In chapter 9, I argued that Promotion produces the most welfare, that a world where life extension is available will probably have greater net welfare than a world where it is not. However, there’s more to moral theory than welfare. There are also rights, and sometimes maximizing welfare involves violating rights. In this chapter, I will focus on three rights: a right to equality, a right to self-determination, and a right against harm. The members of each of the three groups—Haves, Will-nots, and Have-nots—have all three of these rights. However, as we’ll see, not all of those rights are relevant here.
In this chapter, I will argue for three conclusions. First, the right to equality does not weigh in favor of either Inhibition or Promotion. The right to equality must be respected, but the importance of equality is not a reason against Promotion even if we have good reason to believe the right to equality will be violated once life extension becomes available. Second, the right to self-determination does not weigh in favor of either Inhibition or Promotion, for neither policy violates the right to self-determination of any of our three groups: Haves, Have-nots, or Will-nots. Thus, the right to equality and the right to self-determination are not relevant here. Third, the right against harm is relevant, and it favors Inhibition. Promotion will harm the Have-nots and Will-nots, but—I will argue—Inhibition will not harm the Haves. Inhibition prevents the Haves from becoming better off, but that’s not a harm.
We’ll begin with a brief overview of rights and their relation to welfare.
Sometimes maximizing welfare seems unjust. For example, we might maximize welfare by killing one healthy innocent person and taking his organs to save three other people who will die without them (imagine they’re too low on the waiting list to get a transplant any other way), thereby killing one person to save three others. Almost no one believes that’s morally right. To take another example, we might maximize welfare by passing a law that says all people ages 20–22 must perform two years of “national service” for free (room and board provided by the government), during which they must work on public construction projects, thereby saving everyone over 22 a lot of money. Such a law strikes me as unjust.
So there is more to morality than simply maximizing welfare. Many philosophers express this idea by claiming that there are moral rights. When we say that people have a right to something, we’re saying (whether we realize it or not) that they have an interest or choice of such importance that we should give that interest or choice special priority and protection. Moreover, we give the things the right protects greater moral weight than the moral value those things would have if we considered them merely as good or bad consequences apart from their relation to some right. For example, most of us believe that people have a moral right to free speech, even if the speech is false, disturbing, or harmful (within limits and with exceptions, such as shouting “Fire!” in a theater, passing military secrets to the enemy, slandering others, and so on). We believe, at least implicitly, that the value of free speech, both to the speaker and to others, is usually morally more important than the harm such speech might cause.1 In addition, most (perhaps all) rights have corresponding duties. If, for example, you have a right not to be harmed, others have a duty not to harm you. As a result, sometimes we have a duty to do something that conflicts with maximizing welfare.
So morality requires that we maximize welfare so long as we don’t violate rights by doing so. However, we don’t want to say that we can never maximize welfare at the expense of violating a right. Consider an example involving the right to self-determination—roughly speaking, a right to make decisions about our own lives. Suppose that one person in the entire human race has a genetic mutation that produces a protein that makes her immune system twice as effective as normal. Leaving aside what’s legally possible, wouldn’t morality require (or at least permit) taking a small sample of her blood so we can clone the blood cells and produce a serum that saves hundreds of millions of lives, even if she adamantly refuses to consent to this? You may be an absolutist about rights, but I suspect most of us would say that maximizing welfare takes priority over respecting her right in that case. In my judgment, morality requires taking a blood sample from her by force, if necessary. Cases where morality requires maximizing welfare even at the expense of violating rights should be rare, but it’s not plausible to say there are none at all. That’s why our theory allows us to maximize welfare by violating a right when the amount of welfare at stake is so large that it outweighs the right. (Later on, we’ll talk about how to determine when welfare outweighs a right.)
To sum up, our moral theory requires us to maximize welfare except when doing so violates a right, unless the amount of welfare at stake is so large that it outweighs the moral importance of the interest protected by that right. For the rest of this chapter, we’ll ask whose rights, and which ones, are violated when we maximize welfare by making life extension available.
