Is extended life a waste of time? Some writers say it will sap our motivation to use our time well and accomplish something. We’ll have so much time that time itself will be less valuable (a thing cannot have value when we have an infinite supply of it), and what we do with that time will lack value too. Nothing will matter, and extended life will lack value and meaning. Moreover, it will be harder, if not impossible, to develop certain virtues and other aspects of good moral character, for character develops under constraints, and extended life is unconstrained—it just goes on and on. Some of the writers who make these arguments speak of the “benefits” of death.
I’ll argue that the death benefits are either nonexistent or small enough to be easily outweighed by the benefits of extended life. However, although bioconservatives are wrong to think that extended life is a change for the worse, they are right to think extended life is not just a longer version of life as we know it. Life extension presents a new kind of human condition and a new relationship with death—and not just in the obvious sense of postponing death indefinitely.1 Apart from being longer, the new human condition is not obviously better or worse—just different.
Possible drawbacks to extended life have dominated the literature on life extension. In my view, they have received far too much attention, not just because the drawbacks are insignificant, but also because focusing so heavily on possible drawbacks sets up a lopsided discussion. I suspect that this happens in part because it’s easier to make interesting arguments that extended life is bad than it is to make interesting arguments that extended life is desirable. What can we say, really, except that extended life gives us more time for all the good things a life can contain? There are many more arguments against extended life than for it, and the sheer number (and the hydra-headed variety of ways to state them) can make it seem like there’s a fire somewhere under all that smoke. However, focusing excessively on these concerns can lead us to overestimate the downside to extended life and undervalue the upside.
So let me try to forestall a lopsided discussion by briefly summarizing the case for extended life. Extended life gives you more time to accomplish your life goals and contribute to the world. You would live long enough to see what the future brings and to benefit from the marvels of a more advanced science. You would live alongside the posterity you already care about. A longer life span might give you greater wisdom and maturity, and if enough of us undergo this, the world might be less violent, less prone to war. We might value the future more and take a long-range view when it comes to the environment and the welfare of people generations in the future. Finally, and much closer to our present concerns, life extension research may be the most effective way to combat age-related diseases—halt aging and you reduce the incidence of cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes and the suffering they cause.
Consider one possible extended life. Our heroine used life-extending technology at 23, effectively halting aging in her mid-20s. She finished grad school by her early 30s, earning advanced degrees in genetics and public policy, then began a successful career at the National Institutes of Health, where she helped draft legislation on gene therapy and health insurance. As the years went by, she married, raised children, and took sabbaticals every few years to travel on all five continents. She learned languages, experimented with new spiritual perspectives, published a volume of poems, twice ran for Congress, and served on her city council. In her 70s—while still looking and feeling young—she separated from her husband and entered a Buddhist convent for three years of meditation, where she developed a talent for ink-brush painting and took long hikes in the Japanese Alps. In her 90s, she took advantage of the newer enhancements made possible by applied neuroscience and achieved a higher IQ, a better memory, and easier access to altered states of consciousness through meditation. Using these enhancements she was able to reach new heights of meditative awareness and altered consciousness and then returned to university to study art history and religion. She again ran for Congress with no more luck than before. After a century or so, she made virtual-reality trips to a variety of undersea locales, other planets, and fictional worlds, living in some of them for months or years on end. She emerged into reality from time to time to check up on her investments. She entered into a variety of relationships with various genders at various times and experimented with polyamory. She lived long enough to see the world settle down and become largely free of poverty, war, and short-sighted environmental abuse. She is 400 years old and shows no visible signs of aging.
In that life, everything went right (aside from three fruitless runs at Congress). It could also, of course, go this way: She didn’t get into the grad school of her choice, had difficulty getting grants and getting published, lost decades in an abusive relationship that went nowhere, suffered the death of a child, broke her knee on a hike in the Japanese Alps, and the critics panned her book of poetry. The point is not that extended life is a blissful march from one triumph to the next or a living hell. It can go as well or as badly as any other life, and over enough time, it may well do both. The point is that it’s as promising as any other life, so it’s probably in your interest to try it out for a while. If it doesn’t work out, you can always terminate your life extension treatments and resume aging, so what have you got to lose by giving it a try?
According to some writers, quite a lot.
These writers are often called “bioconservatives,” for they oppose altering human nature and wish to conserve it. We’ll meet them later in this chapter (I cover them at greater length in chapter 12). Bioconservatives think we are better off without extended life and that a normal life span is much better for us. Before I present their arguments, let me note four general problems with their arguments.
