David Benatar, with whose book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence Peter Singer here interacts, thinks the world would be better off without people. “Benatar claims, inter alia, that deliberate procreation is immoral; that abortion is morally mandatory if possible before approximately 30 weeks of gestation; and that the morally optimal size of the human population is ZERO,” writes one Amazon.com reviewer who calls the book “moral philosophy at its best.”

Singer has been well known as a leading anti-human philosopher for decades; now he has even more brutal company. As he writes in his review of Benatar’s book, Singer won’t go quite so far as Benatar. But Benatar goes all the way. There should be no humans.

One could respond by suggesting that if to come into existence is to do harm, then Benatar shouldn’t have come into existence, and the world would be better off without him spewing such “philosophy” (really thanatophilia, love not of philosophy but of death). But to do so would be to commit the same elementary logical fallacy Benatar, a philosopher who should have known better, commits: hasty generalization. Does everyone who comes into existence do harm? Yes. But many, perhaps all, who come into existence also do good. Benatar’s having chosen to live long enough to write his book suggests that he, at least, thought he could do more good than harm by not committing suicide first.

But this argument, while it reveals the self-refuting nature of Benatar’s (and Singer’s) reasoning, has the same weakness theirs has: it is fundamentally utilitarian, and utilitarianism is fundamentally irrational because it cannot justify any end and therefore cannot justify any means. Without divine revelation to give us both epistemic and ethical presuppositions, it is impossible to justify any conclusions at all.

And divine revelation tells us two things (among others) relevant to this issue: (1) Human beings are the image of God and therefore good and sacred in themselves, before reference to anything they do or don’t do. (2) The proper ends of human existence are not pleasure (which Benatar and Singer argue can’t be assured for anyone born, while pain can be assured) but virtue and the glory of God. “All those who hate me love death,” says Wisdom in Proverbs 8:36. Singer and Benatar hate Wisdom—not human wisdom, but divine Wisdom (1 Corinthians 1;18-24); it’s no surprise, therefore, that they love death.