The Right Not to Exist?
“[...] once the child is grown, he may look back and feel, ‘I would have preferred nonexistence.’”
In this letter to Since You Asked by Cary Tennis (Warning: Some foul language), a couple considers it wrong to have a child because any harm that comes to the child would then be their fault and the child may end up preferring non-existence. I doubt that they are actually trying to make (or looking for) a moral argument, but we do encounter something of the same kind of thought in a broader sense, namely, “Is it always better for a person to exist than not to exist?”
To the ancient (and Christian) mind, this question is absolutely absurd because existence is good. This is a self-evident principle, and it used to be recognized as such. Today, we’re a little more confused, but still no one can really deny that it is better to be than not to be. After all, how can not-being be good for the thing that is not? Existence is good, plain and simple.
In fact, existence is participation in God’s Being, which He is and which is his Goodness. God is, and God is Good. As they say, God’s essence and existence are identical. So, for God what he is and that he is are the same thing. Being itself cannot not be.
For creatures, however, essence and existence are not identical. I can to some degree talk about what a unicorn is, but there are, in fact, no unicorns. Still, a tree can exist at one time and then exist no more at another time. Since the existence of creatures is a priori dependent on God, he himself maintains their existence. Creatures have no existence on their own; it is always God who keeps them existing. This brings us back to the point: existence is always good. Being is good. Evil, in fact, is a lack of being. It’s the lack of a good that should be present, a corruption in the order of good beings.
Perhaps many of us are “still thinking that evil is a substance,” as Augustine says. Perhaps not quite. I think the problem is deeper. At least a dualist or a Manichee thinks that good and evil are real things. The question from Since You Asked betrays a graver fault: a doubt about the quality of goodness as a reality. In fact, the question is only following relativism to its quasi-logical conclusion. If I decide what is good and bad for me, then I can’t decide what is good and bad for others. If I can’t decide what is good and bad for others, then if another decides that it’s bad that he exists, it would be blameworthy for me to have contributed to his existence.
The question is perhaps a species of man’s basic question about morality: “What do I have to do?” This question depends on the answers of two others: “Where am I?” and “Where am I going?” In terms of morality, these questions are basically anthropological: What am I? What is my end? How do I achieve my end? These questions presume the goodness of existence. It makes no sense for the end (purpose, goal) of human existence to be in any way non-existence. This would not be an end at all because it would, in fact, be the annihilation of the I.
If being ain’t good, ain’t nothing good.