First, extended life is not immortality. As we’ll see, some of these arguments were originally proposed in connection with immortality, where dying is impossible. They are meant to show that being immortal is not desirable. Whether or not that’s true, arguments about immortal life don’t transfer well to extended life, where we’re mortal and will die sooner or later from some cause of death unrelated to aging even if we don’t age at all. Death’s power to motivate us, force us to invest in things bigger than ourselves, develop courage, avoid boredom, appreciate the transient beauties of life, and so on may be muted, but in an extended life, it’s never gone.
Second, if we’re going to talk about immortality, then we should extend these points to all forms of immortality. If we do, however, we get some strange results. God (if he exists) is immortal; is he deficient in virtue? Does he procrastinate, lack motivation, exhibit narcissism and selfishness, or suffer boredom? Does his life lack meaning? But God is different; he’s perfect and responds differently to immortality than we would. Very well, let’s switch to human immortality: Suppose there’s an afterlife where we exist as immortals (a possibility I accept). Do we lose our virtue once we get there? Do we suffer boredom, procrastinate, become more selfish, fail to appreciate life, or find the afterlife meaningless? It is hard to say until we get there, but ask yourself this: Suppose you know no more about the afterlife than you do now, and you are given a choice: you can (a) have an afterlife (without knowing whether you will like it) or (b) cease to exist at the moment of death. Hesitation and anxiety are understandable here, but would you really give up an afterlife just to play it safe?
Third, we get odd results if we run these arguments backward. Suppose, for discussion, that these things are true of extended life. What, then, would happen if we had a significantly shorter life span? Imagine that a mutated virus gets loose and rewrites the DNA of every human on earth in a way that accelerates aging so that we naturally age in our 30s and die in our 40s. (If it helps, imagine that this happened tens of thousands of years ago, so we’ve long since adjusted to this.) Would we then be even more motivated to achieve something, less inclined to waste our years, more appreciative of what life has to offer than we are in a normal life span? Would we be more virtuous and have better moral character? Would we be less given to narcissism and selfishness than we are now? Do people who die early from disease, knowing in advance this will happen, have more meaningful lives than the rest of us? In short, if we naturally had 45-year life spans, would we have better lives and be better people? Probably not.
Fourth, pointing out drawbacks to extended life does not establish that there are no advantages to it or tell us whether the drawbacks outweigh the advantages. However, bioconservative writers focus only on the downside. This is the lopsided discussion I warned you about. We don’t make other important choices by focusing only the downside. You wouldn’t decide which house to buy just by looking at what’s wrong: a noisy street, tiny closets, or a roof that needs replacing. We evaluate other things by considering the whole picture, cons and pros, and we should do the same when it comes to extended life.
With that in mind, let’s consider the supposed drawbacks the bioconservatives warn against.
Leon Kass says having a normal life span with a scheduled death makes it easier to accept the fact that you will die one day.2 He may be right. Death may be harder to accept when it arrives randomly and there’s no stage of physical decline during which you can console yourself by thinking, “Nearly everyone dies by this stage, so I’ve done well to make it this far.” Death will be less feared as imminent but perhaps more feared as unexpected. Moreover, it will deprive of us far more time than it does now. All of this may well make death harder to accept.
This is possible. It’s also possible that if you live long enough, you may feel that you have accomplished and experienced enough for one life, that death no longer threatens your ability to have a full life, and thereby become less fearful of death. Moreover, this is another argument we don’t want to run backward: you would not shorten your life in order to make death even easier to accept, so it makes little sense to refuse to extend it for that reason. Refusing life extension to make death easier to accept is a bit like driving around without a seat belt so you can more easily accept the risk of becoming mangled in an accident. Being less prepared for death is a drawback we can live with.
However, I will concede a related drawback. I call it lucky streak anxiety. Right now we don’t worry very much about dying from non-age-related causes, for we’re more likely to die of age-related causes. As we get older, we have less time left, so an accidental death would not deprive us of very much time anyway. If, however, we die only from causes that are not age-related, and if death deprives us of centuries of life, then we might become far more anxious about this than we are now. It might become harder to go skiing, drive a car, or leave the house for fear of accidents.3 As the years go by, you might become more and more anxious about the unscheduled moment of your death, wondering how long your lucky streak will last. I’ve been told that some optimists who believe they’ll get life extension in the future travel around in Hummers: they don’t want to die in an accident before they can get life extension. They got the anxiety before they got the luck.
