David Benatar

A South African philosopher at the University of Cape Town who built a rigorous, widely debated case for antinatalism — the view, argued in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been, that bringing a sentient being into existence is always a harm. His asymmetry argument, holding that the absence of pain is good even when no one benefits from it while the absence of pleasure is only bad if someone is deprived of it, forced mainstream ethicists to take a position most had dismissed as fringe seriously enough to argue against it.