There are books that one should never give to depressed friends. David Benatar’s “The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions” is one. Although Mr. Benatar doesn’t want to be one ...

It is hard to overestimate the impact of the French student uprisings of May 1968 on the philosophy of the so-called post-68 generation, that group of politically awakened academics that included, ...

“Life is misery, and it would have been better not to have been born. But who is so lucky? Scarcely one in a hundred thousand.” This Jewish witticism, (first quoted by Freud,) is the epigraph of David ...

David Benatar is probably the most important philosophical pessimist active today. He has presented many original and challenging arguments for life's badness. In this and some ensuing posts I’ll ...

Based on: Cutting to the Core: Exploring the Ethics of Contested Surgeries Edited by David Benatar. 236 pp. Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. $75 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). 0-7425-5000-1(cloth); 0 ...