Some bioconservatives argue that having a normal life span with a scheduled death forces us to use our time well, make our limited years count, accomplish something, and take life seriously.4 Hans Jonas says, “Perhaps a nonnegotiable limit to our expected time is necessary for each of us as the incentive to number our days and make them count.” Kass claims that “to know and feel that one goes around only once, and that the deadline is not out of sight, is for many people the necessary spur to the pursuit of something worthwhile.” In an extended life you’ll dawdle, like a student with an extension who never finishes that term paper, and end up living a frivolous, aimless life.5 Something like this thought may lie behind Psalm 90, which asks God to “teach us to number our days so that we may get a heart of wisdom.” You’re more likely to make wise choices if you keep track of your remaining time so that you don’t waste it, and you can do that more easily if you know how much time you have left. If you extend your life, you’ll procrastinate on an epic scale.
Yes, you might waste time. Most of us already do. Then again, you might eventually get tired of wasting time and start using it well, or you might use each year less well but get more done overall because you have so many more years to work with. Or you might come to believe that accomplishing a lot is overrated and that the point of life is not to fill out a resume. Or you might be spurred to action by the knowledge that death is unscheduled and can come any time you cross the street. Besides, this drawback will not materialize in all lives to the same extent; much depends on your values and your drive. Finally, this is less a threat in moderately extended lives, where aging is merely slowed somewhat and you live for, say, a mere 150 years or so. We simply don’t know how big a problem procrastination might be, but there is reason to think it’s a problem we can handle. Turning down extended life in order to avoid procrastination is like avoiding college so that you never turn in a late assignment.
The procrastination concern commits every one of the four mistakes I attributed to bioconservatives in the previous section. First, even if this is an issue in an immortal life, extended life is not immortality. Second, this argument suggests that beings who are immortal (such as us, in an afterlife) will fail to get things done, and thus an afterlife is undesirable. Third, this is another argument we don’t want to run backward; we don’t want to shorten our lives in order to be more productive. Finally, this argument overlooks the advantages of having more time when it comes to getting things done.
Some thinkers claim that an endless life lacks the things that make life meaningful. In its extreme version, this amounts to saying that aging and a normal life span are necessary for the meaning of life. Kass asks, “Could life be serious or meaningful without the limit of mortality? Is not the limit on our time the ground of our taking life seriously and living it passionately?”6 Kass could be saying that living under the death sentence of normal aging motivates us to use our time well—a version of the procrastination objection. However, he might also mean what John Pauley says: “Our finitude is so deeply rooted in our being that it necessarily structures the meaningfulness of our lives. On the condition of an infinite amount of time in existence, nothing would matter for persons.”7 Nothing would matter, and extended life would lack value and meaning.
The meaning of life is a complex topic, but roughly speaking, to say that a life has meaning is to say that it is worth living—that it has value for the person who is living it. There is more to it than that, but for our purposes, we don’t need to define or characterize the kind of value necessary for a meaningful life. It will be enough to list some of the things we commonly think can make a life meaningful: creative activity, raising children and forming a family, intellectual development, working to make the world a better place, helping those in need, developing your talents, and overcoming challenges to gain something worthwhile, to name just a few.
With that in mind, perhaps Kass and Pauley are saying that most things become less valuable the more of them we have and that this is also true of the things that make life meaningful. We value silver partly because it’s scarce, and we would value great paintings less if every painter had the talent of a Picasso or a Rembrandt. The morning’s first cup of coffee is usually the best. Therefore, the activities, experiences, and accomplishments that have value and make life meaningful will have less value the more of them we have. The longer we live, the more of them we’ll have, and eventually we’ll have so many that they no longer have enough value to make our lives meaningful. For example, writing philosophy papers gives some meaning to my life, but it’s hard to imagine that they would provide as much meaning after I’ve written hundreds of them over a century or two. That, anyway, is what I think Kass and Pauley are suggesting.
To evaluate this argument we must distinguish two ways in which life might have meaning. First, it might have objective meaning. That is, a life might contain things that really do have value apart from whether or not we think they do. Second, a life might have subjective meaning. A life has subjective meaning when we find it meaningful; in other words, when we feel and believe that the things it contains have objective value. They engage and satisfy us, and we consider them worth doing or having. Obviously a life might have subjective meaning while lacking objective meaning. You might, for example, value fame and social standing far too highly and overlook other things of real value. A life might also have objective meaning without having subjective meaning. Perhaps you don’t think the objectively meaningful things in your life have value, or perhaps you do but you take no satisfaction in achieving or producing them. I’m inclined to say that a life can’t have full objective value unless it has subjective value as well. If you don’t enjoy or feel engaged by your life, then your life lacks at least one thing that’s objectively valuable: the quality of engaging and satisfying you.
