will result (if Hume is right) in more pain than pleasure. In contrast, non-existence will have no pain (and no pleasure) for a total of zero. Doing value math, since zero is greater than a negative value, never existing is better than existing.
But this sort of calculation might seem odd. After all, if the person does not exist, then their pleasure and pain will not balance to zero. Rather this sum would be an undefined value. It cannot be better for a person that they do not exist, since there would not be anyone for the nonexistence to be better for.
This can be countered by saying that this is just a semantic trick and nonexistence would be better than existence because of the relative balance of pleasure and pain. There is also another approach, which is to broaden the calculation from the individual to the world.
In this case, the question would not be about whether it would be better for an individual to exist, but whether a world with the individual would be better than a world without them. If a consequentialist approach is assumed, if it is assumed that pain and pleasure are the measure of value and if it is assumed that pain will outweigh pleasure in every life, then the world would be better if a person never existed. This is because the absence of an individual would reduce the overall pain. Given these assumptions, a world with no humans at all would be a better world. This could be extended to its logical conclusion: if suffering outweighs the pleasures in the case of all beings (Hume did argue that the suffering of all creatures exceeds their enjoyments), then it would be better that no feeling creatures existed. At this point, one might as well do away with existence altogether and have nothing. Thus, while it might not be known why there is something rather than nothing, this argument would seem to show that it would be better to have nothing rather than something.
Of course, this reasoning rests on many assumptions. It can be argued that the measure of value is not solely in terms of pleasures and pains. That is, even if life resulted in more pain than pleasure, the overall positive value could be greater than the negative value. For example, the creation of art and the development of knowledge could provide value that outweighs the pain. It could also be argued that the consequentialist approach is in error and that estimating the worth of life is not just a matter of tallying up the negative and positive. There are, after all, many other moral theories of the value of existence. It is also possible to dispute the claim that pain exceeds pleasure (or that unhappiness exceeds happiness).