I argued in chapter 8 that people have a right to equality. I also argued that unequal access to life extension is unjust and that the Have-nots have a right to subsidized life extension. Of course, the Haves and the Will-nots have a right to equality too; everyone does. However, in this section, I’ll argue that neither making life extension available nor failing to do so violates anyone’s right to equality. To put this another way, the right to equality does not count for or against making life extension available. To see why, let’s briefly review some arguments from chapter 8. After describing a world where some get life extension and some do not, I argued that the big question is not whether such a world is morally unattractive. The big question is what to do about it.
I made three egalitarian arguments that unequal access to life extension is unjust. First, it violates the right of equal opportunity. Second, it magnifies other unjust inequalities. Third, most theories of equality (and some alternatives to egalitarianism that have egalitarian implications, like prioritarianism and sufficientarianism) imply that this particular inequality is unjust. Then I argued that Haves have a duty to subsidize life extension for the Have-nots because it’s wrong to do nothing about an unjust inequality and it’s also wrong to deal with inequality by practicing collective suttee (also known as leveling-down) by denying extended life to everyone. The only other thing Haves can do about it is to subsidize as many Have-nots as they can. Therefore, Haves have a duty to do just that. Because they have that duty, the Have-nots have a right to equality—in practice, a right to such a subsidy.
Then I addressed this question: What if we can be pretty sure that many or even most Haves will not subsidize life extension for the Have-nots, either because they’re too stingy or because it’s not fiscally possible for the Haves to provide life extension to all the Have-nots? Is that a reason for Inhibition? I gave four reasons why it’s not. I’ll briefly summarize them again here.
The first and primary reason why an expectation of inequality is not a reason for Inhibition concerns equality and leveling-down. As I argued in section 8.3, Inhibition is a kind of leveling-down, and equality doesn’t require leveling-down. There’s a virtually universal consensus to the effect that equality doesn’t require leveling-down, and egalitarian philosophers acknowledge this. Instead of arguing that leveling-down is morally acceptable, they argue that egalitarianism doesn’t require leveling-down (or that some moral principle forbids it and overrides egalitarianism), thereby implicitly agreeing that leveling-down is wrong. Because the right to equality does not require leveling-down to correct breaches of that right, it also doesn’t require leveling-down to prevent breaches of that right. Therefore, even a high probability that Have-not rights to equality will be violated is not a reason for Inhibition. It is a reason for doing other things about the inequality, but stifling the technology that we anticipate will be distributed unequally is not one of them.
Second, some Haves are generous and will subsidize life extension for the Have-nots; inhibiting life extension prevents stingy Haves from breaching their duty of equality but also prevents generous Haves from performing that duty, so it prevents breaches at the cost of preventing performances too. Inhibiting the development of life extension so that stingy Haves will not be in a position to breach their duty to subsidize life extension for the Have-nots is like outlawing medical care because stingy Haves refuse to provide it to Have-nots. There is something to be said for punishing those Haves, but preventing the means of performing the duty does not prevent breaches of the duty except in a narrow, technical sense.
Third, we cannot justify this as punishment for stingy Haves, for we can’t punish someone for something they haven’t done (it’s in the nature of Inhibition that this punishment would preclude the crime). Moreover, some Haves are not stingy; we can assume that some will donate money to funds for Have-nots and that some governments will subsidize life extension for at least some Have-nots. Preventing life extension from being developed does more than punish stingy Haves; it also punishes generous Haves and the Have-nots those generous Haves would otherwise help.
Fourth, inhibiting the development of life extension delays the day when life extension may be cheap enough and the world’s economy prosperous enough to provide life extension to everyone, thereby hurting still more Have-nots.