With the objective/subjective distinction in mind, we can distinguish two questions about the meaning of extended life. First, does an extended life have less objective meaning over time? Second, does an extended life have less subjective meaning over time? As for objective meaning, it’s hard to see how creative work, making the world a better place, conserving and appreciating works of art, raising children and caring for friends, developing your talents, or anything else that might give a life objective value will be less valuable just because there is more of it over time. After all, the objective value of rearing your children is not diminished by the fact that so many other people are rearing children all around you or by the fact that thousands of generations have reared children before you. Making the world a better place does not become less valuable over time unless it becomes harder, over time, to achieve any further noticeable improvements because so much has been improved already, somewhat like trying to improve train service in Switzerland. If something of value does not become less valuable just because so many others are doing it and so many others have done it before you, then it won’t become objectively less valuable just because you have been doing it for hundreds of years. So far as objective meaning is concerned, extended life is no threat to the meaning of life.
Subjective meaning is another matter, and I suspect this is what Kass and Pauley are concerned about. Rearing children might always be highly meaningful in an objective sense, but it’s understandable that you might find it less satisfying and engaging after you’ve reared 137 of them over the last thousand years. It’s conceivable that even a great composer might grow bored with composing symphonies after 800 years, even if the quality and variety of his output never falters. It’s certainly not inevitable that you or he might grow tired of children or music, but it’s also certainly possible. Extended life might come to lack subjective meaning.
But notice that we’ve seen this issue before. This is the boredom issue in another guise. To say that you no longer find something engaging, satisfying, enjoyable, or meaningful, is a way of saying you’re bored with it. Conversely, to say that extended life might become boring is a way to say it might lose subjective meaning over time. When we discussed boredom, we were also discussing subjective meaning, and what I said about it in chapter 2 applies equally well here.
As we all know, we develop some aspects of character—virtues, if you will—partly by responding to challenges or experiences of various kinds. We develop courage by facing our fears, patience by enduring something we want to avoid, and compassion and empathy by coming to understand other people better. Some virtues involve dealing with (among other things) the risk or inevitability of death. For this reason, some thinkers believe that it would be harder to develop those virtues in an immortal life, where death is not even possible, let alone inevitable. Some writers have suggested that this is also true of extended life. Stephen G. Post says, “It is impossible to imagine our capacities for kindness and benevolence evolving without a dominating investment in the young rather than in ourselves.”8 Bill McKibben believes that “without the possibility of death, heroism would disappear.”9 Leon Kass believes that life extension makes it harder to acquire virtue:
To be mortal means that it is possible to give one’s life, not only in one moment, say, on the field of battle, but also in the many other ways in which we are able in action to rise above attachment to survival. . . . We free ourselves from fear, from bodily pleasures, or from attachments to wealth—all largely connected with survival—and in doing virtuous deeds overcome the weight of our neediness; yet for this nobility, vulnerability and mortality are the necessary conditions. The immortals cannot be noble.10
Notice the reference to immortality in an argument about extended life.
Martha Nussbaum has made the same argument at greater length, and although she limits her remarks to immortality (I won’t charge her with trying to extend it to extended life), we can see the argument more clearly in her version. She says that immortals cannot develop certain virtues, or at least not to the same extent that we do, for those virtues can’t be fully developed without facing danger and making sacrifices, especially in the face of death. There would be no virtue of courage, for “courage consists in a certain way of acting and reacting in the face of death and the risk of death. A being who cannot take that risk cannot have that virtue—or can have, as we in fact see with the gods and their attitude to pain, only a pale simulacrum of it.”11 According to Nussbaum, “That component of friendship, love, and love of country that consists in a willingness to give up one’s life for the other must be absent as well,” for as we see in Homer, “there is a kind of laxness and lightness in the relationships of the gods, a kind of playful unheroic quality that contrasts sharply with the more intense character of human love and friendship, and has, clearly, a different sort of value.”12 There would also be no virtue of moderation, for “moderation, as we know it, is a management of appetite in a being for whom excesses of certain sorts can bring illness and eventually death.” The same is true of the virtues of justice and generosity, for “political justice and private generosity are concerned with the allocation of resources like food, seen as necessary for life itself.” Without the threat of death, “distribution would not matter, or not matter in the same way and to the same extent.”13
Is this a sound argument? Let’s start by considering it in the context of immortality. Even there, this argument is weak. You can acquire virtues that require facing serious dangers and challenges even if you cannot die.14 Courage, for example, can be developed in the face of dangers that are not lethal. Many things would still be very difficult even in an endless, immortal life, such as making a marriage work (even harder, probably), writing good philosophy papers, learning to live without things you cannot get, and trying to surpass your previous achievements (or accepting the fact that you can’t).15 Some choices are still more important than others, and it matters when we make them. Some things can be achieved only once, and some have permanent consequences. Some goals are very difficult to achieve, and some may be impossible. Boredom itself, if it turns out to be a problem, could be one of the obstacles we must struggle to overcome or deal with.16
The argument is even weaker when it comes to extended life. Even for those who never age, death is still a threat on the battlefield, or while treating plague victims, or when rescuing children from a burning house. Most of the situations where you develop virtue by facing or risking death involve potential causes of death that are not age-related, so extending life will not affect their acquisition. Moreover, the virtues needed to deal with resource shortages and distribution—moderation, justice, and generosity—are just as important in an extended life. After all, famine is just as lethal for those who never age, and developing techniques of life extension does not guarantee we will have enough resources for everyone. The versions of this argument that are deployed against life extension exhibit three of the argumentative mistakes I mentioned earlier: extended life is not immortality, it is not clear that the argument works even for immortality, and we don’t want to run the argument backward (I’ll let you work it out this time).
