It prevents a coming biotech revolution that’ll eliminate suffering
David Pearce 17, Co-Founder of the World Transhumanist Association, Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, “Review of BETTER NEVER TO HAVE BEEN”, https://www.abolitionist.com/anti-natalism.html
Yet how should rational moral agents behave if - hypothetically - some variant of Benatar's diagnosis as distinct from policy prescription was correct?
In an era of biotechnology and unnatural selection, an alternative to anti-natalism is the world-wide adoption of genetically preprogrammed well-being. For there needn't be selection pressure against gradients of lifelong adaptive bliss - i.e. a radical recalibration of the hedonic treadmill. The only way to eradicate the biological substrates of unpleasantness - and thereby prevent the harm of Darwinian existence - is not vainly to champion life's eradication, but instead to ensure that sentient life is inherently blissful. More specifically, the impending reproductive revolution of designer babies is likely to witness intense selection pressure against the harmfulness-promoting adaptations that increased the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment of adaptation. If we use biotechnology wisely, then gradients of genetically preprogrammed well-being can make all sentient life subjectively rewarding - indeed wonderful beyond the human imagination. So in common with "positive" utilitarians, the "negative" utilitarian would do better to argue for genetically preprogrammed superhappiness.
The negative utilitarian ethicist might dismiss this alluring prospect as pie-in-the-sky. Like negative utilitarianism itself - and Benatar's argument that sentient existence entails intrinsic harm to its victims - the superhappiness solution invites ridicule, ad hominem attacks, and incredulity. But a cruelty-free world is technically feasible. And unlike anti-natalism, there are strong sociological and technical grounds to predict that the application of biotechnology will wipe out the substrates of suffering for good.
Homo sapiens is the only species capable systematically of preventing harm to the rest of the living world - despite the frightfulness of what we do to non-human animals today. So it is vital that humans survive in the face of existential risks to bring the abolitionist project to completion. Presumably its implementation will entail the use of depot-contraception, ecosystem redesign, CRISPR-based gene drives, and rewriting the vertebrate genome - a formidable but not impossible challenge.
If we succeed, then coming into existence will be intrinsically good.