So the right to equality is not a reason for Inhibition. However, it’s not a reason for Promotion either. The right to equality tells us that if the Haves get access, they must try to provide access to the Have-nots too. It does not tell us that we must develop life extension so that we can then distribute life extension equally any more than the right to equality requires that we develop faster speeds for internet access so that we will then be able to provide equal access to that technology. There are other good reasons for developing something like that, but doing this in order to create a new opportunity for equal distribution is not one of them. Therefore, the right to equality does not count for or against Promotion, and we can set it aside.
It’s commonly agreed that people have a right to self-determination—roughly speaking, a right to run your own life as you see fit.2 The right to self-determination is not about what is good for you or even about what you think is good for you; it’s a right to determine the nature and course of your own life however you choose, for whatever reasons strike you as good ones. Usually, your reasons concern your own welfare, and you are usually right about what promotes your welfare, but your right to determine your own life is not contingent on your being right about what promotes your welfare or even contingent on you trying to promote your welfare.
There are some qualifications and refinements. Your efforts at self-determination may not harm others. There’s a boundary—hard to draw in practice—between what, to put it crudely, falls within your life and what does not. It is generally thought that you can exercise this right only if you are competent to do so and that others may interfere with your decisions if you are not competent or if your decision is not well-informed (such that your action won’t achieve what you think it will).
The most important refinement for our purposes is that the right to self-determination is generally thought to be a negative right (a right against interference), not a positive right (a right to assistance). The right to self-determination requires us to respect the self-determining choices of others by refraining from interfering with them, but it typically does not require us to help them get what they want. If the right to self-determination were a positive right, we would all have the right to demand help from anyone else whenever we need it to determine our own lives as we wish, and they would have the right to demand the same from us. Such an expansive right to self-determination would ultimately undermine self-determination. This is not to say that we never have a positive duty to help others determine their lives, only that such a duty arises only in special cases, including but not limited to these: when we agreed to help one another or made some other commitment to do so or when we have a special responsibility for someone else (as parents do for their children).
Thus, the Haves, Have-nots, and Will-nots all have a right to determine the course of their own lives, subject to those qualifications. The Haves want to extend their own lives, the Will-nots (or some of them, anyway) want to live in a world without life extension, some Have-nots will want access to life extension, and other Have-nots will want life extension to go away. It seems like the right to self-determination pulls in two directions; to some extent, it’s a reason for Promotion and, to some extent, it’s a reason for Inhibition. However, it only seems that way. As it happens, neither Promotion nor Inhibition violates the rights of self-determination of any of these three groups.
Let’s start with those who prefer to live in a world where life extension does not exist: the Will-nots and some Have-nots. Does the right to self-determination cover that preference? The right to self-determination is not a right to have what you want; it’s a right to make decisions and take actions about matters that are, roughly speaking, your own business and no one else’s. A preference for living in one kind of world rather than another is not an action or decision of that kind. It’s true that some intentions can be fulfilled only under certain conditions, but it doesn’t follow that a society that does not provide those conditions has thereby interfered with that person’s right to self-determination. I prefer to live in a world where a large percentage of the population is interested in intellectual pursuits, but people who are indifferent to such things are not violating my right to self-determination.
You might think that living in an extended world does interfere with the self-determination of Have-nots and Will-nots. It means, for example, that they can’t get the opportunities they want (the Haves are hogging all the senior positions) or afford real estate as easily (the world is more crowded and the Haves bought all the land long ago), and so on. My answer is that these things may happen, and they are serious grievances. However, these things are covered by the right against harm, not the right to self-determination. There are many situations where I can do things under one set of social conditions that I can’t do under another set, and I prefer the first set. However, bringing about the second set of conditions does not thereby violate my right to self-determination. For example, I wish the government would fund social security more generously (by taxing the rich more heavily) so that I could pursue other projects that are possible only if I spend money that I now set aside for retirement. However, society’s failure to do so is not an interference with my self-determination. It’s true that in an extended world, Have-nots and Will-nots are forced to endure various things: distress, increased death burdens, Malthusian consequences, reduced death benefits, and so on. Once again, however, those interests are covered by the right against harm, not the right to self-determination.