In fairness, Nussbaum qualified her argument in ways that indicate she would not apply it to life extension. She says that “the closer we come to reimporting mortality—for example, by allowing the possibility of permanent unbearable pain, or crippling handicaps—the closer we come to a human sense of the virtues and their importance.” She also doesn’t claim that an immortal life would have no value—or even less value—just that we cannot imagine the kind of value an immortal life would have: “There would be other sources of value, no doubt, within such an existence. But its constitutive conditions would be so entirely different from ours that we cannot really imagine what they would be.” Finally, she admits that “the argument is incomplete. For it should, ultimately, investigate not only death, but other limits as well: the human being’s susceptibility to pain and disease, our need for food and drink, our proneness to accidents of various kinds, our birth into the world as vulnerable babies.”17 In short, it’s a mistake to extend Nussbaum’s argument to extended life, but it’s not Nussbaum’s mistake.
Kass has another concern about extended life and the development of character. He worries that we might become more selfish, more narcissistic, and less able to transcend our own lives by identifying with and caring about other people and posterity: “Simply to covet a prolonged life span for ourselves is both a sign and a cause of our failure to open ourselves to procreation and to any higher purpose. . . . For the desire to prolong youthfulness is not only a childish desire to eat one’s life and keep it; it is also an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity.”18
This argument probably doesn’t work for immortality, and it certainly doesn’t work for extended life. Suppose you live for centuries. You can still be concerned with the children you produced centuries ago (assuming they still show up for Christmas). You’ll still have a posterity, it’s just that you’ll live to see more of it (this may tend to increase, rather than undermine, your attachment to posterity). Even if your interest in those people wanes after 150 years, you might grow attached to other people along the way. As for causes, you can take them on even if you never age: living longer does not obviously undermine your motivation to preserve the natural environment, eradicate poverty, or promote the arts. Now run the argument backward: nature has already shown us where that leads; so far as I know, there is no evidence that people who know they will die decades ahead of schedule, such as victims of Huntington’s disease, are less selfish or more concerned with posterity than anyone else. Therefore, we have no evidence to believe that extending life will make us more selfish or less concerned with posterity.
But suppose, for the sake of argument, that the bioconservatives are right—that extended life will prevent us from developing virtue and character as fully as we would in a normal life span. Is that a reason to turn down extended life? I believe not. Even if I’m wrong and our moral character would suffer in an extended life, it’s not clear that we should refuse extended life. I’m not talking about the “should” of self-interest but about the moral value of life and the moral value of virtue. In other words, perhaps we should choose extended life even if that meant we would have less well-developed moral characters. (Well, maybe not if it meant becoming amoral and corrupt, but even arch bioconservatives don’t expect things to get that bad.) Many of us think that human life has intrinsic moral value and that every life is morally important. If so, then ending it sooner than we need to seems wrong, for ending it cancels something that has moral value. All else being equal, a more virtuous life probably has greater moral value than a less virtuous life, but giving up centuries of that life just to make it more virtuous is quite a trade-off. The total moral value of a much longer life with a somewhat lower level of virtue may exceed the total moral value of a much shorter life with a somewhat higher level of virtue. The gain in virtue would have to be staggering for that decision to make any sense.
