I mean the idea that we should decide between competing sets of premises on their long-term practical prospects of becoming widely accepted is itself a premise we can consider. And having adopted that premise, we can use it to conclude that Benatar's conclusion is false. Which implies that the negation of that premise is one of Benatar's premises, even if not one he ever made explicit. And thus, we've actually learn something about the assumptions underlying Benatar's position.

> I don't entirely agree with his premises and it's easy to counterbalance them if you are so incline - you can take a religious angle and argue than eternal salvation counterbalance pain during life or a progressist one and argue that the suffering of the current generation are offset by their absence for the future ones - but I still find them valuable.

Maybe there are other ways of counterbalancing them. Population ethics seems to assume all relevant goods are fungible. If some of the relevant goods are non-fungible, the whole enterprise would turn out to be based on a false assumption.

> From my point of view, it definitely is a valuable contribution to the philosophy of ethics.

I never said his contribution was worthless. Sometimes, a person can make a valuable contribution even while being wrong–e.g. by helping to clarify the space of possible arguments, the lay of the land.

> I'm curious about how you propose we discuss and study ethics if you don't think it can be based on exposed principles.

Can we axiomatise history? Can we axiomatise psychotherapy? In both cases, I think the subject is inherently unaxiomatisable. But that doesn't mean it is impossible to approach rationally. We just have to accept that rigorous formal methods of deduction, which the term "axiomatisation" implies, while a perfectly appropriate methodology for some disciplines, has for others at best occasional applicability