Here is another way to argue that Promotion interferes with self-determination. Imagine a librarian who allows a study area to be noisy and disruptive, and it’s been that way for years. We might well say that the librarian’s failure to straighten things out is an interference with the self-determination of those who want to use the study area for study. Here there is a situation that is not as it should be and someone who is failing his or her duty to set things right. That counts as an interference with self-determination. Does permitting life extension to become available to Haves interfere with the self-determination of Have-nots and Will-nots in this way?
It does only if there’s a reason to think that a world with available life extension is not legitimate and that a world without life extension is legitimate. (It also requires that there be someone who has a duty to set things right.) However, this argument requires some other reason to think that Promotion is wrong. We can’t say that Promotion is wrong because it interferes with their self-determination, for that argument becomes circular; it amounts to arguing that Promotion interferes with their self-determination because it is wrong, and it is wrong because it interferes with their self-determination. Whatever other reason we might have for thinking that Promotion is wrong can stand on its own. We might argue that Promotion is wrong because it violates the Have-nots’ and Will-nots’ rights against harm, but we should not count that rights violation twice by describing it under two different names. Every harm interferes with self-determination in some sense, but we do not count all harms as two rights violations: a violation of the right against harm and a separate, additional violation of the right to self-determination.
What about the Haves? The Haves intend various things we can classify as efforts at self-determination, and some of these things require the extra time life extension would give them. They will pursue whatever projects they have now over a longer period of time or take up new projects. They may pursue new careers, new experiences, new relationships—or continue all the old ones over a longer span. Living life involves countless efforts at self-determination, and gaining additional years of life opens up time for additional efforts at self-determination.
However, the same reasons to think that Promotion does not violate Have-not or Will-not rights to self-determination also tell us that Inhibition does not violate the self-determination of Haves. (I mean potential Haves, obviously.) Again, society’s failure to provide the conditions necessary for certain acts of self-determination is not necessarily a violation of the right to self-determination. A Have’s right to self-determination does not imply a right to have life extension aggressively funded. And again, there is a circularity in arguing that Inhibition violates the Haves’ right to self-determination because Inhibition is wrong if the reason it’s wrong is that it violates the right to self-determination. And once again, if there is some other reason to think that Inhibition is wrong, that reason can stand on its own without being double-counted as a violation of the right to self-determination alongside whatever other rights it might violate.
There is another reason to think that Inhibition does not violate the Haves’ right to self-determination. This reason is unique to the Haves; it doesn’t parallel the arguments concerning the self-determination of Have-nots and Will-nots. Rather, it turns on the fact that, as I explained above, the right to self-determination is generally understood to be a negative right (a right against interference), not a positive right (a right to assistance). For example, I have a right to try to write another book and others have a duty not to disturb me when I’m writing, but no one has a duty to edit the manuscript or help me publish it. In particular, no one has a duty to fund a year free of teaching so I can work on it. Other people have a duty not to intercept your application for a job, but they don’t have a duty to drive you to your job interview.
For the same reason, our current funding policy does not interfere with life extension research. It does not take the form of blocking research funding from being provided, or destroying someone’s research records, or banning the research. No one’s negative rights are being interfered with here. Instead, it consists of not funding such research as much as society could—a failure to provide help. The duty to avoid interfering with self-determination is not (absent some special duty or an illegitimate status quo) a duty to provide help, so failing to help does not violate that duty. Moreover, this is probably happening mostly through ignorance or indifference or simply because those who direct research funding are focused on other things they consider more important or more practical. Society is not interfering with the Haves; it’s merely choosing not to fund life extension research as aggressively as Haves might like. Thus, the fact that lack of funding for life extension research prevents the Haves from determining their lives in some ways or to some extent is not thereby a violation of their right to self-determination even though their efforts at self-determination would be more successful if such research were funded more generously.