Of course, it seems odd to say that the right thing to do is to be less virtuous in order to extend your life. But maybe that’s not so odd after all. Both your life and your interests have moral weight too, and when your life and interests are sufficiently threatened by the trade-offs needed to attain some high degree of virtue, perhaps the moral value of that life and those interests can outweigh the moral value of that extra margin of virtue. In that case, the moral value of that extra virtue is outweighed by the moral value of extra years of life.
In this chapter and chapter 2, we considered several alleged drawbacks to extended life: boredom, loss of personal identity over time, procrastination, time losing its value, and various difficulties in developing moral character. I argued that these drawbacks are either nonexistent or not serious enough to outweigh the value of additional life. We might summarize the point this way: Suppose that slowing or halting aging means that your existence would be characterized by all the alleged drawbacks—is that life really worse than death? It’s hard to understand how it could be, given other choices we already make. We put up with quite a lot before we decide death is preferable: serious chronic pain, extreme disability, loss of loved ones, loss of dignity, and other forms of suffering. Why, then, do so many people say they would turn down life extension if it were offered to them? Are we that concerned about boredom and our moral character?
Judging from my conversations with many people about life extension, some of this may stem from confusing life extension with conventional end-of-life care, with its feeding tubes, dementia, and bed sores. No one wants decades of life in that condition. For many others, much of their diffidence about extended life might be chalked up to the extreme novelty of slowing or halting aging—to instinctive personal conservatism. Most of us haven’t thought very much about this, and it’s easy to cling to the familiar. After all, life without aging is a far more radical modification of the human condition than we find even in most science fiction. Science fiction gives us starships that travel faster than light and machines that travel back in time but rarely gives us humans who do not age. It’s natural to hesitate when confronted with profound change.
However, as I mentioned in chapter 1, a lot of this is probably adaptive preference formation. The fox in Aesop’s fable adapted what he wanted to what he could get and convinced himself the grapes were not worth having. He formed an adaptive preference.19 Adaptive preferences may result from social conditioning and indoctrination, learning and experience, and false expectations, among other things.20 Whatever their cause, they seem to be a kind of unconscious psychological adjustment that reduces tension and frustration.21 This can be beneficial. Rejecting something we can’t get may be in our interest when we really can’t get it, for that makes us feel better about not having it. However, this can also be very dangerous, especially when we really can get the grapes—or at least have a legitimate right to them. For example, women subject to oppression and abuse often come to see such treatment as normal and to feel that they aren’t entitled to anything better.22 In situations like that, adaptive preferences are destructive and get in the way of justice.
Adaptive preferences cause trouble when we think about life extension. We want to know whether we would want life extension if we could get it. We can’t learn that by consulting attitudes that help us accept a normal life span, where we cannot avoid aging. Even now most of us (me included) will not live long enough to get life extension or won’t be able to afford it. In light of that, it’s more comfortable to believe life extension is not worth having than to believe we are missing out on something big. Unfortunately, that preference is a poor guide when we’re thinking about whether extended life is desirable for those who can get it. Even if it’s in our interest to believe that extended life is not worth having, we can’t think clearly about the merits of life extension research and development unless we undertake the painful task of setting those preferences aside. When we ask whether we would accept extended life if it were offered to us, we need to think and feel as if it really were an option, however uncomfortable that is to imagine.
In this section I want to set aside what critics of life extension think extended life would be like and offer my own view of this. Although I reject the bioconservative claims about extended life, they are right to think that it’s not just a longer version of life as we know it. Extended life changes our relationship with death in four ways and presents a new version of the human condition. The first two ways appear both in moderately extended lives, where we might live a few more decades at best, and in radically extended lives, where we might live for centuries. The third and fourth features appear only in radically extended lives:
Aging and dying from predictable, age-related causes have always been unavoidable, unalterable aspects of the human condition. However, for those who can afford life extension, normal aging and a normal life span will be elective, a matter of choice. This is true for the Will-nots as well as the Haves, and it’s true in both moderately and radically extended lives.
As I’ve pointed out before, the decision to slow or halt your aging will be a reversible choice. (This is an aspect of the fact that it is elective.) You can cease taking the necessary drugs or stem cell transplants or reverse the genetic engineering back to its natural state. If extending your life were an irreversible decision, you might want to play it safe and not take a chance on it, but because it’s reversible, you can give it a try and find out for yourself. Some questions should not be answered from armchairs.
The next feature of the new human condition arises mainly in radically extended lives. For this one, assume that life extension completely prevents, halts, or reverses aging so that people die only from causes that are not related to aging, such as violence, accidents, or disease. (The feature I’m going to discuss is also present in moderately extended lives, but only to a lesser extent, so I’ll focus on radically extended lives.)
As I said, life extension is not immortality. If you’re immortal, you cannot die. If you merely halt aging, you will die sooner or later, but not from age-related causes. You’ll die from something like an accident, violence, disease, or suicidal behavior. It’s impossible to avoid such things forever. This is obvious, but it’s worth mentioning, for as we saw, many writers who argue that extended life is bad for you use arguments originally developed to show that immortality is bad for you. Those arguments don’t transfer well to extended life.
However, because you’ll die only from causes that don’t correlate with age, death will not be more likely the older you get (at least in lives where we never age at all). As things now stand, even the young can foresee that death will be imminent for them in a few decades, and the elderly know it could come at any time. We have a sense of how much time is left. However, in radically extended life, the odds of death are the same at any time, and they never go up. Therefore, you will never know—even within very rough limits—how much time you have left. Death will be unscheduled and (assuming you haven’t caught a lethal disease or gone into battle) never imminent. Your life span will not be infinite (that’s immortality), but it will be indefinite. You will not count the years until death. You will count the years since birth.
Here is another feature that arises only in radically extended lives; it’s closely related to the fact that death is unscheduled. In an extended life, your life expectancy will always be the same. Because death is not more likely the older you are, your remaining expected years of life will always amount to several centuries, whether you’re 21 or 921. No matter how old you are, death will always deprive you of the same vast span of time, measured in centuries.
You might think that the odds go up over time even if there are no age-related causes of death. After all, how long can you avoid an accident on the highways? Surely your luck is running out after few centuries, so death must be more likely at age 800 than it was at 200. If you think about extended life that way, then you might think that having a life expectancy of 1,000 years (as you would if you never aged) means you will live until you are around 1,000 and then die, barring an untimely death earlier in life—or at least that death becomes more likely as you approach 1,000.
However, thinking this way is a mistake; it’s an example of the gambler’s fallacy. Suppose you have a coin that’s evenly balanced (a “fair coin”), someone tosses it, and the person tossing it is not manipulating it to make one side more likely to turn up than the other (she’s a “fair tosser”). In other words, imagine that the outcome of each coin toss is independent of the outcome of any other coin toss and that the odds of landing heads is 1 out of 2. Now suppose the coin lands heads four times in a row. Most of us think that because landing heads five times in a row is so unlikely, the odds that it will now land tails are better than 1 out of 2. However, that is false. The odds of landing heads are always 1 out of 2, assuming a fair coin and a fair tosser. The odds of the coin landing heads on the fifth toss are 1/2, and thus the odds of landing heads five times in a row (after the first four tosses) are 1/2, even though, at the outset, the odds of landing heads five times in a row is 1 out of 32.
Now consider life extension. Let’s say that death by disease, violence, or accidents are all accidents in a more general sense. Let’s also assume that the odds of such accidents do not vary from year to year (you’re a “fair coin”) and that you’re not doing anything to change those odds from year to year (you’re a “fair tosser”). If these conditions obtain, then your odds of death in any given year are always the same. If you live to be 1,000, you are just as likely to live to 1,001 as you were to live to 51 when you turned 50. It’s true that your odds of making it to a later age are always less than the odds of your making it to some earlier age; for example, your odds of making it from 900 to 950 are much better than your odds of making it from 900 to 1,800, but if you make it to 1,799, your odds at 1,799 of making it to 1,800 are the same as your odds at 900 of making it to 901. The average extended life span of 1,000 years is simply the average of individual life spans that have no set limit, determined by the accident rate and similar factors.
This means that no matter how old you are when you die, death deprives you of roughly 1,000 years (the life expectancy we have if we never age and we die only from causes unrelated to aging)—even if you are 1,000 when you die. Thus, your life expectancy in an extended life is always longer than it is in a nonextended life, all else being equal.
This may seem to make your death worse, for we tend to think that death is worse the more time you lose when you die. That’s why it’s worse to die at 20 than at 80; at 20, you lose 60 years, and at 80, you lose much less. If you completely halt aging, then death will deprive you of centuries—far more than we lose now. Thus, in one sense, life extension makes death worse. However, as Jeff McMahan has argued, when we measure how bad a death is, we not only consider how many years the person lost by dying at a given age but also consider how much that person gained while he or she was alive. As McMahan puts it, we discount the years we lose in death by the years we gained before dying.23 For example, a patient with progeria (a disease that mimics accelerated aging and kills people in their teens) and an elderly patient may both have only a year or two left to live. If we consider only the time lost, their deaths look equally bad. However, most of us think the progeria victim’s death is worse, so we must be considering something else too. McMahan says the progeria patient’s death is worse because it’s discounted by only 15 years of life, while the elderly patient’s death is better because it’s discounted by 70 years of life. The elderly patient gained far more during her life than the progeria victim gained during his simply because her life was so much longer (all else being equal).