Unlike the right to equality and the right to self-determination, the right against harm is relevant to the question of whether we should make life extension available. However, as we’ll see, that right cuts in only one direction: making life extension available will harm the Have-nots and Will-nots, but failing to make it available will not harm the Haves. (We’ll consider the Will-nots and Have-nots and their right not to be harmed in the next chapter.) The reason for this is that although failing to make life extension available will prevent the Haves from gaining vast amounts of welfare, preventing someone from gaining a benefit is not a harm per se. Being harmed means you are worse off; failing to be better off does not usually count as a harm. This claim is consistent with the three major theories of harm: comparative theories, noncomparative theories, and theories that combine comparative and noncomparative elements.
According to noncomparative accounts, you are harmed if something causes you to be in a state that is bad for you in a noncomparative way. There are many versions of this idea: the state may be intrinsically bad for you, or it may fall below some normatively set threshold of well-being, or it may be a state that you can rationally desire not to be in.3 However, none of this seems true of having a biologically normal life span. Having a normal, nonextended life span is not intrinsically bad, nor does it push you below some threshold of well-being no one expects to fall beneath. You can rationally desire to have extended life (if my arguments in chapters 2 and 3 are sound), but if the fact that desiring some improvement in your condition is rational means you are harmed when you don’t get that improvement, then we’re all harmed in countless ways just because we can rationally desire to be better off. That’s far too expansive a concept of harm. Therefore, according to noncomparative accounts of harm, Inhibition does not harm the Haves, for it leaves them with the same normal life span everyone always had.
According to comparative theories of harm, something harms you if it makes you worse off than you would otherwise have been.4 According to such theories, you might, conceivably, be just as well off as you were before—or even better off—but still be harmed because something left you less well off than you would have been otherwise. For example, if someone destroys a will under which you would have inherited millions of dollars from your rich uncle, you’ve been harmed even if, for other reasons, you’re wealthier now than you were before the will was made.
The Haves are not worse off in this sense unless there is reason to think that they are left worse off than they would otherwise have been. However, the better off condition they would “otherwise” have enjoyed cannot simply amount to the fact that there is some alternate possible world where they would be better off. If the possibility of being better off is all it takes, then we are all harmed whenever our lives are not as good as they might be if others behaved differently. The sense in which we would otherwise have been better off has to be something like an entitlement or a reasonable expectation, like the kind you have under your uncle’s will. To argue that Inhibition harms the Haves in this way requires showing that they are entitled to Promotion. At this point in the discussion, it’s still an open question whether justice requires Promotion, but even if it does, we cannot argue this way: The Haves are entitled to Promotion because Inhibition harms the Haves, and Inhibition harms the Haves because they would be better off under Promotion. That’s blatantly circular.
The Haves are not worse off under Inhibition than they were before; they just don’t get better off. Their life spans do not change for the worse; they just don’t change for the better, and they still live as long as everyone else. Therefore, under comparative and noncomparative theories of harm, Inhibition does not harm them, and what is true of both theories is also true of theories that combine comparative and noncomparative approaches. Therefore, Inhibition does not violate their right against harm.
You might object that suffering pain and indignity from various age-related diseases and other maladies associated with old age is a harm. Arthritis, cancer, and other conditions that correlate with age make people worse off and surely count as harms. Life extension enables the Haves to avoid these things. Doesn’t that mean that life extension enables the Haves to avoid harm and therefore Inhibition harms the Haves? (Here we’re talking about the harms of the aging process itself, not the harm of dying sooner than one might.)
We can, of course, weigh all that into the balance. However, I suspect that the total amount of harms stemming from senescence that the Haves suffer under Inhibition is less than the total amount of harms suffered by all the Have-nots in an extended world: distress, Malthusian consequences, and all the rest of it. Moreover, because there are probably more Have-nots than Haves (for at least a generation or so), the total harm suffered by Have-nots in an extended world exceeds the total harm suffered by Haves under Inhibition. This is all pretty speculative, of course, but my critics should accept these concessions; they too are likely to claim the Have-nots suffer more harm from life extension than the Haves suffer from not having life extension. When you can’t help harming one party or another, you violate a right to be harmed no matter what you do. It makes sense in that situation to accept the lesser amount of harm (to Haves) and thereby avoid some larger amount of harm (to the Have-nots and Will-nots). For this reason, the harms of senescence suffered by Haves are not enough to tip the scales in favor of Promotion.
And there is another reason not to say that Inhibition harms the Haves by depriving them of the means to avoid the harms of senescence. There are many situations where you might avoid some harm if others gave you, for example, more money, more opportunities, or more help of some other kind. However, failure to give you that help is not thereby a harm to you. You could help me avoid the pain of age-related arthritis by paying for an extremely expensive anti-inflammatory drug that will make that pain go away. However, you haven’t harmed me by refusing to pay for it.
We could try to argue that the Haves have not only a right against harm but also a right to be helped. Some say that we have a positive right, a right to be helped, when the burden of helping us is very small compared to the harm we will suffer if others don’t help us. For example, when you see someone having a heart attack on the street, you have a duty to call an ambulance and wait for the ambulance to arrive, even though that involves a bit of effort and missing your bus. Similarly, we might argue that helping the Haves won’t cost all that much and that they will miss out on decades of life if we don’t, so we have a positive duty to consent to part of our taxes being used to fund life extension research. According to the estimate discussed in section 1.10, Promotion might cost $3 billion a year in research funding—a pittance compared to the entire yearly budget of any sizeable first-world economy.
But I have argued that the Haves are not harmed here. If I’m right, then a positive duty does not arise in that way. However, there’s another way to argue for a positive duty here. We might argue that we have positive duties not only to prevent harm but also to confer benefits. Imagine that you have a very wealthy acquaintance who hasn’t provided for any family members in his will because he falsely believes they’re all dead. He cares about nothing other than his relatives, and because he thinks he has no relatives left, he doesn’t care who gets his fortune; his entire estate will go to the Internal Revenue Service. (Assume that his fortune makes no real difference to the federal budget.) You happen to know that his long-lost niece is alive, and if you take the time and trouble to call him up and tell him so, that niece will receive a huge inheritance. The burden of making that phone call is dwarfed by the benefit of inheriting a sizeable fortune, so you have a positive duty to that niece to pick up the phone. Similarly, the Have-nots and Will-nots have a duty to consent to the government spending $3 billion a year on Promotion. Their share of that tax burden is miniscule (as a percentage of their total taxes) compared to what Promotion will eventually provide the Haves.
However, the cost of funding Promotion is not the only burden to consider. If Promotion is successful, then eventually the Have-nots and Will-nots will bear other large burdens in the form of the various harms we’ve discussed. The burden that’s relevant in assessing a positive duty of beneficence is not merely what you have to do for someone else but also what you later suffer or miss out on because you helped. For example, grabbing your hand when you start sliding on the ice may not take much time or effort, but if doing so sends me sliding over the cliff to my death, then that loss is part of the burden. An argument based on the Haves’ right to be helped is not promising.
To sum up, making life extension available harms the Have-nots and Will-nots, and failing to make it available does not harm the Haves. Failing to make it available does prevent the Haves from getting a massive gain in welfare. That may or may not be unjust. It may or may not be a serious wrong. However, whatever else it may be, it’s not a harm, and so it does not violate their right not be harmed. The Haves’ interest in all this is represented not by the right against harm but by the principle that welfare—including theirs—should be maximized. We should not count that interest twice.
Thus, the only rights that are relevant to deciding whether to make life extension available are the Will-nots’ and Have-nots’ rights not to be harmed. In chapter 11, we will weigh those rights against the welfare gained by making life extension available and ask whether welfare outweighs those rights—or the other way around.