Therefore, even though death deprives you of much more when you’re not aging, your death neither seems nor is as tragic as that vast deprivation would suggest. Suppose, for example, that you have life extension and die at 200. If the life expectancy estimate of 1,000 years is correct, and your remaining life expectancy is always 1,000 years, then you lost 1,000 years but gained 200 years. Now compare that with a normally aging person who dies at 20 when he could have lived to 100. The ratio—2 to 10—is the same in both cases, and the total deprivation is greater in the case of the extended life, yet my judgment is that the death of the 20-year-old is worse than the death of the 200-year-old. That suggests that not only do we discount a deprivation by previous gains, but we also weight the years gained much more heavily than the years lost. The 200 years gained in the extended life outweighs the 80 years lost in the nonextended case, but those 200 years also outweigh the 1,000 years lost in the extended life so decisively that we’re better off living an extended life even if death deprives us of so much more. Therefore, life extension does not make your death worse, even though you lose centuries when you die.
Is the new human condition an improvement on the old one or a step backward? It is hard to say until we live it. It will almost certainly require new ways of coping with time and mortality. The essence of the new human condition is that death is unscheduled and therefore not a hard limit.
In the existing human condition, death is a hard limit; we never get much more than a century of life and must arrange our lives within that schedule. We have a sense of how much sand is left in our hourglass, and we tend to see our lives mapped out against a timeline, almost as if watching ourselves moving along that timeline from birth to death, the future growing shorter and the past growing longer. In this human condition, life is a bit like a movie; we have a sense of the beginning, middle, and end, and even if the plot is a confused and chaotic mess, we know roughly when it will be over. If you know you’re likely to live as long as your 80s or a bit beyond, you can plan a career where you rise to seniority in your field, achieve what you believe you have the capacity to achieve, watch your children produce grandchildren, and watch your grandchildren grow up. We all know this movie, and many of us hope to star in it.
Some writers suggest that life has meaning when it has the kind of structure a fictional narrative has, where the parts of the story cohere into a single overarching theme and gain their significance from their relationship to that theme. For example, I started my professional life as an attorney, hated practicing law, and after 17 years of this, I managed to change professions and become a philosophy professor. I used to think my years in law practice were wasted years, but I now see some value in them. Learning to function competently in a profession that didn’t suit my temperament or values made me a broader person, gave me some skills I would never have acquired otherwise, bolstered my self-confidence, and made me appreciate the fact that we’re all capable of a far wider range of activities than we think we are. Those years now serve as an episode in a life story that (like many life stories) involves struggle to overcome setbacks, along with increased self-awareness and self-realization. My years in law practice gain significance and meaning from the place those years have in that larger narrative. (That’s not to say I would do it all again.)
So the meaning of a life often comes partly from its narrative structure. However, just because it can be meaningful in that way does not mean that it can be meaningful only in that way. We are used to such narrative structures because they fit the life span we are used to. In an extended life bounded only by unscheduled death, we might develop other structures or find that large units of time can be narratives in their own right. A very long life might contain many movies, as it were, or resemble a miniseries with no preconceived conclusion. Or we might find meaning not in the unfolding of a finite story but in something entirely different, such as deeper spiritual development. The finite story kind of meaning works for lives whose meaning is tied up with career and raising a family, but we might move past those concerns and find our meaning elsewhere, somewhere outside ourselves.
In the new human condition, we might try a series of careers or different ways of life with no intention of assembling it into a coherent story. Each of those phases might have meaning or value without being arranged into any larger pattern. Moreover, the new human condition may (paradoxically) require us to live more in the moment, despite having more time. Living without a timeline and without any sense of how much time is left may force us to value the present and not worry too much about the future, partly because the odds of death are always low (compared to what they are now in old age) and partly because we live long enough to accomplish a lot and therefore don’t fear that we’ll die before we experience life and achieve some major goals. It may be easier to accept death if we get enough time to correct the mistakes of our youth and accomplish what is important to us.
The new human condition will be very different from the old one, but once we get used to it, it might be better than the old one—and not just because it lasts longer.
Here are my main conclusions about the issues raised in this chapter, continuing the letter order from the conclusions listed at the end of chapter 2: